"Hour-long lectures on the color of Dido's hair"

Lauren Davis's piece on the survival of our pop culture is lovely and imaginative. But there's a more important reason I liked it: it explains why my classical studies students prefer Homer to Vergil:

Today... the Aeneid is relegated to upper-level Latin classes, while middle schoolers and high schoolers get the Greeks' mythical side of the story with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. So why do Hector and Achilles get a starring role in English class (and, consequently, big box office movies) while Aeneas and Dido don't? A Latin teacher once explained to me that when she tried to teach Vergil's poem in English, she had very little to say. The Aeneid is one of the great works of Western literature, but appreciating it depends heavily on understanding the language in which it was written: Vergil's word choices, his syntax, even the number of times he uses certain words to describe Dido's hair. (I had a Latin teacher who could deliver hour-long lectures on the color of Dido's hair.)

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