The Animated ‘Aeneid’

Though it’s still taught in classrooms and studied by scholars to this day, Virgil’s Aeneid is less popular among readers than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Mark Robinson makes a case for the Roman epic in a vivid animated video featured in Open Culture. “The Aeneid is a foundational epic in the Western literary tradition because of Virgil’s undeniable poetic skill in adapting classical Greek forms into Latin, and because of its influence on hundreds of poets and writers for hundreds of years after. […] Maybe the poem has also ‘survived to ask questions about the nature of power and authority ever since’ it was first published, to instant acclaim, in 19 BC.”