Virgil had Homer strongly in mind, but was too great a writer to be subservient. In the matter of differences between Virgil and Homer much can be said.

Such terrible grief kept breaking from her heartĪs Aeneas slept in peace on his ship’s high stern.Īs a romantic hero Aeneas fails to keep his end up. Virgil allows him to feel remorse on a ‘told but not shown’ basis, but after a long, bitter, and affecting lament by Dido, Virgil says this: In the matter of Dido he acts very poorly even allowing for the fact that he is obeying the will of the gods. Consequently Aeneas has many of the qualities of a good horse but few of an intelligent and interesting man. Virgil foregrounded his intentions of celebrating the consolidation of the troubled Roman world under the emperor Augustus, and it is this that in a sense takes the place of the kind of hero that we know from Homer. Rereading The Aeneid reminds me that Aeneas is rather hopeless. On the topic of translations it should be well considered that that of Dryden is still green and always recommendable. The sportscaster voice that describes the funeral games for Anchises is appropriate and amusing, but elsewhere it calls attention to itself for no purpose. This slangy approach to the lives of the Olympians strikes an unusual note, a note that recurs frequently.

Later he translates ‘haud cessabit’ as ‘She won’t sit tight.’ The speaker is Venus and she is speaking of Juno. He also supplies a ‘my’ that is absent in the original. His Pallas becomes Fagles’s Minerva although Fagles uses Pallas elsewhere. Virgil chose words that gave his Latin verses a strong resemblance to Greek. Virgil writes:Īrgivum, atque ipsos potuit submergere pontoĪnd yet Minerva could burn the fleet to ash Virgil began The Aeneid in the most striking way he could manage and a line or two from near the opening becomes eminently suitable for comparison of the original with Fagles’s translation. I am not a Latinist but I have over the years immersed myself in Latin texts and have a little knowledge of the problems that Fagles faced. This is a handsome book and sturdily constructed with a ribbon bookmark. The backmatter has an afterword by the translator, notes to Virgil’s text, and a pronunciation guide. The introduction by Bernard Knox compares favorably to the introduction that he provided for Fagles’s translations of Homer. Lattimore’s translation will take you, I find, to the exact same line in Homer, but his sturdy honesty loses against the imagination and color of Fagles. Robert Fagles is the well known, much applauded, if somewhat controversial, translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey. A friend who knows Greek gave me a slight scolding for preferring Fagles’s translation to that of Richard Lattimore.

The aeneid robert fagles