The Aeneid/YMMV

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Turnus, Lausus, and even Mezentius.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: An inter-book example. Aeolus is seen in both The Odyssey and The Aeneid. In The Odyssey, he is seen as a splendid guy with a fertile kingdom -- in the Aeneid he is seen as a jerk in a hollow barren cave, who screws over Aeneas for an arranged marriage with one of Juno's nymphs.
  • The same goes for Odysseus, who is presented in the Aeneid as more of a slimy trickster than a hero.
  • The most difficult one is Helen. In one scene, she's suffering a total breakdown. In another, she's gleefully killing Trojans. It's possible to reconcile the two, but there's such a disparity that it may be one of the incomplete parts (see below).
• Author's Saving Throw: Virgil justifies the Trojans falling for the Trojan Horse so that they wouldn't go into the story looking like moronic losers, complete with the Trojan who vociferously argues against it, to the point of attacking the horse but whom the gods then strike down (along with his two children). Virgil also stresses the fact that they kept Troy safe for over a decade and only lost by underhanded trickery.
• Complete Monster: Virgil tries to make Mezentius sound like one, but his total Badass-ery, relationship with his son, and very touching exit more or less ruin the effect for modern readers. To the Romans he would likely have seemed much more evil due to his disrespect for the gods; to a modern audience this doesn't hold as true.
  • Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus is also portrayed as one for his bloodlust and cruel murder of the old, defenseless Priam.
• Nintendo Hard: Translating it, especially for students that have just come off prose. Vergil's poetic endings, word order (or lack thereof), and figurative language can be quite annoying. Author Existence Failure also leads to some incomplete lines, making translation even more difficult.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The phrase "The Arms and The Man" (the title of a Shaw play) is from the first sentence of the epic and the memorable line translated as something like "going to hell is easy; it's getting back which is the hard part" might be considered the origin of the phrase To Hell and Back.
  • There's also Vergil's description of Dido re-discovering love as re-kindling "an old flame."
• Tear Jerker: Most deaths, with the deaths of Pallas, Mezentius and his son (Lausus) being standouts.
  • How about the final hours of Troy?
• The Woobie: Aeneas. When he's introduced, he's bawling his eyes out over the threat of immediate death by drowning. He gets more pathetic from there, possibly changing once he gets to Italy.
  • Dido is also portrayed quite sympathetically. Turnus skirts this during the parts when Virgil describes how he is doomed to die.

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