My favorite thing about Aristophanes is that you can pull all of this super-serious stuff out of him--literary analysis, political commentary, you name it. But it is always, always laced with cross-dressing or fart jokes.

This is why I would pay huge amounts of money to see Monty Python performing Aristophanes.

I believe I've discovered one reason why Virgil has always appealed to me more than Homer.

In the past, I've had people complain to me that Virgil's Aeneid is nothing more than one big glory-fest propaganda piece for Augustus. Now, apart from the fact that that sort of hasty reading is totally irresponsible and utterly annoying, it's also completely untrue. Yes, on one level, Virgil is glorifying Augustus. And maybe, maybe, if you were an illiterate Roman peasant who heard somebody reciting the Aeneid once, you could be forgiven for taking nothing more away from the poem than, "Hurrr, Rome good! Augustus = teh b0mbz0rs!"

But you are not an illiterate Roman peasant. You are a fairly intelligent modern, and if you're reading this you're also literate. You can't get three pages into the Aeneid without hitting your first hints that there's something else going on here, and it might just be a critique of Rome, the empire, and occasionally even Augustus himself*.

In short, the reason I've always enjoyed Virgil more than Homer is historical context. People, we don't even know if Homer really existed. We can't track his political agenda--if he had one. His poems are some of the greatest literature ever written, but you just can't analyze them for that sort of thing. But we have plenty of historical context for Virgil's epic, and that lets us examine it in the light of politics, as well as literature and society.

Pretty. Dang. Fun**.



* That's all I've got to say on that subject for now, since I'm not quite finished with the paper I'm writing about it, but if anybody's curious why I believe this so strongly, I'd be more than happy to share.

** Well, you know, until you get to the actual analyzing, which--let's face it, writing papers is just plain a bore.