I'm quite surprised at how much I got into this. Many years back I forced myself to read the Iliad, and the endless repetition of slaughter made it something of a chore. Perhaps I'd think differently if I read it again today, but for now the The Aeneid is as far as I'm going.

It's the sheer breadth of it that I found most exhilarating, I think. Not so much the characters, because they're fairly thinly drawn and I'm dreadfully unsympathetic to their glory-hog motives anyway (nine times out of ten, whenever a character's doing something in this book, it's for self-aggrandising reasons - and the gods are even worse about this than the humans!) but the scale of the story and the language used to describe it was excellent. How much of that language is down to Mandelbaum's translation I don't know, but I was pleasantly relieved at just how accessible the thing was.