Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007
'Let Virgil Be Virgil'
By Hayden N. Pelliccia
The Aeneid
by Virgil, translated from the Latin by Robert Fagles, with anintroduction by Bernard Knox
Viking, 486 pp., $40.00
Aeneid
by Virgil, translated from the Latin by Stanley Lombardo, with anintroduction by W.R. Johnson
Hackett, 355 pp., $34.95; $9.95 (paper)
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are the holy trinity of classical European epic, and Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo, with their recent versions of the Aeneid, have translated all three. But the Aeneid is very different from the other two. The Homeric poems report from a misty prehistoric past: we don't know who Homer was or even if he existed, the historical actuality of the Trojan War is a perennial subject of dispute, and the ancients could not say for sure to what island home his celebrated homecoming brought Odysseus, even if we think we can.[1] The Greek epics have always been comparatively free of historical setting; by the time they emerged in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE the Mycenaean world they purported to depict had long been gone. What the classical Greeks knew of that world they knew from Homer, which means that Homer's version of people and events enjoyed, as it still does, the definitiveness of fiction or myth: the legitimacy of the Iliad's representation of King Agamemnon as an arrogantly boorish fool is not subject to revision in light of new evidence about any real historical Agamemnon, who might to our surprise turn out to have been, say, a wise and lovable commander, and husband, too.
Review, 4726 words
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