/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18893962]

Do you consider The Aeneid as being on the same level as The Iliad and The Odyssey?

[Anonymous No.18894102]

>>18893962
Yes and I liked The Aeneid more so there.

[Anonymous No.18894147]

>>18893962
No. It's on a higher level.

[Anonymous No.18894164]

>>18893962
I think it's on the same level
It think it has the best illustration of a fight between lovers (or spouses) in literature though

[Anonymous No.18894167]

>>18893962
>The Aeneid
akneeid

[Anonymous No.18894169]

>>18893962
I found it tedious except for the fourth book, but I read it long ago and I plan to reread it. I'll probably appreciate it better.

[Anonymous No.18894195]

Maybe in terms of individual poetic virtue or genius or something Virgil shouldn't be deprecated, but Homer is more than just incredible epic poetry, it's like the Greek Shakespeare, more than the sum of its parts and almost bizarrely protean and unfathomable. When I think of the Aeneid I think of high genius and literature, but it's still just that, intentional genius creating intentional literature. When I think of Homer I immediately picture this murky shadowy whole whose edges aren't neatly known, always larger than any attempt to comprehend it, a polyphony and a window into a lost world rather than a high expression of a high and refined world like Virgil.

Of course this is partly because Homer simply isn't a single work of art or even a single artist, "he" is an entire tradition of bards creatively collaborating or something to that effect, possibly across half a millennium or more. But then that attempt, itself, to summarise and put the polyphony of Homer in a neat box seems to fail to grasp the whole. It turns it into a mere artful polyphony when what I FEEL when I think of Homer is way more than that. Homer is a window onto not just a lost world but many lost worlds.

The only thing that comes remotely close to Homer for me in terms of inexhaustibility is Shakespeare.

[Anonymous No.18894212]

>>18893962
The Odyssey>The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel>The Iliad> The Aeneid

[Anonymous No.18894220]

>>18894195
I never had much interest in Shakespeare desu, largely because I was forced to read him in highschool. Why do you place him in the heights with Homer?

[Anonymous No.18894226]

>>18894212
>The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
What? Are you talking about Ulysses?

[Anonymous No.18894227]

more like AeSNEEiD, formerly Chucks

[Anonymous No.18894240]

>>18894226
No, the epic poem by Nikos Kazantzakis. Highly underrated, but genius. Deserves to be placed on the pantheon amongst all the great epic poems of history.

[Anonymous No.18894257]

>>18894240
> He is abandoned by Helen who runs off with a black slave and continues to Egypt, where again a workers' uprising takes place.

[Anonymous No.18894273]

>>18894257
You mean based? Helen is the eternal roastie.

[Anonymous No.18894277]

It's hard to compare mostly because Virgil is a completely different beast. The Aeneid comes at the tail end of the hellenistic tradition of scholarly poetry and because of this it's much more typologically dense than Homer, with Aeneas' trojan past modulating into the roman future (a typology which gets flipped vertically in Dante) while remaining deeply agnostic about the whole ordeal. Aeneas himself is deeply divided in himself between Aeneas the Man and Aeneas the Hero (I sing of Arms and of a Man), something completely alien to Homer. Achilles is very singular in his alienation from society which modulates into his aristeia where he becomes alienated from his own humanity, simultaneously subhuman and superhuman, as opposed to Hector who is so closely to tied to his community that he's essentially a stand-in for Troy itself. I'm actually deeply divided on which poet I like more, but I usually lean towards Homer because he has a breadth of vision that Virgil doesn't have, if only because that wasn't the roman's main concern.

[Anonymous No.18894284]

>>18894240
> His life transforms into that of an ascetic. Odysseus meets Motherth (an incarnation of the Buddha), Kapetán Énas (English: Captain Sole, literally "Captain One", a Greek folk expression for people who are insubordinate and single-minded to a fault), alias Don Quixote, and an African village fisherman, alias Jesus. He travels further south in Africa while constantly spreading his religion and fighting the advances of death. Eventually he travels to Antarctica and lives with villagers for a year until an iceberg kills him. His death is glorious as it marks his rebirth and unification with the world.
>>18894273
Doesn’t mean she needs to get blacked. I’d like someone to write an epic poem about Theseus deciding not to wait until she was an adult, and raped the whore while she was still a child.

[Anonymous No.18894293]

>>18894147
"Based."

[Anonymous No.18894307]

>>18894284
All I'll say is read it. Sure it sounds a little globohomo from that synopsis, but its worth it. If anything it encapsulates the ideals of the 20th/21st century regardless of your own opinions.

[Anonymous No.18894442]

>>18893962
The Dionysiaca does the same schtick, but better

[Anonymous No.18894938]

>>18894442
Explain

[Anonymous No.18895202]

Yes. And Fingal is equal as well.

[Anonymous No.18895345]

>>18893962
IAM REDIT VIRGO
IAM REDDIT SATURNIA REGNA

[Anonymous No.18895535]

Is Fagles the best line by line translation in English? I checked out the Penguin Classics and Oxford ones, the former is prose, the latter isn't line by line translated (each page is something like "lines 299-331")

[Anonymous No.18895543]

>>18894147
>It's on a higher level.
Where's the evidence for this?

[Anonymous No.18895555]

>>18894195
Amazing amazing post
>>18894220
Not him but in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Romeo.. to essentially become the best example of every genre you touch across the whole spectrum of comedy and tragedy is truly special. It's not just Hamlet the play, Hamlet the character is something you could dedicate your entire life to studying - and he probably has 10+ plays on that same level.