Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: aeneas

  • Reading Book II of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Thursday, September 10, 2026

    I often wonder why God allows the ills of society to persist and their victims to suffer violence for no reason. What are the sins of children who suffer such violence? Why can’t he care more about changing the fates of these children? The same question arises through Aeneas in Book II when he sees his beloved Troy burning and, with a yearning heart, seems to demand an answer. If fate requires suffering, what is fate? Is God truly omnipotent and omniscient?

    Book II is Aeneas’s ballad of burning Troy—the story of his fate, which does not allow him to enjoy the ordinary life of a married man. His life doesn’t seem to be protected by the gods, even by his divine mother, who appears to her son as Venus, not as a mother. They force him to fulfill sacred pietas by carrying Troy’s future to foreign soil, where his descendants will build Rome. He tries to resist their gambit on the chessboard, where he is their number-one knight, moved around at their pleasure. Even his mother Venus is part of the divine ilk and hurries him out of Troy like a mom sending her son to school before it’s too late. In Aeneas’s mortal eyes, the idea of becoming the forefather of Rome appeals to him less than being a husband, a father, and a son at home. Can even his divine mother protect him from this fate?

    Gods are cruel just as God is cruel. They make his life easy only when he acts according to their will. Without the gods’ command, Aeneas would not have thought of fleeing the burning city with his elderly father Anchises on his back, his little son Ascanius at his right hand, and his wife Creusa following behind. But then Creusa must stay away from her husband, who has a duty far greater than his personal life. Her ghost appears and tells Aeneas that he must leave; as she vanishes into the folds of mist, all his chances of escaping his fate and its burdens vanish with her. He has no reason to stay but must move forward against his will.

    The Trojan Horse, Laocoön and his two sons engulfed by the sea serpents, and the cries of Priam and his wife Hecuba all signify the great labor of birth in the process of dying, all within the fate of a man who must act out his assigned role in the divine chess game.

  • the image of the war

    original
    from International Archive

    When Oberon, the king of Fairyland in Shakespeare’s The Midsummer Night’s Dream, demands that queen Titania yield the human child whose mother is a votary of her order,  she remonstrates thus: “Set your heart at rest. The fairyland buys not the child of me.” The queen is adamantly protective of her human changeling for the sake of his well-being. Then I see one of the famous photos of the war children, which was taken in the wake of the Korean War, as shown above in this post. Where is their Queen Titania in her fairyland? Or more tragically, has she forsaken these little children in their own care? What would have happened to them?

    The face of a doleful young girl carrying her little brother before the tank needs no assistance of words with a surge of the pathos of child refugees who were forced to grow fast in the reality of war. Wandering about their whereabouts now in mind conjures up the mental picture of Aeneas carrying his elderly father on the back, escaping from the carnage of the war behind. Both the elderly father and the younger brother are prone to any seismic events because of their weak mentality and physical strength, and therefore require special care at all times. Aeneas, the man destined to become a founder of Rome and the nameless girl, is, in fact, are brought together by the collective experience of war, bound by the familial duty that requires sacrifice.

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    Aeneas carrying his elderly father

    Notwithstanding the official cease-fire agreement unwillingly made and entered into by and between the Two Koreas, the tension, the disbelief, and the conflict of the political, social ideologies are still in the consciousness of the North and the South, keeping the amber of the war volatile around the 38th Parallel Line. This current unfinished state of the war is arguably akin to the 10-year long Trojan War between the allied forces of ancient Greece and of Troy during which the Trojans continued to carry about living in the semblance of the ordinariness of life.  The compelling, emotive picture of the little Korean siblings attests to the atrocity of war that forfeits the innocence of childhood that every child in the world should have. It pleads in silence that we as citizens of the world should prevent a reprise of the Trojan War not only in the Korean peninsular but elsewhere in the world so that no more war children of their kind will be begotten by the tragedy of war.