Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique? by Daniel Mendelsohn

Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique? by Daniel Mendelsohn

[T]he difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.

Mendelsohn rethinks the Aeneid to finally see Aeneas as far more modern than we might otherwise think and therefore far more relevant