Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [126]
Apparently so. Those Romans knew a good thing when they saw it. The national epic of ancient Rome, the Aeneid, is largely modeled on the great Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
A complex poem celebrating Roman virtues and giving the new empire a glorious past, the Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil (also sometimes spelled Vergil) between 30 and 19 BCE. Virgil chose the mythical Trojan hero Aeneas, son of the goddess Aphrodite and Anchises, a prince related to the royal house of Troy, as a way of expressing Rome’s ancient moral and religious values. Composed to honor Augustus, the first emperor, who was later believed to be a descendant of Aeneas, the Aeneid comprises twelve books. The first six of these books imitate the Odyssey by describing Aeneas’s adventures at sea following the capture of Troy by the Greeks.
As the Aeneid begins, Aeneas and his Trojan followers have survived a shipwreck and reach Carthage, a city actually founded by the Phoenicians in North Africa about 800 BCE—hundreds of years after the Iliad’s Troy might have fallen. Once ashore, Aeneas meets and falls in love with Carthage’s Queen Dido, and recounts for her court the fall of Troy: the well-loved story of the wooden horse, the tales of Sinon and Laocoon; and his own escape. Then, just as Odysseus had regaled the Phaeacians with his tales in the Odyssey, Aeneas spins the long history of his adventures.
Dido and Aeneas are soon caught up in a steamy romance, but the gods have Roman destiny to worry about. They order Aeneas—the soul of that destiny—to leave Dido. In despair and anger, Dido commits suicide, cursing Aeneas and his descendants with her dying words. Later, after reaching Italy, Aeneas goes down to the underworld—where he encounters Dido and his dead father—and learns about his future descendants, the Romans. He returns to the upper world and, with his followers, lands at the mouth of the Tiber River in Latium.
Virgil based the last six books of the Aeneid on the Iliad, and these begin as Aeneas arrives near the future site of Rome. There, the local king, Latinus, offers him land for his people and marriage to his daughter, Lavinia, who had already been promised to a local king. War erupts between the locals and the Trojan survivors. The battle is hotly contested, and finally Aeneas and the rival king agree to settle the conflict by single battle. Aeneas wounds his opponent, and is about to show him mercy when he sees a reminder of a friend he had lost—as Achilles had lost Patroclus. He plunges his sword into the breast of the warrior king.
Aeneas founds a town called Lavium, after his wife, Lavinia, before he dies in battle. Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, later moves the town to Alba Longa, where twelve generations—or 450 years—later the twins Romulus and Remus are born.
MYTHIC VOICES
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus [a hill west of the Acropolis] and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in