What do you like about Virgil's Aeneid?

I like this question because my students have tended not
to like the Aeneid. I'm not sure why, because I really like the
poem. Of course, it's much better in Latin than in English, because Virgil has taken
such great care with the poem that practically every word is dripping with some sort of
symbolism or important meaning. So, one reason I like the Aeneid is
because it IS a poem that is deliberately filled with meaning and symbolism, and that
meaning and symbolism was directly related to the first century BCE Roman world in which
Virgil lived. Aeneas strikes me as a far more complicated character than his Homeric
predecessors Achilles or Odysseus. Aeneas is part Achilles, part Odysseus, part Jason,
part Augustus, part Marcus Antonius, and so on.

Another
reason I like the Aeneid is because the poem's hero is struggling
mightily to figure out what he is going to do with his life. Aeneas is tugged in many
directions and struggles with what he wants to do versus what his father wants him to
do, what his mother wants him to do, what his people want him to do, what his girl
friend wants him to do, and what the gods want him to do. Aeneas is trying to balance
his responsibility to all of these various forces and I think most humans face the same
challenges in our lives. Thus, as Aeneas himself says in Book 1, the Aeneid
is a poem where

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             ...virtue has its rewards, here
too

there are tears for events, and mortal things touch the
heart.

(A.S. Kline
translation)