Carrying gods
Yesterday I said that the people in American Gods who carried their gods across the sea to America "had a hard time of it, or at least the gods did", by contrast with the Aeneid. My point was not, of course, that Aeneas didn't have a hard time of his sea-crossing -- obviously he did, "multum ille et terris iactatus et alto / [...] multa quoque et bello passus". My point was that his gods had a pretty easy time; they just got to hang out, they didn't have to fight the wars, they just got free transportation, and when they finally arrived at Lavinium, they found a whole budding civilization unanimously eager to worship them.
This is not the gods' experience in Gaiman's book.
The hero of the Aeneid is a refugee ("profugus"), unlike the hero of the Odyssey, who's going home to a city already built. (And also it wasn't really a city Odysseus was going to, but that's a whole other matter.) Aeneid as refugee/exile literature? Hmmmm.
