procrastination is a fairy godmother; enjoy her gifts

yes, it has been ages. yes, i forgot you. no, i am not at all concerned by this. mostly because i doubt you, my Nonexistent Readers, are either.

regardless, i was reading the Aeneid a month ago, and there was an assignment for one of those 'reader response' journals, and i think i made quite a point during one of the 'entries'. i will therefore offer it as good tidings, and come up with something more recent in a few weeks.
end of term exams are nigh, and i haven't yet figured out if i shall be dining on dashed dreams after they've finished with me.

=

Aeneas Needs To Chill Out

Aeneas is continuously referenced as pious and righteous and all manner of bleeding kittens from his rectum, but there is a scene wherein even he winds up losing his seemingly endless supply of control – the slaughter of all those Italians before he finally fells Turnus. Is that a What The Hell Hero moment, or is it justifiable in the face of everything that’s just happened in the last few books?

Everyone can understand the feeling of losing control when under duress, and by this point, Aeneas was definitely cracking. Virgil notes that Aeneas’ anger was “excited by the treachery of Turnus, / whose chariot and horses have been carried / far off, and having often pleaded with / Jove and the altars of the shattered treaty” (book XII, lines 666-669). Then, the typically pious soldier goes berserk and starts slaying Turnus’ men. Virgil doesn’t seem to have a problem with the brutal warfare that Aeneas wages – and it’s not like he’d been a gentle person before, either – and one could suggest that the Italians and Etruscans brought Aeneas’ Mars-assisted wrath on themselves when they broke the treaty. I feel like seeking bloody therapy for his anger issues is against Aeneas’ own promises to the people he intends to live among. Killing everyone’s relatives isn’t going to endear you to the locals, which could cause him trouble down the line, whenever Fate decides to stop backing him. Not that he should have avoided bloodshed if anyone was actively attacking him, but Aeneas should have just gone after Turnus and Juturna. If his devotion to that death he sought to give had remained single-minded, I feel like this whole affair would have been done with so much sooner.