Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Aeneid
    The Aeneid
    The Aeneid
    Ebook843 pages8 hours

    The Aeneid

    By Virgil, David Ferry and Richard F. Thomas

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.

    Read more from Virgil

    Related authors

    Related to The Aeneid

    Related ebooks

    Ancient History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Aeneid

    4/5

    2,622 ratings57 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5

      Oct 27, 2019

      Propaganda literature, written with political and moral aims, in imitation of Greek models, and so is inferior art.
    • 4/5

      Oct 27, 2019

      Love this translation, especially the beginning.
    • 3/5

      Feb 24, 2019

      The Trojan Odyssey. Interesting for how it has carried down even until today.
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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.
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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

      Dec 20, 2018

      Read this rather hurriedly and when lots of other things were going on in my life.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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.
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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!
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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).
    • 5/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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.
    • 5/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      Boy, I really liked this.
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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.
    • 5/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      Even though "pious" Aeneas isn't as clever or as entertaining as wiley Odysseus, he's still pretty cool.
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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

      Dec 20, 2018

      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

      Dec 20, 2018

      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.
    • 5/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      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

      Dec 20, 2018

      A bit slow, but it certainly follows the whole "odyssey" thing.
    • 2/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      I prefer Homer.
    • 5/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      poetic and lyrical all the way through. the weaving of the words is beautiful and apart. from the story they. The story is inspirsing and heart break. It was a stroke. of genius to give Romans their çreation epic (in copy of the Greeks witheir Homer epics The Iliead & The Odessey....Virgil's Abridge countinues the story of one defeated. Trojan General and prince who was under order orders from the gods to seek his "new kingdom" by the Tiber river in the strategic place perfect for a city to be born and control the Italian peninsula. SO....ONE OF THSE LAST STANDING TROJAN NOBLEMAN IS ANEAS..,.SON OF APHRODITE AND LEGENDARY FOUNDER OF ROME ACCORDING TO THIS EPIC POEM.
    • 2/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      Read in college in the late 60s. Much prefer the Mandlebaum translation. The Day-Lewis translation too often goes in for phrasing that was probably in vogue with the English public schools of the 20's: Lachrymae rerum (I, 445-475) awkwardly translated as "Tears in the nature of things." From Book 1, 340-341: ""a long and labyrinthine tale of wrong is hers, *but I will touch upon its salient points in order."" Book 2:: Pyrrhus is "crazed with blood-lust" and Anchisis "flatly refused to prolong his life." "Ye gods prevent these threats! Ye gods avert this calamity." Stale phrases from Book 4: "his trusty wand," ""Got wind of what was going to happen." "It has come to this!" "I must have been mad!" "Jump to it, men!." "they cut and ran for it." The Aeneid is a great epic poem; other translations do justice to it; the Day Lewis translation does not.
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      A classic - it is what it is. I had never studied this in college, so looked forward to reading one of the foundations of classic literature. For a modern reader, it was a slog - especially the battle scenes which listed every person killed, their back story and the gory detail of how they died. I got a little tired of vomiting blood and meddling gods. What I did appreciate was the context of the piece. It's basically a paean to Augusta Caesar by telling the family myth of illustrious and goddess-born ancestors therefore legitimizing Julius Caesar's and Augusta's own deifications. Virgil also manages to highlight a few other powerful men and their roots among the Aeneas' followers. I'm afraid I can't comment on the quality of the translation, but I found it readable.
    • 2/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      Not sure why, but I just wasn't enjoying listening to this one. Odd for something that's supposed to be read aloud! Maybe the narrator?
    • 3/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      A bit of a slog. Much harder to get through than Odyssey, less poignant than Illiad. Still, the section on Dido was moving and the bit in Book 6 (?) about the Queen of the Latins was worth the price of admission.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      Virgil deals with war and peace, love and hate, gods and men, historic fact and pure fancy. Aeneis escapes from fallen Troy and founds Rome.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      Sometimes you just enjoy the book.
    • 5/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      I remember Joy de Menil telling me that the first six chapters of the Aeneid were great but the last six were unreadable and merited skipping. It took me another twenty years to get around to reading it and I largely agree with Joy -- although I found some parts to like in the second half.

      The first six books are Odyssey-like and recount Aeneas' travels from the fall of Troy, through a variety of islands, to Carthage. It begins in media res (not sure of the Latin of this) with the gods fighting about the treatment of Aeneas. Within the first pages the narrator rushes to inform us that the book will culminate in the triumph of Rome, a theme it returns to somewhat didactically throughout.

      Following the opening book, is a second book with an extraordinary and largely self-contained flashback to the fall of Troy, including Aeneas' bitter recriminations about the decision to bring the wooden horse into the city walls and some moving scenes with the ghost of his wife who got separated from him in the shuffle. The tragedy of Dido and Aeneas is another largely self-contained book in the first half.

      The journey's forward momentum begins with Aeneas' trip to the underworld to see his dead father (not quite as dramatic as one might have hoped). This is followed by the second half of the epic, which is an Iliad-like accounting of the Trojans' war with the Latins, a conflict that is even more pointless than the Trojan War because the leaders of both sides both see the same peaceful solution but repeatedly get driven apart by Juno and her minions.

      Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, most of the stories and characters in the second half of the Aeneid were completely unfamiliar to me. I don't think I had ever heard of Latinus, Turnus, Amata, Lavinia or Evander -- all characters that loom large in the epic war that Virgil describes. That is in stark contrast to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Paris, Helen, Priam, Hector, Odysseus, Patrcolus, the Ajaxes, Achilles, and the many other familiar characters that populate The Iliad. I think it is largely because of this that the second half is so much less engaging and dramatic (or it could be that all of these figures are less familiar because the second half is less engaging and dramatic).

      Regardless, certainly not something anyone should miss reading, even if you wait another twenty years from now.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      The epic poem of Aeneas who escaped from Troy, wandered the Mediterranean for years and eventually triggered the founding of Rome. Virgil presents a vivid tale, filled with heroic adventures largely for the purpose of giving Romans a legitimate claim to an ancient heritage that could rival the Greeks, to whom they felt culturally envious.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      He got there in the end, did Aeneas. Battered in Troy, he overcame all that was before him on the way to Rome. Dido turned out to be very aggrieved. The last six books overdid the blood and gore. Poor Turnus was slain. The word emulously recurred and the earth groaned and moaned a lot. Super journey, however; we all make these journeys but with less excitement and spillage of limbs and blood. Not sure what Virgil would have thought of just a 4 star rating.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2018

      I really enjoy Fitzgerald's translation... I think he hit a home run on this one, although I'm not as hot on his Homeric translations. The Everyman's Library edition is quite an attractive one as well. As for the Aeneid, it's a fine tale of love and war, an interesting bit of propaganda, and some nice poetry. Those interested in Vergil as alchemist, rather than as author, should check out Avram Davidson's novels (particularly The Phoenix and the Mirror).

    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,

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1