Ancient history: periods, cultures, and civilizations

Ancient History

Comparison and Contrast of the Aeneid and the Iliad

In The Aeneid and The Iliad, both Virgil and Homer show that their characters are tragic. They often do things that they don't want to do, while lamenting the reasons for their actions. The simply give their lives over to fate instead of trying to take control of what they are doing and change it for the better. They also talk about what the gods have done to them, but neither Virgil nor Homer makes any real effort to portray the gods as they were actually portrayed in either Greek or Roman history.

Instead they both show the gods the way that they think they should and the way that works best for the story. They take some liberties with different parts of history and different parts of the story that they are recreating to make sure that it not only fits in better with their cultures during their lifetimes, but that it fits well into a tale that is easily told either aloud or in writing.

While Virgil was not considered to be as great a writer as Homer was, both writers created works that have lived on well after their deaths. Both The Aeneid and The Iliad discuss the Trojan War and the aftermath of it, but since one is written from a Greek perspective and the other from a Roman one, they often talk about the same things but not in the same way. The Greeks and the Romans obviously saw the Trojan War differently because they were from different cultures.

Each of them wanted their culture represented in the best way possible through the works of people like Virgil and Homer. There are both similarities and differences between the works of Homer and Virgil, but most of the similarities come from Virgil borrowing the narrative and poetic style of Homer, as well as some of his phrasing, to write The Aeneid. Virgil's work is, however, good in it's own right, as he borrowed some things from Homer but not the actual story itself. That came from history and Virgil's opinions of what really happened during and shortly after the Trojan War.

First of all, The Iliad is an epic poem. The Aeneid is referred to as a 'literary epic' or 'secondary epic', which are basically synonymous terms. The difference between an epic and a literary or secondary epic is not one of value, but one of creation. Epic poems were created by an oral story-teller without the benefit of being able to write them down. Literary or secondary epics were works of writing that could be re-worked, changed, and edited, much more like the way it is done today. Modern society doesn't have much room for oral story-tellers that are paid to entertain people, but Homer's day made use of them.

Epics require a lot of stock phrases because the proper rhyming meter must be used and the story-teller often does not have time to stop and think about different ways of saying the same old things. So they have certain phrases that get used over and over again during the poem to make it flow properly and please their audiences' ears. Whether the phrase that they use is long or short depends on what kind of line they need to fit into the current rhyme. Sometimes they will use a short phrase -- just a word or two -- and other times they will use a longer phrase, perhaps a specific sentence.

In literary epics, there is no need for the repetition that is used in epics because the poet can sit and write a literary epic down, working with it to ensure that the writing flows properly and that the ideas all make sense. Without the benefit of being able to write it down, The Aeneid would have been closer to The Iliad in that it would have had many phrases repeated over and over again instead of using a different way to express something almost every time it was mentioned. It might never even have been created, as Virgil kept editing it even after he wrote it and still wasn't happy with it when he died. It was only published because a friend of his thought that is was an important piece of work despite Virgil's unhappiness with it.

While Virgil did borrow quite a bit of literary style from Homer, he didn't plagiarize him. Among other things, he changed the value system in his poem. In The Iliad, Homer paints a picture of individual heroism when he talks about Achilles. This was perfectly fine for the Greeks, but would have been unheard of for the Romans, who thought their leaders should live according to a more civilized social ideal.

The Romans would have thought that Achilles was conceited and stubborn for not using a whole group of people who would have then all been heroes. He would have been accused of taking all of the glory for himself. Because of the cultural differences between the Greeks and the Romans, Virgil changed his poem. He also talked about the way that heroes would have acted in his own lifetime, instead of worrying about the way they may or may not have acted during the actual Trojan War. This was like the liberties both he and Homer took with the gods in their works.

Another major difference between The Iliad and The Aeneid is that The Aeneid often has much deeper meanings hidden in it, beyond what is seen in the actual story. The Iliad is written to be what it is -- a story that takes place during the Trojan War. Homer didn't really add anything else symbolic or significant in his works, nor did he dwell on the history of his people and culture. He thought history was important only as a story, and not as something that might have value at a later time. He shows very little concern for the relationship between the past and the present.

Virgil thinks that history is very important, and in The Aeneid, the events of the past are needed to fully appreciate and understand the present. While The Aeneid can be read as simply a story and still enjoyed, if one looks for deeper meaning there is much that can be found in the work. The reason that Virgil wrote the story was so that Romans could consider the meanings in the history and see whether they felt it had any relevance to the present, or whether it gave them thoughts for the future. There was a point to The Aeneid. It was not written just to be a story, but to provide an understanding of history.