the aeneid virgil translated by robert fitzgerald

On the other hand, I'd argue that the poem's characterizations are more compelling than has usually been admitted. But there's no denying that successive battlefield scenes are, by their very nature, wearying - or that the poem does bog down in unvaried repetitions on Aeneas's mission and Rome's destiny. The final four books, covering Aeneas's landing in Italy, his series of campaigns against its several tribes, and his climactic single combat with the famed military commander Turnus are frequently engrossing. Several centuries after Virgil, it became the impetus for Dante's ''Inferno.'' And the splendid Book VI is a richly imagined, brilliantly lit tapestry of drama and idea, in which Aeneas travels to the underworld and receives a philosophical explanation of the workings of the universe, and hears a detailed prophecy of the founding of Rome. Book IV describes Aeneas's brief stay in the North African kingdom of Carthage, his romance with its widowed queen, Dido, and the desperate rage which drives her to suicide when the wanderer, faithful to his mission, wanders on. It contains, moreover, two justly famous long set pieces.

Storms at sea, encounters with Harpies and Cyclopes, and graphically described battles are the matter of this poem. Its 12 books tell of the forced wanderings of the Trojan hero Aeneas (son of the goddess Venus and the mortal Anchises) after the fall of Troy how he survived the wrath of the goddess Juno (who favored Troy's enemies, the Achaeans), and, after a series of demanding adventures, fulfilled a prophecy that he would lead his uprooted people to a new home and there found an empire - what would become the home of Augustus.

Such readers feel ''The Aeneid'' never achieves the degree of life Homer breathed into virtually all of his battling, scheming heroes and villains.įor me, ''The Aeneid'' is, on balance, a dramatic and colorfully varied work. Many have felt that Virgil's adulatory ''history'' of the founding of Rome bores readers with its partisan insistency and its focus on a hero who is really little more than a political-ethnic idea. ''The Aeneid,'' left all but completed at Virgil's death in 19 BC, might seem a strange choice, for it has long been out of favor with modern readers, perhaps ever since scholar Edith Hamilton drew a distinction between the stylistic purity and narrative economy of the ''classical'' epic (Homer's) and the exaggerated rhetoric and loose sweep of the ''romantic'' (Virgil's). Well known for his vigorous and plainspoken English verse versions of Homer's ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey,'' poet Robert Fitzgerald now becomes the first writer to have translated all three major epics of ancient Greece and Rome.

The aeneid virgil translated by robert fitzgerald