The Roles of the gods in the Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey

This paper compares the roles of gods in “The Aeneid”, written by Virgil, and “Odyssey”, written by Homer, two of the most influential Greek writers of their time.

The Aeneid varies from the Iliad and the Odyssey as it often gives evidence of meaning beyond the narrative level. Homeric account is somewhat straightforward. Where as, despite Vergilian narrative can be read and enjoyed as a story, it is often compact with tacit symbolic meaning. Repeatedly the tacit reference is to Roman history, while Homer is narrowly moved by the kinship of the past to the present. Vergil tells the legend of Aeneas as he believes it has meaning for Roman history and especially for his own times. A further important contrariety between the Aeneid and the Homeric poems is that the bygone has a philosophical base while the following were composed in an epoch entirely untainted with philosophy. The Aeneid gives indication of the influence of Stoicism, a Hellenistic philosophy which had accrued many suasion in the Greek world and by the first century B.C. had become the most accepted philosophy of the educated classes at Rome. Another significant countenance of the explanation of the Aeneid is Vergil's use of the Homeric poems. In the Aeneid there are countless repetition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some repetitions are so discriminating that they go unobserved even by experienced readers of the poem. Maybe the most significant connections in Aeneid where the knowledge of the Iliad enables to see how important figures of Vergil's poem are associated in various ways with heroes of the Iliad. But once these connections are classified, one can see that these references to the Iliad provide an interesting and notable critique on the action of the Aeneid.

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