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Creative Writing 101 with Virgil and Homer // Abigale Bell


As I was reading Virgil's Aneid, I couldn't help but compare the story to the Iliad. Here we have two great epics that recount the actions of the gods and the actions of humans in relation to the gods. I was interested to see the differences in how the authors depicted their gods. Instead of focusing on the details of the story itself, I took a step back and looked at the big picture.

One of the main differences I noticed between Virgil's and Homer's works is the style of storytelling. Homer throws the reader right into the action of the story. One is immediately caught up in the middle of the events. There seemed to be a presupposition that Homer's readers would know the background of the story. Virgil's writing is different. In the Aeneid, the reader is not immediately thrown into the middle of the story, instead, they are led into it by an introduction of sorts. This introduction gives the reader a window into the background of the story, but it also builds the stage for the main character who comes in to tell the story from his perspective. 

Something else I noticed when considering the Aeneid in light of the Iliad, was the difference in the voices of the authors. Homer's account of the gods and their involvement with humans was very dramatic. He describes scenes so magnificently that the reader (or listener) is not able to experience the story. Virgil takes a milder approach in his descriptive language of the gods, but he is very realistic when describing events. He tells the story like great fiction as if the listener could actually be in the moment experiencing what the character experiences. 

Commented on Hailey's and Jamie's posts.

Comments

  1. Lily CaswellNovember 12, 2020 at 6:55 AM

    Abigail, I though it was interesting how Virgil kind of led up to the events in the Aeneid. It’s like he assumed his audience wouldn’t have been familiar with the major events in the Iliad and just did a basic review of them. I also noticed the difference about Homer and Virgil talking about the gods and maybe that’s a representation of their cultures. The Roman gods were very much not involved in the every day life of Romans while the Greek gods were everywhere.

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  2. Haylee LyndNovember 12, 2020 at 8:10 AM

    Something I found interesting as well was the invocation of the muse. The Greek poets did it at the beginning of almost all their stories. The Illiad calls the muse in the first line, but Virgil begins the Aneid by saying "I sing..." and waits several lines before saying his invocation, as though he does it out of obligation rather than a true belief in divine inspiration.

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