A British student sitting next to me is reading the epic. All I knew about Virgil before reading the critique here , was the meaning I used to describe to tourists of the famous mosaic housed in the Musée de Bardo in Tunis, Tunisia. Here is what Daniel Mendelsohn writes about the Aeneid on The New Yorker: [T]he Aeneid—notoriously—can be hard to love. In part, this has to do with its aesthetics. In place of the raw archaic potency of Homer’s epics, which seems to dissolve the millennia between his heroes and us, Virgil’s densely allusive poem offers an elaborately self-conscious “literary” suavity. (The critic and Columbia professor Mark Van Doren remarked that “Homer is a world; Virgil, a style.”) Then, there’s Aeneas himself—“in some ways,” as even the Great Courses Web site felt compelled to acknowledge, “the dullest character in epic literature.” In the Aeneid’s opening lines, Virgil announces that the hero is famed above all for his pietas , his “sense of duty”: hardly ...