last night my spouse asked “is Vergil’s love of bees the main thing he’s known for, or is that just a niche classicist thing?” and I had to explain that the Aeneid is a whole thing. and I could leave this post there as a fun anecdote from my classicist-married-to-non-classicist household, but there’s also something interesting here in that it reinforces a trend I’ve noticed in teaching both Greek and Roman Civ classes for the last 5 years which is that non-specialists are now much more familiar with the Homeric epics and Greek material in general than they are with the Aeneid or really any Roman literature.
and I think there are a variety of reasons for this — the Odyssey especially seems to have a really strong transhistorical resonance as an adventure story (plus the hook of “man really wants to go home to his wife and his house,” which is admittedly universal), and pop culture in the last few decades has really amplified the prominence of Greek mythology in ways that have obviously helped the Iliad’s visibility. but there are also ways in which I feel like the Aeneid has very particular resonances at our historical moment - e.g. as a refugee narrative, as a comment on imperialism, etc — and so it’s kind of fascinating to me that familiarity with it seems to have dropped to the point that few of my students know anything about it before taking a Roman Civ class, when even in the mid-20th century I imagine the Aeneid may well have been more familiar to your average non-specialist than the Iliad
