Compare characters Aeneas and Turnus from the Aeneid by Virgil Essay

Compare characters Aeneas and Turnus from the Aeneid by Virgil - Essay Example Aeneas is the character with whom Vergil most identifies. He is the primary character in the legend and like Vergil; he approaches the world, even its hostilities, in an idealistic and prophetic manner. Aeneas is also Vergil’s self, facing the devils of a peremptory, wicked, outer world that commanded him to act and to face hard things; and he is Vergil’s self, guarded and guided by a voice of God in tones of an ultimate authority, his own mother’s. Vergil was brave with the courage that poets need, and he used the excitement of heroic tradition to sustain his courage to face the horrors of the world. (2) Aeneas, in addition to being influenced by his mother, unlike Vergil, was strongly identified with his father, Anchises, who saw him as becoming the ‘ancestor of Rome.’ Yet, Vergil’s greatness is no less foretold than Vergil’s in his works of literature. It is in the past, not only in Rome’s past, but that of his own that Vergil finds good and evil. There he also finds†¦powerful friends to help him†¦ and to be worshiped as heroes†¦as well as feelings like his own and lines already drawn, which could discipline and classify and organize, and so justify, these feelings. These include both feelings belonging to his present, which his own experience arouses, and also feelings that were more instinctive, as well as tendencies such as we all inherit from a past, those in which the experience has been wider than our own.(3) It is feelings like these that predestine Vergil to produce great works. It is also these feelings that, in addition to being a soldier and Roman leader, predestine Aeneas to be a romancer of women. While Vergil, no doubt jaded by his experiences in the world, finds romance in words, Aeneas finds romance through the waging of wars and the lives of the many women whom he comes in contact with while these wars are waged. The motherly love