Love between Fate and Duty

We've all lost someone in our lives and it has most definitely been tough to deal with. Memories resurface from time to time and make adjustment that much more difficult. Losing someone close or something important to you is a very emotional experience. Ideally, one should not have to deal with it by oneself. Yet, in our thoughts, grief and loss we are alone and it is ultimately up to us to find a way to deal with the grief.

Hector and Adromache have a very loyal and loving relationship in the Iliad. In book six, when Hector takes a break from war to shame his coward brother Prince Paris back into the battle, he visits his wife and little infant son one last time. He asks around to find them and when he does, Adromache runs up to meet him, relieved that he is still alive but ever fearful for his safety. They weep together and Hector's wife begs him to stay out of the war. "My dear husband, your warlike spirit will be your death," she says. "You've no compassion for your infant child, for me, your sad wife, who before long will be your widow." Hector is sad as well and deeply pities his wife, but he recognizes his duty in war. He will not shun it. He comforts his wife, blesses his son and prays for his future, and leaves for the battle that will end in his demise.                                                                                                                                      

Creusa's fate is dealt with in detail by Virgil in his Aedneid. As Troy is falling to the Greeks, Aeneas goes to his home to lead his father Anchises, Creusa, and their son Ascanius out of the city and into the countryside. Anchises refuses to leave the house, prompting Aeneas to decide that he will leave to continue the fight against the Greeks so that he may die in battle. Creusa grabs his feet and begs him to think of what would become of Ascanius, Anchises and herself if Aeneas were to be killed. As she does this, Ascanius catches fire with an un-earthly flame. The flame is quickly doused with water. Anchises believes this to be an omen from Jupiter, who confirms this omen by sending a shooting star. Anchises now agrees to flee Troy. The family leaves the home, Aeneas carrying his father and Ascanius holding his hand, while Creusa is to remain some distance behind them. As they flee through the city, pursued by Greeks, they reach the gates and begin to run, after noticing that the Greeks appear to be gaining on them. Creusa is unable to keep up with them. After reaching the temple outside of the city, Aeneas leaves Anchises and Ascanius there to go back in search of Creusa. As he searches the city without success, he meets the ghost of Creusa, who tells him that she may not leave the city with him. She predicts his journey to Hesperia, Italy and future marriage to another. She asks that Aeneas take care of their child and vanishes. Aeneas tries three times to hold her, each time failing to grasp her wraith.

 In Aeneid, Creusa pleads Aeneas to just stay with her and their son Ascanius and not to take part in the Trojan War. While in Iliad, Andromache pleads Hector to stay with her and their baby and not to fight in the Trojan War, too. Both the two ladies in the poem was left with their sons and experienced to be so sorrowful without their husband whom they loved. And everybody may think that Hector and Aeneas may not join the war but for them it's their responsibility and duty for their land and God.

Victory and Loss

One of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of the epic is its ending: even though our hero Aeneas is victorious, the Aeneid ends on an unquestionably tragic note, devoting its final lines to the sad last moments of Turnus's short life. Virgil could have ended the story with, for example, victory celebrations and the joining together of the Latins and the Trojans, but he chooses to end it in a manner that not only takes readers to the opposite emotional pole from the triumphant, positive beginning, but is consistent with his interest in creating multilayered, painfully human characters. The ending of the epic is tragic in order to convey Turnus's complexity, as well as the complexity of the situation at hand.
At the end of the Aeneid, Aeneas is confronted with a similar decision, but he does not show a comparable level of empathy (even though his loss of Pallas might be compared with Achilles' loss of his friend Patroclus). The fact that Virgil's epic ends with Aeneas's sword plunging through Turnus to his death, and with Turnus's embittered shade fleeing to the underworld, might be even more downbeat than the funeral of Hector at the end of Homer's work. By ending the poem in this manner, Virgil underscores the theme of loss as a consequence of following one's destiny. Aeneas's adventures result in the loss of countless lives, but in the end something even more precious is lost, Aeneas's mercy. Throughout the Aeneid, the protagonist has shown himself to be a just, moral, and kind leader, but in the final moments of the epic he is a fighter, slaying a man who lies pleading for his life at his feet. While Aeneas may be a classic hero, modern readers might want their heroes to mix more mercy with their justice.

The Fall of Troy

With Aeneas’s claim that his tale of Troy’s fall is so sorrowful that it would bring tears even to the eyes of a soldier as harsh as Ulysses, Virgil calls attention to his own act of retelling the Trojan horse episode from a new angle, that of the vanquished Trojans. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, we learn the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Ulysses and the Greeks. Virgil’s claim is that even the Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers and winners earn our sympathy and respect.

I really feel sympathy when Aeneas summarized the fall of Troy to Dido on Book II of " The Aeneid of Virgil". I imagined that it's like our house then my mortal enemy will won on getting it where i'ts my father's fruit of hardships. I will also never give up my faith to get the Troy back again to the Trojans like Aeneas did in the Aeneid. I like Aeneas so depressed of what happened to Troy. I will think that I'm a stupid man, or leader cause I can't be a hero of my own city. I will be so guilty of why it happened to Troy, and in fact, I'm the leader so I should remain standing and willing to die for the sake of Troy, but I sailed away from Troy and let my  comrades die fighting the Greeks.