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    The Aeneid
    The Aeneid
    The Aeneid
    Ebook843 pages8 hours

    The Aeneid

    By Virgil, David Ferry and Richard F. Thomas

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    This volume represents the most ambitious project of distinguished poet David Ferry’s life: a complete translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Ferry has long been known as the foremost contemporary translator of Latin poetry, and his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics have become standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil’s formal, metrical lines into an English that is familiar, all while surrendering none of the poem’s original feel of the ancient world. In Ferry’s hands, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, devotion and death.
     
    The paperback and e-book editions include a new introduction by Richard F. Thomas, along with a new glossary of names that makes the book even more accessible for students and for general readers coming to the Aeneid for the first time who may need help acclimating to Virgil’s world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 29, 2017
    ISBN9780226450216
    Author

    Virgil

    Publius Vergilius Maro – or Virgil – was born near Mantua in 70 BC and was brought up there, although he attended schools in Cremona and Rome. Virgil’s rural upbringing and his affinity with the countryside are evident in his earliest work, the Eclogues, a collection of ten pastoral poems. As an adult Virgil lived mostly in Naples, although he spent time in Rome and belonged to the circle of influential poets that included Horace. He also had connections to leading men within the senatorial class and to the Emperor Augustus himself. Following the Eclogues, Virgil wrote the Georgics, a didactic poem, and thereafter began his longest and most ambitious work, the Aeneid. He died in Brindisi in 19 BC.

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    Reviews for The Aeneid

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    • 4/5
      The Aeneid, translated by Robert FaglesAfter reading Black Ships by Jo Graham (which was based on The Aeneid), I was inspired to find a copy and read it myself. Robert Fagles is an award-winning translator and is especially recognized for his work on Homer's The Illiad and The Oddessy. He more recently turned his attention to The Aeneid by Virgil. While I've never read The Aeneid before, and can't compare Fagles translation to others, I did find it to be very approachable, enjoyable, and immensley readable. In fact, he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets because of it.Also included in this edition is a wonderful introduction by Bernard Knox explaining the background, history, and context of The Aeneid. Additional useful elements include a genealogy, notes on the translation, and a fairly comprehensive pronunciation glossary. Apparently, Virgil died before he could finish the epic poem and requested that it be destroyed. Fortunately, for us anyway, his wish was not fulfilled.The Aeneid consists of twelve books following Aeneas, a Trojan commander, and what remains of the free people of Troy after it's final destruction. Destined by the gods to settle in Italy and become the ancestors of the Romans, their path is not an easy one. (The establishment of this ancestry was one of the primary reasons Virgil set about writing this work.) The Trojans must face storms, wars, monsters, and even the gods themselves in their struggle to survive and to found a new homeland. Even unfinished, the poem is quite an achievement. It is filled with fantastic imagery and is packed with action while addressing the humanity of the people involved.While in high school, I was intensely interested in classical studies. Reading this terrific translation of The Aeneid was a wonderful way to revisit that one-time obsession. Though it did end rather suddenly, right at one of the climaxes actually, it was very much worth reading and I very much enjoyed it.Experiments in Reading
    • 2/5
      Propaganda literature, written with political and moral aims, in imitation of Greek models, and so is inferior art.
    • 4/5
      Love this translation, especially the beginning.
    • 3/5
      The Trojan Odyssey. Interesting for how it has carried down even until today.
    • 4/5
      Having read Broch's The Death of Virgil earlier this year, I felt I should read The Aeneid, especially as I never studied Latin III, where we would have read it in the original. I'm glad I read it now for the first time, as I don't think I would have appreciated its richness, creativity, and psychological insight years ago. The story is quickly told: Aeneas flees Troy after the Trojan War and he and his companions seek a new land to settle, in Italy. Juno opposes them, so they are forced on a long voyage until reaching their destination. They must fight to gain the land where they will found their new city. Yes, you could call it a propaganda piece; but oh, how marvellous! In Book VI, Aeneas journeys to the Elysian Fields where his dead father's shade tells him of the glories of the Rome to come. The translation was very readable and evocative of the time and place. I liked the use of the present tense to describe the action [the 'historical present']; to me, it gave it immediacy. I appreciated the lengthy introduction by Bernard Knox and the Postscript by the translator, Robert Fagles. More than just the text, I highly recommend all supplementary material. My favorite parts were Book VI and Book X [the main battle against Latium]. I could almost call Aeneas the distant ancestor of one of the Roman soldier-heroes in today's Roman military novels. Certainly, the fighting was as bloody. The Aeneid is a must-read!
    • 3/5
      I found this easier to get through than [book: The Iliad], I think because at least for the first half there was stuff going on besides warfare. But I think I'm kind of epiced out after those two and [book: Paradise Lost] all this semester.
    • 4/5
      Aeneas is the son of a goddess. His wife is dead. His home is destroyed because someone decided to run away with the wife of a Greek King named Helena. A prophecy is guiding him to Latium, an area of Italy where his descendants will become the greatest empire of mankind. But first, there is an epic that has to happen.The story is not entirely unlike The Odyssey. There are some parallels, and there are some things that are put in to place to basically say, "This is happening at the same time" because it is.Suicidal queens, vengeful royalty, and large sea voyages are abound in this epic tale.
    • 4/5
      I liked The Aeneid. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure read, but I liked it in the way you like arduous things (and by arduous I mean reading all 300+ pages of epic prose in 3 days) once they’re over. If you’ve ever read Grapes of Wrath maybe you know what I’m talking about. There were a lot of slow parts, many of which involved an excess of names, but there were also plenty of gripping parts that had me actually forgetting to watch the page numbers tick by as slowly as the minutes. For example, the last four books are almost entirely devoted to one long, drawn out, dramatic, and incredibly visceral battle scene. I may have cringed at least once a page, but I certainly wasn’t bored! Two Sentence Summary: After the sack of Troy, Aeneas escapes with a group of Trojan warriors and sets out for the shores of Italy, where he will found New Troy (aka Rome). He must first overcome the obstacles of a vindictive meddling goddess, and then conquer the land destined to become a great empire.I’m guessing most of you have heard of The Aeneid. And maybe you’ve heard whisperings of comparisons to The Odyssey. Maybe some have you have even read it. If you a) haven’t and b) have read The Odyssey and didn’t loathe it, I recommend The Aeneid as a good companion read. It’s an excellent microcosmic example that for all the energy the Romans put into dissing the Greeks, they put at least as much or more into imitating (and in their minds, improving on) them. Naturally it’s chock full of meaty themes as well, like the conflict between duty and desire, the martyrdom of present happiness for future greatness, learning what to let go of and when, the ephemerality of human life and connection, the entanglement of place and identity... the list goes on. And Virgil wasn’t kidding around. He knew his way around a vivid description (see: incredibly visceral battle scene). I’ve never read such inventive – and numerous – descriptions of dawn. They put Homer’s lovely, if repetitive, “rosy-fingered dawn” to shame. And that’s pretty much Virgil’s goal in a nutshell: outdo Homer. Whether he succeeds or not is up to you.
    • 3/5
      Although it is a classic and beautiful epic poem, I think the translation takes a lot away from what the original could be. After awhile hearing the repetitive use of words such as train, main, fate, state, began to get old. Also, knowing that it is pretty much a rip off of the Iliad and Odyssey with just a swap of Greeks for Trojans in what is just an attempt to say "Hey, those Trojans weren't so bad after all" made it almost unbearable. The swap also made it hard to follow since all the gods were identified with Roman names instead of Greek which was confusing at times.It is a good classic to read but I think I'll stick to the Greeks.
    • 3/5
      I so disliked this translation that I stopped reading it at Line 620 of Book II and finished it in another. I think I reacted so strongly against it because I had just read The Iliad in Richmond Latimore's magnificent version. While that style was ringing in my head and heart, I just could not buy into this so different version.
    • 3/5
      Read this rather hurriedly and when lots of other things were going on in my life.
    • 3/5
      I listened to the audiobook read by Simon Callow. He was an excellent narrator. The story itself is a classic, and one that is somewhat familiar to people: the Trojan Horse, the betrayal of Dido, the journey to the Underworld, the voyage to found Rome. It’s part of our Western folklore. Hearing poetry aloud makes a big difference in understanding. The Fagles translation, while somewhat stilted, is understandable when written, but even better aloud. Like Homer, Virgil’s poetry definitely benefits from being read in audiobook form (at least if you have a good narrator).
    • 3/5
      Another classic! Interesting to hear the Trojan side of this and also the slightly different Roman Gods. Aeneas is a great hero and the story suitably epic!
    • 4/5
      While I've read both the Iliad and the Odyssey several times each, I've never gotten around to the Aeneid by Virgil, until now. The Aeneid is a sequel to the Iliad from a Trojan's point of view, specifically, Aeneus' wanderings after escaping the sacking of Troy. He is promised, by the gods, that he will found a new Troy in Latium (the future Rome), thus this epic, written during the time of Augustus Caesar, is a foundation story for the Roman Empire. It copies the structure and devices of its predecessors with the gods constantly interfering with Aeneas' mission because of their own petty quarrels, as well as wanderings from place to place, tragic loves, bloody battles between heroic men and even a trip to the underworld. In this book you'll find the description of Troy's destruction, the details about the Greek's devious ruse with the Wooden Horse, as well as the story of Dido the queen of Carthage who falls, to her own demise, in love with Aeneas. If the Aeneid is inferior to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is, nevertheless, enjoyable reading. I especially liked the depiction of Camilla, a female warrior that would give the Amazons a run for their money.
    • 5/5
      This is a classic of course. This translation in particular is quite well done. It has excellent notes and references. I love this work particularly because of the context in which it was written which gives depth to many of the events and/or the way in which they are portrayed.
    • 3/5
      The Aeneid is one of those staples of an education in Latin with which I was acquainted during my high school and college years, but only from a translation standpoint. In other words, I would be assigned to translate passages from The Aeneid as homework, but never really read the epic in its entirety until now.I love poetry, but epic poetry is something I've never quite been able to wrap my head around. I think it's because, with epic poetry, it's so much about the story and so little (In many cases) about the symbolism that I run into trouble. The conventions of the poetic form make it difficult to follow what would be, in prose, a normal sentence over several lines. By the time I get to the end of a "sentence" in an epic, I've lost the entire meaning of the thought because of the twists and turns of the poetic dialogue.So, basically, this was a bit of a slog for me.Keeping in mind that, in both Greek and Roman mythology, the gods and goddesses are petty and vengeful and really, really like to indulge their whims, I really thought Juno was spot-on. She was upset that Paris chose Venus as the best goddess (That's such a reductive way to state this, but there you have it), so she decided to take it out on Aeneas. However, she didn't really take into account that Aeneas would be protected by some other gods and goddesses, so she just ended up killing a bunch of people close to Aeneas without ever really being able to touch him. I guess that's the "Hurting those closest to your target hurts more than actually hurting your target" theory of vengeance.Aeneas is one of those characters that ran kind of hot and cold with me. At times, he seemed to be the heroic, noble founder of Rome from legends. At other times, he was kind of boring. For being the title character of this epic, I found him pretty blah.I did find myself, during battle scenes, grimacing quite often whenever someone was slashed/impaled/beheaded/what-have-you, as Vergil was quite fond of the term "gore" and all that went with it ("Thick gore," "thick black gore," "clotted gore" -- You get the idea). Much more effective than a lengthy description of blood spurting several feet from a decapitated trunk, if you ask me.Overall, I liked The Aeneid well enough to see why it's a classic in higher education. However, for those of you squeamish of epic poetry, I'd suggest finding either a prose version (I'm sure they exist somewhere) or a version that offers summaries of each of the books.My rating: 7/10
    • 5/5
      In what you'll recognize as a classic "reading group review" (if you've been paying attention . . . and why would you be?), some thoughts from The Aeneid Week 1:-I haven't been this excited about a reread in a long time.-Indeed, what is fate here? That which must be? The desultorily enforced whim of Zeus? Its own proof, because if you just did something awesome, some god or other must have been on your side?-I read that Virgil studied under Sino the Epicurean. I'd always thought of V. as more of a Stoic. Will read with that in mind.-What is all this about them braving Scylla and the cyclops? Like, Aeneas did everything Odysseus did, only offscreen? Burn!
    • 5/5
      Boy, I really liked this.
    • 5/5
      A lot of comparisons are being made between the Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey, but I personally find the Aeneid to surpass the former. Aeneas is portrayed with more compassion, I think, than Odysseus and a comparison isn't really very useful as Aeneas is a Trojan sailing with nowhere to go and Odysseus is a Greek victor who is just cursed to take ten years to get to his homeland.As far as the Aeneid on its own is concerned, you really get a feel for all of the characters involved (except, oddly enough, Zeus/Jove), and all of their points of view are justifiable, more or less. The personal drama and the battles are gripping, and you really sympathize with all of the characters.This translation in particular is a very easy one to read and I think true to the simplicity of the Latin original; Latin isn't a stuffy language and this is not a stuffy translation.
    • 3/5
      I do think it is a commendable effort by Fagles to translate another lengthy epic but I do think my on-going ennui while reading through this epic poetry even with the help of Simon Callow's narration was the result of Virgil's prose and storytelling itself. The Aeneid is a continuation after the fall of Troy and it set around the adventures of Aeneas and his role in the founding of Rome. However, this doesn't mean Virgil is ripping off Homer although obviously he did base his work around Iliad but Mediterranean culture often derive from the same geographical source, much like how there's some similarity between food cultures around South East Asia.

      Unlike Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid is highly political and almost devoid of storytelling until usual good parts. Most of the time the poems constantly surrounded itself with 'prophetic' grandeur of the future Roman empire and its people and there's a lot of brown nosing in this book that it became unbearable. That made more sense why Virgil wanted his manuscript destroyed. Its not just a story of Aeneus, its also a 19 BC product placement story about how the then-Roman families and rulers being placed inside the mythology with stories of their grandeur.

      The role of various women in Aeneid is by far the most troublesome element I had with this book. I could blame it on my modern bias but there are prevalent amount of misogyny in this book that made the process of reading as discomforting. This whole story seem to assert itself that a woman couldn't hold a position of power and always in danger of irrationality and on the verge of hysteria and suicidal at the whims of men. First we see them with Juno and Venus then Dido and Queen Amata. I do admire Dido at first but due to a deus ex machina, her characterization was tarnished and she became an even more caricatured version of Homer's Penelope and Calypso.

      There are some good parts with war and fight scenes and occasional description of gore but overall the narrative seem to jump around characters. But unlike Greek's thematic Xenia where hospitality is one of the most important values, Aeneid focus more on Pietas which was piety toward the gods, the prophecy and responsibility which was prevalent throughout the book. It show Aeneus in varied position where he was pushed to his destiny and held back from his goal by people or divine stalker entity. It is laughably distracting that in a way it is a classic way to teach its listener about being pious but all I want was some coherent storytelling instead of a propaganda and a story within a story. Aeneid have its historical significance but it certainly doesn't give me much entertainment without being distracted by all the allegories.
    • 4/5
      The Aeneid is a true adventure - a look towards the future and the promises made. History in the making for the Roman Empire. There are twelve books in the epic, much-loved poem. In a nutshell, the first six cover Aeneas and his wanderings after surviving the Trojan war. The second half of the poem are the details of the Trojan War. Much like how Gregory Maguire chose to tell the story of the wicked witch of the west, Virgil tells the other side of the Trojan War story. Instead of following Odysseus, we focus on Aeneas, the defeated Trojan.On a personal level, an observation: Aeneas reminded me of Dorothy Dunnett's character, Francis, from the Lymond series. He is that deeply flawed hero that everyone roots for.
    • 5/5
      Even though "pious" Aeneas isn't as clever or as entertaining as wiley Odysseus, he's still pretty cool.
    • 3/5
      Borders edition to the Iliad and the Odyssey's counter, the Aeneid. Tehe Trojans wonder looking for a home after Troy's defeat moving on until they reach Italy. And battle after battle leads to a final victory with heroes and gods in tow. This was definitely a bathroom read, one page at a time. So 2500 years ago the hero was the center of attention. You can see how this story line is still wih us today. Glad I took the tike to read it.
    • 3/5
      The fact that this is unfinished makes me want to gnaw on my own liver - because it ends right when things start (finally) getting interesting. Still an interesting read, however, if only to get glimpses into the way the ancient Greeks thought.
    • 4/5
      While I loved all the supplementary information, Fagles translation wasn't as good as I had hoped based upon my experience with his Odyssey. My old paperback edition, translated by Allan Mandelbaum, was better but my friend's copy of Fitzgerald's was best of all.
    • 3/5
      Several reviews characterize The Aeneid as a slog and I agree. Compared to The Iliad and Odyssey it definitely is a more difficult story to get through. Partly for its self-aggrandizement of the Roman people and foundation, partly for its huge chunks of backstory and wild justification, but mostly for the insufferable gods and goddesses. Oh my head that was painful. Everyone it seems has a stake in Aeneas’s fate, but of course they are almost all at odds with each other and none seem to know what the others were doing. Every once in a while Zeus/Jove/Jupiter gets involved and lackadaisically makes a decision, but for the most part Venus and Juno get to butt heads and see who can mess with the participants the most in order to fulfill her ends.To some degree it’s a foregone conclusion since Vergil is writing this epic to give validation and divine permission to Augustus (his patron) and the Claudian and Julian families for crushing the life out of the Roman Republic. That means that Aeneas has to be perfect. Noble. Brave. Clear-sighted. Righteous. Determined. Bor-ring! There wasn’t enough humanity about Aeneas for me to connect with him. He was the correct embodiment of all that Roman Patrician families strive for in their men and he came off robot-like and stilted. Give me the much-maligned Odysseus any day.
    • 5/5
      In my opinion, the greatest of the Classical epics. The Aeneid does not merely praise the glory of Rome and Augustus by exhalting Aeneas; it conveys a melancholy for everything that Aeneas, the Trojans, and even their enemies underwent in order to bring about fate. Rome's enemy Carthage, and even Hannibal who lead the invading army, is here depicted as the eventual avengers of a woman abandoned by her lover not for any fault of her own, but merely because the gods required him to be elsewhere. The Italians are shown as glorious warriors, whose necessary deaths in battle may not be worth it. Finally there is the end, not with the joy of triumph, but with the death moan of the Italian leader. The translation by David West perfectly captures the tone of the original.
    • 3/5
      A bit slow, but it certainly follows the whole "odyssey" thing.
    • 2/5
      I prefer Homer.
    • 3/5
      Unlike Homer, to whome I can lose long nights bound by his captivating cadence, Virgil's Aeneid took me a full season--nearly six months--to finish. The tricks of the trade that were novel when I saw them in Homer lost some of their luster in Virgil's derived forms, though there were some passages and stories here that provide almost universal archetypes to the lineage of western literature.The first remarkable thing is how little has changed in Mediterranean cultures' sense of heroicism in the many hundreds of years that elapsed between the Homeric epics and Virgil's lifetime in the first century CE. Without an academic familiarity with Imperial Roman culture, it's hard to determine how much of the poem's epic content is supposed to reflect ideals that are still relevant to its contemporary audience versus how much--and knowing Romans' captivation with the-good-old-days-had-real-heroes, we-are-only-sad-imitations, I sense that this might be closer to the mark--the glories of the past and the founding of Rome are a legacy of god-like men and endeavors that cannot or even should not be emulated. If one were to prune out the portions of the poem that are weak echoes of Homer's mastery, those pieces that are hackneyed homages to Caesar Augustus, and perhaps pare down some of the martial descriptiveness, one would have something very close to perfect. When Virgil allows himself to be narrative--maybe at slight expense to the propagandistic tack--wonderful things happen. Pious, predictable Aeneas is no crafty Odysseus, and besides performing the prescribed role of establishing Roman history, seems to be less dimensional than some of the epic's other notable characters. Where Homer's women are mostly reduced to submissive pale sketches unless deities (Athena, for example, is always inspirational no matter who writes about her), Virgil gives us a couple of plausible inspirations. Dido pulls of tragic without simpering, and even in the underworld refuses to be a doormat. Camilla is nothing short of fantastic.But in the end, there is a lot of poring over gory and repetitive battle scenes. Important to the epic genre and the symbolic completeness of the story? Likey. But to the modern reader or at least one disinterested in military history, not terrifically impactful. A required read in the Western Canon. But a touch too much work to be enjoyable.

    Book preview

    The Aeneid - Virgil

    Cover Page for The Aeneid

    The Aeneid

    The Æneid

    Virgil

    Translated by David Ferry

    With an Introduction by Richard F. Thomas

    The University of Chicago Press

    Chicago and London

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

    The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

    © 2017, 2022 by The University of Chicago

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

    Published 2017

    Paperback edition 2022

    Printed in the United States of America

    31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45018-6 (cloth)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81728-6 (paper)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45021-6 (e-book)

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226450216.001.0001

    Pages xxxii–xxxiii: Lauren Nassef, The World of the Aeneid (2017).

    Page 2: A sculpture by Dmitri Hadzi in the collection of David Ferry. Courtesy of the Estate of Dmitri Hadzi. Photograph by Stephen Ferry (www.stephenferry.com).

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

    Names: Virgil, author. | Ferry, David, 1924– translator.

    Title: The Aeneid / Virgil ; translated by David Ferry.

    Other titles: Aeneid. English

    Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2017002329 | ISBN 9780226450186 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226450216 (e-book)

    Classification: LCC PA6807.A5 F47 2017 | DDC 873/.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002329

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    To my family

    for all your help

    Contents

    Preface

    A Note on Meter

    A Note on the Translation

    Introduction by Richard F. Thomas (2022)

    The Aeneid

    Book One

    Book Two

    Book Three

    Book Four

    Book Five

    Book Six

    Book Seven

    Book Eight

    Book Nine

    Book Ten

    Book Eleven

    Book Twelve

    Acknowledgments

    Glossary of Names

    Preface

    Aurora rose, spreading her pitying light,

    And with it bringing back to sight the labors

    Of sad mortality, what men have done,

    And what has been done to them; and what they must do

    To mourn. King Tarchon and Father Aeneas, together

    Upon the curving shore, caused there to be

    Wooden funeral pyres constructed, and to which

    The bodies of their dead were brought and placed there,

    In accordance with the customs of their countries.

    The black pitch smoke of the burning of the bodies

    Arose up high and darkened the sky above.

    Three times in shining armor the grieving warriors

    Circled the burning pyres, three times on horseback,

    Ululating, weeping, as they rode.

    You could see how teardrops glistened on their armor.

    The clamor of their sorrowing voices and

    The dolorous clang of trumpets rose together

    As they threw into the melancholy fires

    Spoils that had been stripped from the Latins, helmets,

    And decorated swords, bridles of horses,

    And glowing chariot wheels, and with them, also,

    Shields and weapons of their own familiar

    Comrades, which had failed to keep them alive.

    Bodies of beasts were thrown into the fire,

    Cattle, and bristle-backed swine, brought from surrounding

    Fields to be sacrificed to the god of death.

    And all along the shore the soldiers watched

    The burning of the bodies of their friends,

    And could not be turned away until the dewy

    Night changed all the sky and the stars came out.

    Over there, where the Latins were, things were

    As miserable as this. Innumerable

    Scattered funeral pyres; many bodies

    Hastily buried in hastily dug-up earth,

    And many others, picked up from where they fell

    When they were slain, and carried back to the fields

    Which they had plowed and tilled before the fighting,

    Or back into the city where they came from;

    Others were indiscriminately burned,

    Unnamed, and so without ceremony or honor.

    The light of the burning fires was everywhere.

    On the third day when the light of day came back

    To show the hapless scene, they leveled out

    What was left of the pyres and separated what

    Was left of the bones, now cold and among cold ashes,

    And covered over the ashes and the bones.

    • • •

    Aurora interea miseris mortalibus almam

    extulerat lucem referens opera atque labores.

    This beautiful two-line sentence with which Virgil’s Latin introduces this passage from book 11 is definitive. It defines for us how we are to experience the telling of this heartbreaking scene; it is also, I believe, the definitive declaration of how to read the whole continuing enterprise of the poem, the accounting of what men have done and what has been done to them and what they must do to mourn, here and in every episode of the work.

    I love the way that opening line in the Latin ends with almam, which I translate as pitying, and the line therefore seems almost to embrace with its pity those sad, those suffering, those miserable mortals; and then after that embracing line, extulerat follows; the light is spreading, bringing forth still more about the wretchedness of the scene, bringing back to sight what the scene looks like, exposing it to our eyes in the pitying morning light, into which and against which the black pitch smoke rises and darkens the sky; and it’s by the light of the fires burning the bodies that we see, demanding a pity beyond pity, the tears on their armor, and hear their ululating cries of mourning.

    And over where the Latins are, the fire of the burning of the bodies is everywhere. The Trojans and the Latins are paired in their distress, though to be sure there are differences between the two scenes. Doleful, heart-struck as it is, the burning of the bodies of the Trojans and their Arcadian allies is also mournfully glorious, a desolate celebration of Pallas’s deeds. Here young Pallas is sent down to the Underworld with all the spoils his skills and his filial piety, piety owed to his father and to Aeneas as well, have earned. The trumpets’ music and the music of the soldiers’ ululation are sounding their praises; you can see the tears on their armor but the armor is shining; there is ceremony. Over there with the Latins there is almost none, and the pity that’s invoked is even more thoroughgoing in its implacable account of their haplessness. Mortals, alike and different, in the condition of their mortality.

    The terms, the vocabularies, in these great two lines—miseris mortalibus, referens, opera atque labores—in the grammar of the great sentence, tell us that what this wretched scene, so marvelously particularized, what the light of the morning and the light of the fires, showed on the particular moment is not just what’s true of these soldiers and these dead bodies, but also instances of what’s true of them, and of mortals, all of us, always. And so I believe these lines, this sentence, constitute a definition of Virgil’s poem and a demonstration of how it goes about its work.

    Miseris mortalibus

    Mortals, meaning subject to death, therefore means creatures, and therefore as created beings subject to chance, to the fates, to the favor and disfavor of the gods, and to the condition of not knowing for sure when they are favored by the gods and by which gods and when they are not; subject to winds, to floods, to plagues; and subject also to the rights and wrongs of their own natures, their loves, their kindness, their faithfulness to their fathers, their confusions and forgetfulness, and their own sometimes savage rage and their bloodlust. And so I translated miseris mortalibus as (taking the phrase from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65) sad mortality, the name of the condition itself, of being subject to death, to the partialities and contingencies and constraints of being human.

    Opera atque labores

    It is no accident that this phrase deliberately recalls the Latin title of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Opera et dies), or that Virgil says in his Georgics that he’s singing the songs of Hesiod in Roman towns, and is doing so again in the Aeneid, or that both poems narrate the dogged pursuit of their mortal aims within the contingent partializing powers and limitations of being mortal. Jupiter saw to it that the way should not be easy, and he did so, so that mortal men would develop arts to make their way with Labor omnia vincit: And everything was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need. David West excellently translates opera atque labores as their toils and sufferings, and I’ve translated it as what men have done, and what has been done to them. The relentless toil and sufferings are definitive of the condition of being mortal, in the Georgics as in the Aeneid.

    Referens

    The light is at sunrise, bringing back not only this terrible scene but also, not ferens but referens, bringing back to mind the stories that have been told before: for example, that other, so like this one, in book 23 of the Iliad, the burning of the body of Achilles’ Patroclus, with the bodies of the twelve captive Trojan young men, and the beasts offered up to the god of death. The consequences of the deaths of Patroclus and of Pallas are referentially there to the end of both poems and play their part in the imponderables of the conclusion. Of course, Virgil’s lines and the lines brought back from Patroclus’s funeral bring back many other things in both poems, but here they also bring back the crucial lines at the end of book 6 of the Aeneid, the lines about young Marcellus, the hope of Rome, in Anchises’ prophetic account of Augustus’s triumph and its promise of a stable, persisting city; and Marcellus dies a natural death, as if by chance or fate, unchallengingly, unexplainingly showing that he is mortal, that hope is mortal—Could it have been that you could have broken through / The confines of your unrelenting fate? So Rome itself is a mortal thing, as was Troy.

    And the pitying light brings the mortal scene back to sight, and doing so it brings back to sight all those other scenes in the Aeneid, and, referentially, all those in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which constitute the telling of the works and days of mortal men in the condition of their mortality. And I believe we are also meant to hear in referens the poem’s awareness that the scene is being brought back to the sight of the reader, who is in the condition of mortality and knows it, but knows it more vividly in the terms of the great sentence.

    On Meter

    As in my other translations from the Latin, I have not sought to use a dactylic hexameter instrument. In my view, the forward-propulsive character of English speech favors iambic pentameter, in which iambic events naturally dominate, with anapestic events as naturally occurring. One reason for this is that in English there are often so many articles and frequent prepositional structures; and also because, in English speech and grammar, adjectives normally occur before the noun they modify, and so their relationship is normally iambic or anapestic, even in prose. Trochaic events for various reasons frequently occur in the first metrical foot of the line, but very seldom in the second, third, fourth, or fifth feet. So in the pentameter rhythm of the poem, the strong syllable occurs as the strong stress in those feet in the continuing, guaranteeing, sovereign, rhythmic pulsing of the poem.

    Iambic pentameter arises most naturally from the characteristics of English grammar and syntax, and so I am using it here. Virgil’s dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter have in common that they have (not by accident) histories of being instruments of heroic writing, and that the internal structure of their metrical lines is capacious and welcoming—though responsive to different rules—to all sorts of expressive individuation. There is room for syntactical manipulation, room for—and a susceptibility to—tonal variation, variations in the degrees of pressure or emphasis on the weak syllables in the iambic feet and on the strong syllables as well, often subtle, sometimes introspective, while continuing to be regular iambic pentameter events. And at the same time, the amplitude and continuous regularity of the line is suitable to the grandeur of the sovereign rhythm of the whole, the lines in their regularity triumphantly reiterated across the twelve books, as its essential rhythm; and each new individual line is a new metrical event in the exploration of how the poem is to be heard. What is told in the poem is deeply moving and important, and it is a creation of the way it is told, in the metrical play of its meanings. That’s what’s true of Virgil’s metrical lines; the translator can only hope it can be true of his own.

    John Dryden, in his translation of the Aeneid, used rhyming couplets, the so-called heroic couplets. He did so for the music of the rhyming, but he also provided markers at the ends of the lines to make it clear that a new line was a new metrical event, as the line before it had been, and as the line after it was going to be, each line having its own way of having its own music, its own play of meanings, like and also different from the lines around it, though all of them were regular iambic pentameter. William Wordsworth said that there’s always something like a pause after each line in unrhymed verse, marking the fact that a new metrical event is conceding, and another new metrical event is beginning to happen. Readers should hear it this way. As they read the lines, their imagination should hear that this succession of events is going on. Maybe not exactly a pause, but an alerted active awareness that this is happening, as in listening to measured music, all in the play of meanings. As Samuel Johnson says, All the syllables of each line co-operate together . . . every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds.

    The black pitch smoke of the burning of the bodies

    Arose up high and darkened the sky above.

    One sentence, two lines, both iambic pentameter, telling a continuous story; in the first syllable the character (and the content) of the smoke, and the second, third, and fourth syllables are very strongly stressed, with an effect of concentration, perhaps horrified, and certainly pitying, concentration; black pitch smoke, black and smoke off-rhyming, and pitch contained within them in their rising column, a dark viscous substance, here perhaps ingredient of the bodies themselves. "The black pitch smoke, strongly concentrated, but in that second foot, pitch smoke, it’s still iambic, pitch being the adjective, smoke being its noun. And the last three feet, of the burning of the bodies, want us to hear with a kind of insistence that, yes, this is the case, the smoke is of the burning of the bodies; and burning and bodies alliterate intensifyingly with the b of black."

    The verb arose is the beginning of the second line, and it weirdly reminds us of the first line of the passage: Aurora rose, spreading her pitying light; this new line says, by its sense and by its structural similarity, that this is opposite, authoritatively bringing on the darkness, so that the pitiful story is now told by the light of the burning of the bodies. And the vocabulary of the line—arose and up and high; and high rhyming with sky, sky high, a distinct system of sounds—is continuous of the line before it, but with a variant music. Two iambic pentameter lines tell, in their continuances, the same story, the rising of the smoke, but each of them with a distinctive individuated truth-telling music.

    On the Translation

    Let me echo a statement I have made in connection with my earlier translations from Virgil’s Latin. I have tried to be as faithful as possible. English is, of course, not Latin, and I am most certainly not Virgil. Every act of translation is an act of interpretation, and every choice of English word or phrase, every placement of those words or phrases in sentences (made in obedience to the laws and habits of English, not Latin, grammar, syntax, and idioms), and every metrical decision (made in obedience to English, not Latin, metrical laws and habits), reinforces the differences between the interpretation and the original. This is true, however earnestly the interpretation aims to represent the sense of Virgil’s lines and, as best it can, some of the effects and implications of his figures of speech, the controlled variety and passions of his tones of voice. It is my hope that this translation, granting such differences between English and Latin, is reasonably close.

    Reasonably close, of course, is still far away, but the effort is to achieve a representation, in the lines as they move forward, line by line, telling the tale, some kind of kinship not only to the sense of the Latin but also to the expressive complexities of implicated discernment and emotion in the lines. As I’ve said in the Note on Meter above, Virgil’s explorative dactylic hexameter meters cannot be imitated, one-on-one, in English—at least not by me. The laws of his Latin syntax and grammar are too different from the laws of English grammar and syntax in my iambic pentameter meter, though it too is explorative by nature and capable of many subtleties and variations of discernment. Dryden himself said of his translation of the Aeneid that he had done great harm to Virgil. Every translator does, and should say so.

    But I think it is not out of order for me to say that completing this translation of the work of such a great poet means a great deal to me personally, since I have previously translated his Eclogues and his Georgics, and I am in love with his voice as I hear it in all these poems, telling how it is with all created beings, the very leaves on the trees, the very rooted plants, the beasts in the fields, the shepherds trying to keep their world together with song replying to song replying to song, the bees in their vulnerable hives, doing their work, the soldiers doing their work of killing and dying, the falling cities, and the kings and fathers, and their sons, and Dido, and Palinurus, and Deiphobus, and Mezentius the disrespecter of gods, and the mortal son of Venus, the creature Aeneas, carrying his household gods to build a city, heroic and vulnerable, himself subject to monstrous rage, himself not always unconfused. All of them, all of us, creatures, created beings, heroic and vulnerable, and Virgil’s voice telling it as it is, in his truth-telling pitying voice.

    Introduction: Virgil, Homer, and Augustus

    Richard F. Thomas (2022)

    To Imitate Homer

    This is Virgil’s intention, to imitate Homer and praise Augustus through his ancestors. That was how the ancient commentator Servius summed up the aim of the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem about the heroic origins of Rome, published in 19 BCE soon after the poet died. Indeed, the poem was put to good use by the emperor Augustus and his successors for several centuries as they transformed Rome into an imperial power. Being able to claim descent from the great Trojan warrior Aeneas was to burnish the profile and enhance the legitimacy of any emperor as he extended this power throughout the world. The complex details of the poem, and its implicit and explicit questioning of what it costs to create an empire, were not material to the uses required by Augustus and his successors. Those political needs are reflected by Servius’s comment; but praise of Augustus, or of any emperor, soon recedes for anyone who cares to read this great epic of Rome, which resonates in any time, alive beyond and without the rulers under whom it was produced.

    In addition to the fact that the Aeneid is Homeric through and through, it is also a staggeringly original poem, one that is modern in its own time and in ours, in Latin back then and here in the English poetic translation of David Ferry. The Iliad and Odyssey serve as tools that the poet wields in forming the poem, or licking it into shape, as he is said to have put it. The historian and biographer Suetonius, writing more than a century after the death of Virgil, tells that some of the poet’s readers had criticized Virgil for borrowing much material from Homer. His reported response has the ring of authenticity: Why don’t those people also try the same thefts? Then they will realize it’s easier to steal Hercules’ club from him than a single verse from Homer. Before the influential spread of Romantic notions about the primacy of poetic originality, all poetry to a greater or lesser degree dealt openly in reshaping inherited traditions as part of the compositional method. And in this process, as T. S. Eliot wrote in 1921, immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. By this Eliot seems to mean that mature poetry succeeds in stealing, appropriating, or making its own that from which it draws, and this is certainly the case with the Aeneid. It may be read purely on its own terms, without a thought to its Homeric models. But there are rich layers of meaning to be found in the Roman epic’s intertextuality and in the way that Virgil manipulates his Homeric material.

    This begins on the largest level, that of the structure of the poem. The first six books are generally referred to as the Odyssean Aeneid. They track the homecoming, getting us from the fall of Troy, narrated by Aeneas, down through the journey of exile across the Aegean Sea and eventually to the northern Bay of Naples at Cuma, by way of an unplanned, storm-driven, and consequential stop at Dido’s Carthage.

    Book 6 ends with Aeneas emerging from his tour of the Underworld, guided by the Sibyl, that occupies most of that book. This episode, utterly original in conception and detail, is rooted in Odysseus’s journey to the Underworld in book 11 of the Odyssey. Aeneid 6 is indebted to the Odyssey in precisely the same way that the Divine Comedy is indebted to Aeneid 6, which is one reason why Virgil is Dante’s guide through much of that poem. Virgil’s and Dante’s poems are both reception texts, but their source models are only the impulse for their individual and original genius. Moreover, the source text becomes an instrument for conveying meaning. So, for instance, the shade of Dido, who for the love of Aeneas had committed suicide at the end of Aeneid 4, famously rejects his entreaty and turns away (She fixed her gaze upon the ground, and turned / Away) in perhaps the most telling snub in all poetry, as it seemed to T. S. Eliot. Her action derives impact from the same action of the shade of Ajax in the Odyssey. Ajax was still indignant at the slight he had suffered from Odysseus in the land of the living that led to his own suicide. This is typical of the way Virgil uses the Homeric poems in constructing his own, Roman epic.

    Books 7–12 of the Aeneid trade the clash between Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad for that between Trojans and Italians. So, for instance, the prophetic Sibyl tells Aeneas in book 6 that Even now a new Achilles has been born, / In Latium. We encounter that unnamed new Achilles, in the form of the young Italian prince Turnus, at the beginning of book 7. But by the end of the poem, the Italian Turnus has, through a series of reversals, become the Trojan Hector. Just as Hector was killed by Achilles in the Iliad, Turnus is killed at the hands of Aeneas, who is revealed by the reversal of fortunes in the second half of the poem to be the true new Achilles of the epic. This inversion is encapsulated by a recurring Latin phrasing that frames the entire poem: limbs gone weak and chill to the bone is applied to Aeneas in book 1, there victim of Juno’s wrath-driven storm, and then to Turnus, victim of the anger of Aeneas, at the end of book 12.

    The Aeneid announces its Homeric identity from the beginning. I sing of arms and the man refers directly to the two Greek poems and the thematic words with which each begins: anger and man. Aeneas, the man of the Aeneid, corresponds to Odysseus, the man of the Odyssey. But the anger in the Aeneid differs from that in the Iliad, which is entirely shaped by the anger of Achilles and his withdrawal from battle and then by his eventual return to arms to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. And yet anger is also there for Virgil: specifically, Juno’s anger toward Aeneas and the Trojans comes not in the opening sentence but nonetheless dominates the end of the preface and presents the narrative from the perspective of the divine actions of the poem.

    The broader theme of arms is more appropriate for this poem’s beginning. The arms of the Greeks and Trojans appear in book 2, as Aeneas recounts the fighting in the streets of the dying Troy. Then there are the arms of the Trojans, Italians, and Etruscans in the second half of the poem, and in the background, for Virgil, the almost twenty years of the civil war that ended only two months before his fortieth birthday.

    The Homeric poems begin with invocations to the muse (Sing of the anger, goddess, Tell me of the man, Muse), natural in an oral poetic tradition, where one or another of the unnamed daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne) are enlisted to recall details of the song. Whether or not Virgil was aware of the realities and stylizations of orality that are behind Homeric composition, he is quite emphatic in his departure from that method. The literate and highly literary poet of the pastoral collection of ten Eclogues and of the Georgics, the poem that treats the struggle for existence in the age of iron that pervades its agricultural themes, signals the radical difference about his epic poem in the first sentence: "I sing of arms and the man" (arma virumque cano). In those words, there is a hint of pride and a comment on the nature of Virgilian, and Roman, poetry: in its modernity it is the work of the individual poet.

    Not that the Homeric stance disappears. Pointedly, the second sentence assumes the Homeric position as Virgil struggles to comprehend the enormity of the divine anger that will hound his hero. For that he needs the Muses, and that is where we find the Homeric opening, eight lines in, with a line that is both Homeric and deeply imbued with the poet’s own theological wonder: Muse, tell me the causes . . . can there be such anger in the hearts of the gods? The poet will also need the help of the Muses later, in book 7, when the Italian tribes are mustered for war against the Trojan invaders, involving myth-history going back a millennium from the poet’s time, and so beyond mere human memory: Sing the roster of / What kings have been aroused to battle . . . O goddesses, O muses, it is you / Who have it in your memory and can tell / The story (7.844–51). While the details are Virgil’s, he here sustains a fiction that looks back to the beginning of the catalog of the Greek warriors who came to take Troy: Tell me now, Muses, who have your homes on Olympus; for you are goddesses, are present, and know all things . . . who were the leaders and kings of the Greeks (Iliad 2. 484–87). We are meant to see the intertextual connection, to encounter the Homeric lines through the Virgilian.

    Among the many Homeric details large and small that Virgil steals from Homer and makes his own, a few examples will suffice. The shield that the goddess Thetis delivers to her son Achilles in Iliad 18 is engraved with elaborate scenes of the heavens and earth, bounded by the river of Ocean. Western literature’s first ekphrasis—a description of a work of art in literature—depicts cities, weddings and wedding song, political strife and warfare, agricultural scenes and scenes of ambush, shepherding, harvest, hunting, and dancing, and much else. Achilles will carry the shield, and the rest of the armor, into the battle in which he will kill Hector. So when at the end of Aeneid 8 we find Aeneas receiving a shield from his divine mother, Venus, we know things will not go well for his enemy Turnus, who will be killed four books later at the end of the poem. There the similarities cease.

    The shield Aeneas receives is prophetic, comprehensible to the Virgilian reader but a mystery to the Trojan hero, for whom the depictions, exclusively Roman, lie in the future of Roman history. The depictions of that history, beginning hundreds of years after the time of Aeneas, take both viewer and reader down through the glorious and bloody republic to the recently ended civil wars. The Battle of Actium is the centerpiece, along with the assumption of one-man rule by Caesar Augustus, which is where history had just culminated for Virgil. Roman readers would comprehend. When Achilles saw his arms, not just the shield, he was filled with anger and rejoiced in the gift of the gods. There is a world of difference in the response of the Virgilian hero, and it is in difference that meaning establishes itself—no anger, just admiration, but more than that: Although he did not know / The meaning of what he saw, he took upon / His shoulders the fame and fate of his descendants (8.977–79). This brings out the subjective style that is a part of the Roman poem and that distinguishes it from its Homeric models, particularly the Iliad. We see the joy of its hero but also his puzzlement as he goes out on a mission whose objectives, the founding and the very existence of Rome, we can see but he cannot.

    Aeneid 5 artfully disrupts the symmetrical perfection of the poem’s division into Odyssean and Iliadic. That is where we find the funeral games for Aeneas’s father, Anchises—Virgil’s response to the games at the pyre of Patroclus that occupy most of Iliad 23. Some of the contests Virgil takes on from the Homeric model; others are distinct, and distinctly Romanized. So where Achilles ordained a chariot race, Aeneas holds a ship race off the coast of western Sicily. This event resonates with the final and decisive battle of the First Punic War, the Battle of the Aegates in which the Roman fleet defeated the Carthaginian navy in 241 BCE in precisely this same area of the Mediterranean. The ships are also given names that echo old republican Roman families, suggesting a connection from the poem back through Roman history. But even here Homer does not disappear. The Iliad’s chariot race peeps through the Virgilian text in a simile that exemplifies the start of the ship race, as Virgil fleetingly borrows from or steals the Homeric theme: The rush of the two-horse chariots as they burst / Out of their stalls and race across the fields / Is nothing to this (5.202–4).

    A third example takes us away from Homer and toward some of the many other authors and genres, Greek and Roman, that are part of the intertextual tradition within which Virgil works in the Aeneid. We find tragedy, Greek lyric, and particularly Hellenistic poetry, which gave rise to personal poetry in Rome and continues down to our own day. While an episode in Iliad 10 serves as the source model for a night raid in Aeneid 9, there are distinct differences in the treatment. In the Iliad, the Greek heroes Odysseus and Diomedes carry out a successful night raid on the camp of the Thracian king Rhesus, ally of the Trojans, outside the city. The episode in Aeneid 9 involves a less famous and very different pair of comrades, the older warrior Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus, whom we first encounter as competitors in the foot race of Aeneid 5, and whose raid will end in the death of the pair. The latent erotic nature of the relationship is brought out by the response of Nisus to the death of his young friend and by a highly erotic simile. Euryalus is compared to a flower cut by a plow or battered by the rain. The simile emerges from a less loaded one in the Iliad but is mostly informed and vitalized by Catullus (ca. 94–54 BCE) in his parting shot to Lesbia, the lover on whom he turns his back: let her not look for my love, which through her fault has fallen like the flower on the edge of the meadow, nicked by a passing plow. This is but one way in which the interest in love poetry, inherited from Sappho and others and expanded through various genres by the Hellenistic poets of the third century BCE and their avant-garde Roman successors, like Catullus, transforms the Homeric essence of Virgil’s epic. Later traditions used the Achilles-Patroclus friendship as a basis for an eroticized warrior friendship, even if such implications are absent from the Iliad itself. That is in the nature of intertextuality: to transform the source text in a variety of ways. This transformation is a central part of Virgil’s poetics.

    Drawing from Hellenistic Greek poetry and the generation of Roman poets who preceded him, Virgil crafted the tragedy of Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage. Dido kills herself at the end of her Book 4, in part out of unrequited love for Aeneas. Virgil draws on an episode from a masterpiece of Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (200s BCE). There the young Medea, wounded by Cupid’s arrow, falls in love with the hero, Jason, motivating the action of the last two books of the Argonautica. So it was that a detailed love story was admitted as a central component of the genre of Greek epic inherited by Virgil, who then drew also from a mini-epic of Catullus, Poem 64, to transform the story of the life and death of Dido into a unique new chapter in literary history. Along with the poet Ovid’s adaptation in his Letters of Heroines (Heroides 7), Virgil’s innovation enjoyed a rich reception in art, literature, and music for the next two millennia.

    To Praise Augustus through His Ancestors

    Praising Augustus through his ancestors was how Servius described the poem, because that is what he had been taught about it. Servius lived at the end of almost four hundred years of emperor worship during which the Aeneid had held an unrivaled place in the curriculum, even more so than Shakespeare has for the last four hundred in the West. Who was Augustus? The grand-nephew, adoptive son, and heir of Julius Caesar, Gaius Octavianus, renamed Caesar Augustus in 27 BCE as the Aeneid was getting under way, had been most responsible for finalizing the transition from republic to monarchy. He defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battles of Actium and Alexandria (31 and 30 BCE), and the ensuing suicides of these his last substantial enemies left him the last warlord standing, as it has been well put.

    Nineteen years earlier, Julius Caesar had taken the fateful step of crossing the Rubicon (49 BCE) thinking he was about to be prosecuted by senatorial elites uneasy with the power he wielded, power bred of colossal military success and wealth gleaned from his genocidal campaigns in Gaul. In leaving his legal, senatorially assigned province, he was held to have declared war on Rome. Virgil was twenty-one years old when this all began, and these are the years that formed him—at Pharsalus, Philippi, and Actium—uncertain like his countrymen whether the republican system would be restored, and similarly uncertain about which of the competing dynasts would endure, Octavian or Antony. This uncertainty is reflected in the mysterious identities and masks of the Eclogues, published in the early to mid-30s BCE, and in the mix of light and shadow of the Georgics, published in 29 after the Battle at Actium, but largely written before the clarity that emerged after that watershed moment.

    As recent scholars have seen, some of the ambiguities and shadows of the Aeneid, which contribute to its greatness as a poem, may no longer be read or taught as Servius read and taught them. The political outlook of the Aeneid has been contested across the years, particularly after World War II. This is not the place to reprise that contestation. The ambiguities noted are natural consequences for a poet formed by the uncertainties of his youthful and mature years. Virgil, along with Horace and others, was supported by Gaius Maecenas, first minister of Octavian in the 30s, but it would be a mistake to interpret this as active direction by Octavian, Maecenas, or anyone else. Horace’s Secular Hymn of 17 BCE—the only commissioned poem of these years—is a notable exception,

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