Last weekend, during the heat wave, we went to  the much-touted movie, The Odyssey, based on Homer’s epic poem. I wrote about this in a previous post, but bear with me for a minute. The director Christopher Nolan’s offbeat special effects exploded on the screen, and the actors’ interpretations of their roles were excellent.

And now a week later I find myself reading Homer’s Odyssey, my third reading of this splendid epic poem. At my time of life, it is fitting to read epics: that’s what life is like, when you look back, an epic struggle to survive, to take charge of your fate, and to revel when you succeed. I am reading Robert Fagles’ powerful translation of The Odyssey in the Penguin edition.

Epic poetry is posh but accessible, because there is a clear narrative, a story.. The theme of Homer’s Odyssey is homecoming, which, in Odysseus’ case, takes 20 years. After a decade spent fighting the Trojan War, it takes ten more years for him to sail home. On the way back to Ithaka, he fights monsters, accidentally enrages Poseidon, and is waylaid for seven years by a besotted nymph.

At home, Odysseus will have to fight again, because the slackers and suitors of Ithaka have occupied his home, each hoping to marry his wife, faithful Penelope, who contends that her husband may still be alive..

I think we can all identify in some way with Odysseus.

But here’s a thought: why not also make a film of Virgil’s Aeneid, the great Latin epic poem? In T. S. Eliot’s essay, “What Is a Classic?” he says that the Aeneid it is the only classic in the Western canon. He argues that it was written at the height of Roman civilization, when the Latin language and literary tradition were mature and sophisticated. (N.B. Virgil wrote in the first century B.C., in what was deemed the Golden Age of Latin literature.)

And The Aeneid is a homage to Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. The first six books of the Aeneid are the equivalent of Aeneas’ Odyssey: Aeneas, a reluctant, often whiny, post-war general is fated of to lead the Trojan survivors to Italy, where they will establish a new homeland, Rome. He has no wish to do this. He tries to fob the job off on his father, but it doesn’t work out. Finally Aeneas accepts his fate, but it means leaving Dido, a queen who has fled from her country to found Carthage and fallen in love with him. They are happy together: he even does construction work in her growing city. Why can’t Aeneas stay with her? The goddesses, his mother Venus, and Juno, Dido’s patroness, won’t allow it.

The last six books are Aeneas’ Iliad: he and the other Trojans fight a civil war in Italy over a woman, Lavinia, who is fated to be Aeneas’s new wife. Another man from a different region, Turnus, contests this, and thus war breaks out.

I am considered Aeneid-crazy. “No one will ever make a movie of The Aeneid,” they say. Yes, I don’t really see it in the stars, but Aeneas has depth, because he is an ordinary man, a hero who isn’t much of a hero, though he is the the son of a goddess, a post-Trojan War hero who is burnt-out and wants to live in peace.

By the way, I recommend Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid. The Latin, of course, is moving and gorgeous, but if you can’t read the Latin, Fagles is your man.