Volume 46, Number 18 · November 18, 1999
Virgil the Great
By Bernard Knox
Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid
by Michael C.J. Putnam
Yale University Press, 257 pp., $35.00
Virgil: His Life and Times
by Peter Levi
St. Martin's, 248 pp., $27.95
Virgil's Experience: Nature and History; Times, Names, and Places
by Richard Jenkyns
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 712 pp., $80.00
Virgil was a perfectionist. Among the few items in the highly unreliable biographical tradition that have a ring of truth are his remark that he created a poem like a she-bear, gradually licking it into shape, and the report that as he lay dying at Brindisi in 19 BC, he ordered his executors to destroy the manuscript of his major work, the Aeneid, because it lacked a final revision (an order, fortunately, countermanded by Augustus). Virgil had lived only fifty-one years, but, in spite of his slow rate of composition (seven years for the 2,183 lines of the Georgics), he left the huge legacy of three works that contain close to 16,000 hexameter lines.
Review, 7617 words
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