Wrapping Up Greeks and Romans

I'm finding that I am really tired of reading Greeks and Romans.  It definitely did not help that I read two translations* back to back (including for the Aeneid).  While the story will probably stick in my mind a bit better (the second time around the meaning was often a bit clearer), there were parts of these epics that I just did not enjoy (particularly the funeral feast games in both the Iliad and the Aeneid) and they really dragged the second time.**

Interestingly, I had someone comment to me, on the subway last night, that the Aeneid was his favourite of the bunch, so we spoke very briefly about it.  Honestly, the Aeneid (while the shortest of the three due to Virgil's untimely death) is not very inspiring to me.  In many ways, the Aeneid strikes me as a kind of fan fiction, taking significant elements of the Odyssey and the Iliad, but recasting them so that Romans could see themselves linked to the Trojans -- though why they would want to be connected to the losing side is a bit beyond me.  Humphries's footnotes are much better than the postscript in the Fitzgerald version in actually making these connections, so it is clear which Roman emperor Virgil is sucking up to.  I was pretty astounded that Virgil draws on reincarnation, which I didn't realize was at all part of Greco-Roman thought (it seems to be very much a minority preoccupation) to say that quite a few of the Trojan heroes became famous Romans!

While I realize we wouldn't have Dante's Divine Comedy without Virgil, even though the best bits about torments in the Underworld are already in the Odyssey, I much prefer Dante's roasting of the many figures who had fallen short (in his estimation) to Virgil's sucking up to Caesar Augustus.  (I suppose to be fair, Dante does end up putting his patrons into Paradise, but the Paradiso is so much less memorable than the Inferno that it hardly counts...)

I'm still glad that I finally did get around to reading it, even though the odds of me rereading the Aeneid are very, very slim.  I'm going to go ahead and read (and review) Atwood's take on Telemachus and the maids in The Penelopiad, though this is one I can read quite quickly, as I've already seen the stage version twice.  But it would be good to read it while the source material is so fresh in my head.  Then I'm going to switch to something completely different, probably a short novel or two and then Musil's The Man Without Qualities, since if I don't read this while I am still mostly commuting by transit, I will struggle to find the time to read it at all, given it is so long and dense.  I may then switch back to Humphries's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, but I'll probably hold off on the rest from the list, like Horace, Juvenal and Lucretius.  I'm more likely to tackle Montaigne and/or reread Dante, though I'll get back to the ancient authors eventually.

* While there are certainly nice phrases here and there in Fitzgerald, he always came in second to either Lattimore or Humphries.  I honestly wasn't that impressed with Fagles after the first few pages, so didn't bother digging into him the same way.

** I just hit the part of the Aeneid where Virgil spends several pages describing the shield of Aeneas, custom-built for him by Vulcan.  Boring!  If possible even more boring than the description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, since it is so derivative.  I'm getting more and more tempted to bail, since the war scenes in the Iliad were pretty intolerable for me, and that is pretty much all that is left in the Aeneid from here on out (we never do get around to the death of Aeneas, which might have been marginally interesting).