Even if one accepts that Homer's age was more barbaric than our own, the description conveys nothing of a balanced match between equals, only blood and death. This is not to say that the "Iliad" is lacking in tales of great warriors, but that the author was not enamored with conflict and war to the degree that he was immune to its seeder side. Even though Ajax's display is impressive, and merits the man being called by the word "Great" as he often is because of his size and strength, his deployment of this strength in brutal fashion is not given equal admiration as it is warriors that fight fairly, with proper weapons, and with valor. In contrast, Virgil's chronicle of the sacking of Troy, even in the words of one who suffered greatly because of the unfair, tricked destruction of his native city with the infamous "wooden horse," seems almost beautiful in comparison. While sailing away from the wrecked city that was once his homeland, and facing the turbulent waves stirred up by Poseidon, Aeneas cries:

O, three and four times blessed were those who died before their fathers' eyes beneath the walls of Troy. Strongest of all the Danaans, o Diomedes, why did your right hand not spill my lifeblood, why did I not fall upon the Ilian fields, there where ferocious Hector lies, pierced by Achilles' javelin, where the enormous

Sarpedon now is still, and Simois has seized and sweeps beneath its waves so many helmets and shields and bodies of the brave!" [1.130-144]

Unlike Homer, this cry...

Unlike the bloody pulp of the skull of the fallen warrior in Homer, there is little visceral quality to Aeneas' cry to the gods above, to help him in his distress. He says he wishes he were dead like his brothers, who were killed before old Priam. But the diction of blessing the man who enacted the killing is so convoluted, there is little sense of the depth of sorrow, of someone cut off from his land might feel, even in an ancient world where being banished from one's city was a fate feared almost as much as death.
This does not necessarily mean that Virgil was less skilled as a poet than Homer. Rather, Virgil chooses not to dwell upon Aeneas' extensive emotional mourning of Troy because he was more interested in the positive aspects of founding Rome in the aftermath of the death of the ancient, forgotten city that gave birth to Rome's founder. The immediate effect upon the reader is that the main character comes to focus more as a speaker and a weaver of words than an active participant in battle. The interest of the reader is not on what has happened, violently and recently to Troy in the past but where Aeneas' fate will lead him in the future.

Works Cited

Homer. "The Iliad." Translated by Robert Fagels. New York Penguin Classics, 1999.

Virgil. "The Aeneid." Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books, 2003.