The Aeneid 2026

The box office success of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey suggests there’s a market for stuff based on ancient epic poems about arduous journeys following the Trojan War. That’s great news for me because it so happens that every August I write something here at Indirect Objects about The Aeneid, an ancient Roman poem about, well, an arduous journey following the Trojan War. That’s me: finger on the pulse as usual.

I undertake the ritual as a way of marking the anniversary of this site’s inception (speaking of Christopher Nolan movies). In the first Indirect Objects post, dated Aug. 6, 2019, I consulted the Virgilian lottery, a way of divining the future by opening Virgil’s works at random and interpreting what you land on as a prophecy.

I have repeated the practice annually ever since. Welcome to the seventh reiteration—and to the seventh birthday, give or take a couple weeks, of this blog.

As it happens, the prophetic passage for 2026 comes less than a hundred lines after last year’s. We’re still in Book Four, after the poem’s protagonist, Aeneas, has been discovered by his lover, Dido, while attempting to skedaddle on account of because the gods want him to go invent the Romans. Dido does not take it well.

The lines that I closed my eyes and pointed at for this anniversary post occur mid-skedaddle, as Aeneas and his crew hurry to set sail during a lull in poor Dido’s breakdown (she has fainted). As always, the translation is by Robert Fagles.

Then the Trojans throw themselves in the labor,
launching their tall vessels down along the beach
and the hull rubbed sleek with pitch floats high again.

Taking this as a prediction for the year ahead, I assume Virgil is trying to tell me there’s last-minute travel in my future. Which is a pretty safe bet, seeing as how I’m a travel editor. So I’ll give points for accuracy. But I’m afraid I’ll have to deduct a few for a prognostication so bland and impersonal—“There might be last-minute travel in your future”—that it could have come from a fortune cookie or newspaper horoscope.

I do like that bit about the “hull rubbed sleek with pitch.” That’s nicely put, even if it sounds kind of dirty to bring up sleek rubbing so soon after mentioning Trojans.

For a less vague supernatural forecast, I recommend the psychic I once consulted on a lark during college. She told me I was destined to meet my soulmate someday, so I asked for a physical description. Peering into the infinite, she foresaw someone who was shorter than me, with broad shoulders and green eyes.

Unfortunately, the guy I eventually married only meets two of those three criteria. When we are finally torn apart by his green-eyed successor, I hope we all handle the breakup with more equilibrium than Dido could muster.

In any case, I would never sneak away while my jilted lover was unconscious. I would wait till he woke up to see if we could squeeze in one last sleek rubbing as a memento.

And if you think that was a tacky way to drop the name of yet another Christopher Nolan movie, let’s just be grateful I failed in my attempt to get a boner joke out of The Dark Knight Rises.