Aeneid, opening lines (Robert Fitzgerald translation) The Aeneid (Robert Fitzgerald translation) by VirgilĮxpelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore” Foreign Policy & International Relations.The Cambridge Companion is up-to-date and dabbles in theory Domenico Comparetti's 1872 Virgil in the Middle Ages is a wonderful piece of history Theodore Ziolkowski's passionate Virgil and the Moderns brings to life his influence on Eliot, Auden and Gide. Recommended biographyĪelius Donatus's fourth-century biography (not to be taken as fact) Virgil: His Life and Times by Peter Levi. See also the wonderful human portrait in Dante's Inferno and the extraordinary post-Joycean Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch, which imagines the poet's last 18 hours. Virgil's influence saturates English poetry: high points of inspiration include Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's Laodamia and Tennyson's To Virgil. Rome looked to Greece for inspiration and Virgil's works were all imitative: the Eclogues (Theocritus's pastorals), the Georgics (Hesiod's commonplace book Works and Days), the Aeneid (Homer's Iliad). The Aeneid (Robert Fitzgerald translation), the Georgics, the Eclogues Influences

Cecil Day-Lewis's mid-century translations of the Georgics and Aeneid are worth reading.

Of the many translations, there is a mad Renaissance Scots version by Gavin Douglas, Dryden's adaptation has stood the test of time, William Morris's cod-medieval one hasn't, and Robert Fitzgerald's is accessible and fast-moving. The extent to which the Aeneid can be read as Augustan propaganda is much debated, and disturbs some readers. The metre remains the same, but the recitation moves from court singing to (possibly private) reading or speech. With Aeneas, Virgil took a character from Homer's Iliad and produced a myth of origins for Rome and a triumphal dynasty for Augustus. If Homer is communal legend, Virgil is self-conscious, individual and politicised. His Messianic Eclogue, written in 40BC, predicts the birth of a child who will return the world to the Golden Age and uses imagery reminiscent of the Bible (possibly drawing on Sibylline sources) - causing Virgil to be heralded as a Christian prophet and given a starring role in the Divine Comedy as Dante's guide through hell. Other jobsĮarly sources report his learning and wisdom as leading to patronage from the emperor Augustus there's a legend that he argued a case before judges only once, because his speaking voice was so slow and apparently uncultured. According to Aelius Donatus, his studies concentrated on medicine and mathematics.

The aeneid robert fitzgerald online