The Aeneid
Virgil (Everyman's Library; trans. Robert Fitzgerald, 1983)

510 pp. First reading.
Posted 24 August 2006.


Recently I acquired a copy of a new translation of The Divine Comedy, and I am itching to delve into it.  I thought, though, that before taking Dante as my guide on that long and splendid journey again, I should back up and read the work of the man whom Dante himself took for a guide. It is embarassing, of course, to admit that I am thirty years old and still have not read Virgil -- apart from some minor poems -- but then the nature of such embarassment is that there is a simple remedy.

As I read, I learned that my ignorance of Virgil was even deeper than I had supposed; I realized that I did not know what his Aeneid was about. I know that Virgil is considered the second great epic poet of the West, but I did not realize the extent to which his poem is self-consciously in the tradition of the first great epic poet. Kierkegaard wrote a book called The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates; Virgil might well have titled his poem The Aeneid, with Constant Reference to Homer. Not only do many episodes in Homer find echoes and analogues in this poem, but the story itself is the mirror image, as it were, of The Odyssey. They both launch from the sack of Troy, but whereas Homer follows the victorious Greeks as they return home, Virgil follows the defeated Trojans as they seek a new homeland in which to found a new city. The city turns out to be Rome, and The Aeneid is essentially a great founding myth for the Roman Empire.  Perhaps this is common knowledge to everyone, but it was news to me.

We join the story in media res, Aeneid and his men having been blown off course on their journey and landed at Carthage in North Africa. There they are feasted at the court of Dido, and Aeneid relates, in verse that is grippingly dramatic, the backstory of the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy. Sent into exile, they endure various hardships and adventures before washing up at Carthage. (One amusing episode has them land on the island of the Cyclops. A Greek comes rushing unexpectedly out to meet them, begging them to take him on board. This, it turns out, is a sailor left behind by Odysseus when he visited the island a few weeks before! (Odyssey, IX)) During the telling of this tale Dido falls in love with Aeneas, but when he insists that the gods have destined him for other things, she commits suicide. This tragic love story forms one of the more satisfying sub-plots in the poem.

Pressing on toward Italy, they eventually make landfall, but despite their intentions to build a new city and live in peace, their neighbours, inflamed by the ill will of Juno, march to war against them.  The entire second half of the poem is devoted to this war, and the poem ends abruptly when Aeneas at last kills his rival, Turnus:


So much for Turnus.

A main question on my mind when I began The Aeneid was why Dante had chosen Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory.  Was it simply a matter of one great poet seeking guidance from his greatest exemplar, or was there a more specific reason?  When I came to Book VI, which relates the journey of Aeneas to the underworld in search of his father, chills began running up and down my spine. Suddenly it was as though I were seeing Dante's epic through a glass darkly.  The very particular atmosphere of that Book is uncannily similar to that of Dante's poem, and I am sure that it must have been Dante's model.

I understand that Virgil's reknown rests in large part on his command of the Latin language. My Latin, alas, is not strong enough for me to appreciate this aspect of his art. Nor can I critique the technical merits of Robert Fitzgerald's translation. But I can say that, as an English rendering, it was readable and enjoyable.

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