Aeneas, My Grandfather, and the Memory of War

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To me, Aeneas’s desires to remember and be remembered resonate inextricably with my grandfather’s life and death. The gulf between me and the mythology of the text contracts, and I can see the stakes faced by Aeneas with greater clarity. Viewing Aeneas through the lens of my grandfather helps me see just how poignantly human he often is. This is a humanity that readers have not always granted Aeneas; he is simply duty-bound, pious, at times merely the prototype of an ideal.
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