The Odyssey vs. The Aeneid

I went into The Aeneid expecting it to be similar to The Odyssey, and it is in the fact that it's a piece of Ancient literature surrounding the times of the Trojan War. The differences were very striking to me though. The change of the gods's names from the Greek to Roman, the differentiation in phrasing, the constant reference to words that I don't know what they are because I never saw them with Homer. I mean, it took a lot of context clues to figure out that unlike in Odysseus's journey where we sailed around a happy map figuratively, the story was actually referencing the real map as we understand today. So I looked up some background information and learned Virgil actually wrote the Aeneid about Aeneas, a character mentioned some six hundred years earlier in The Illiad. Aeneas eventually becomes the ancestor of the Romans, but the story is about his travels and conquers of Italy.