Oh, well, that's true too. Everybody is deceitful, and everybody is playing along, gods and mortals alike. Everybody who is honest gets ignored or killed.

Oh, the Aeneid is the story of Aeneas, a Trojan who watched Troy fall and then had to go find a new homeland, which destiny says is to be the future site of Rome. It's very sad, because Aeneas just wants to be normal, but he can't, because fate has decreed that he's going to be the forefather of the conquerors of the world. So he leaves Troy, even though he'd rather have died defending it, and goes and founds a city like the gods told him to, but - oops - it's in the wrong place. Sorry, Aeneas, your princess is in another castle. So he sails around a bit more, finds another place for his city, builds a city, and, yet again, it's not quite where it's supposed to be. Sorry, Aeneas, you have to go to Italy. Why couldn't you have told me this before I built these two cities? 'Cause we're mean, that's why. And, oh, by the way, the queen of the gods hates your guts. So she conjures up a storm to blow him off course, hoping to prevent him from ever getting to Italy and founding Rome (because she hates Rome, even though it doesn't exist yet), and Aeneas ends up in Carthage, where he meets a completely awesome woman and falls in love and gets married. But oh, sorry, Aeneas, sorry, Dido, that's not your destiny. Aeneas has to marry Lavinia, this woman he's never met, and she's in Italy. She's also engaged, but that doesn't come into play until later. So, because destiny says so, Aeneas leaves and Dido doesn't and her heart is completely and utterly broken and she commits suicide. And later, Aeneas visits the underworld and has a nice chat with his dead father, and sees Dido completely shunning him and hanging out with her first husband. So that's all very tragic. But he finally makes it to Italy, but it turns out that Italy is already inhabited, and the aforementioned Lavinia is already betrothed, and basically the locals are not too happy about Aeneas barging in with his big destiny. So the second half of the epic is all about the giant war that ensues, and who all gets killed and how, and it ends when Aeneas, who has mysteriously transmogrified from something of a wuss, as Trojans go, to typical manly epic hero of might, kills Lavinia's fiancee, who wasn't a very nice guy anyway. Really, the second half of the book is pretty dreadful. It's like those movies wherein a lot of heavily muscled extras - each of whom has a name and a backstory that you will hear if you watch the special features, and whose armor all has a history and some ungodly amount of work that went into designing it, all for a character that appears for all of two seconds - do battle and kill each other in various gruesome ways. The first half is pretty good, though, in a tragic and sad way.