Aeneas, Hero? or not?

Dido & Aeneas

    We have been reading The Aeneid and the one part of the story we read was called The Passion of the Queen. In this story two people fall in love, Dido and Aeneas, they meet each other and instantly fall in love. I guess you can say they got hit by cupids arrow. In this story the two go to a cavern because theres this huge storm, Juno, the goddess of marriage, kind of made the storm happen so she could get these two together and marry them. At the beginning I guess it all was working out until Aeneas has this dream and Mercury, another god, gets into his dream and tells him you can't do this you have to find Rome, cause that was his mission all along. Aeneas tries to leave Dido without her knowing about it, now to me thats just rude. Dido finds out and she is beyond mad at him which she has a right to be. They get into this argument and Dido leaves, although Aeneas wanted to follow her, he didn't because he knew what he had to do, which is to find Rome. In the end Dido kills herself because she can't live without him or whatever.

Our modern day "Heroes" & Ancient Heroes

     So in this blog i'm supposed to tell you if Aeneas is a hero or not. We kind of went over this question in class and when I first answered this I said he wasn't a hero. The reason being was that in my mind he didn't sacrifice anything, like he left to be a king of a country, to have power and then give the power to his son when he's gone. That he left Dido and broke her heart. To me he chose power over love. When we talked about it in class I kind of started to think that he is a hero. So thats my answer, Aeneas is a hero. The reason why is because when he met Dido he was on his mission already and this I didn't know. He really did love her but had to sacrifice his own love and happiness, to find Rome so the people of Troy could have a place to be again after the war. Now we didn't read the whole story just this one part and that confused me because we didn't really know what happened in the beginning. The reason I said no to begin with was because I didn't know the whole background of the story and we just jumped into it. We got told what happened in the beginning and thats what changed my mind. Aeneas is a hero for finding Rome, giving the people of Troy a new home, and chose to pick his people over love, which had to be hard. I don't think I would be that strong enough to leave the one I love, so it's cool he had the strength to do what he did.

Artwork

    The last thing that we did with Epics were to watch a part of an opera that was based on this story. To me I didn't like it much because i'm not into that kind of music but it was interesting to see how the viewed the story through music and art. It gives us a visual way of understanding it when the text gets hard to understand. This unit for me, was kind of difficult to follow and understand, but when it was explained more I got it. Stories from a long time ago have more meaning than the stories we have now, but there is still things that haven't changed, as in heros, love, and wars.