The Aeneid: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
By Virgil, Robert Fagles and Bernard Knox
3.5/5
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Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles’ mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love affair, and lure him into the world of the dead itself--all the way tormented by the vengeful Juno, Queen of the Gods. Ultimately, he reaches the promised land of Italy where, after bloody battles and with high hopes, he founds what will become the Roman empire. An unsparing portrait of a man caught between love, duty, and fate, the Aeneid redefines passion, nobility, and courage for our times. Robert Fagles, whose acclaimed translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were welcomed as major publishing events, brings the Aeneid to a new generation of readers, retaining all of the gravitas and humanity of the original Latin as well as its powerful blend of poetry and myth. Featuring an illuminating introduction to Virgil’s world by esteemed scholar Bernard Knox, this volume lends a vibrant new voice to one of the seminal literary achievements of the ancient world.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Virgil
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was an ancient Roman poet who wrote during the reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. In addition to his epic poem Aeneid, Virgil’s Ecolgues (Bucolics) and Georgics are recognized as major works of Latin literature, and have been studied, adapted, imitated, and copied by later poets and scholars. Virgil’s poetry has also had a lasting influence on Western literature, inspiring countless works including Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Virgil guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory.
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Reviews for The Aeneid
31 ratings30 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Probably my favourite epic. Aeneas' sense of duty is more resonant with me than Odysseus' trickery.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Boy, I really liked this.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Not sure why, but I just wasn't enjoying listening to this one. Odd for something that's supposed to be read aloud! Maybe the narrator?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Although it is a classic and beautiful epic poem, I think the translation takes a lot away from what the original could be. After awhile hearing the repetitive use of words such as train, main, fate, state, began to get old. Also, knowing that it is pretty much a rip off of the Iliad and Odyssey with just a swap of Greeks for Trojans in what is just an attempt to say "Hey, those Trojans weren't so bad after all" made it almost unbearable. The swap also made it hard to follow since all the gods were identified with Roman names instead of Greek which was confusing at times.It is a good classic to read but I think I'll stick to the Greeks.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I’m torn on the concept of Virgil continuing the Homeric tradition, which was at least 800 years old by the time he came around. On the one hand, it was an homage and The Aeneid is a classic in its own right, telling the tale of Aeneas’ wanderings from Troy to Italy after the Trojan War, and his victories in battle there over the Latins, essentially making it foundation mythology for the Romans. One thing I didn’t like is a fact of the culture, that the Romans converted all the Greek Gods and mythology to their own names, which I have a perhaps silly philosophical objection to. Worse is the less than straightforward way of referring to people or places in the narrative, it makes reading the book harder; I was regularly going into Fitzgerald’s glossary (e.g. Orcus = underworld/Hades; Pelides=Achilles; Ausonia=Italy; Elissa=Dido, etc etc).The first six books of The Aeneid are along the lines of the Odyssey, and contain my favorite parts: Book II, “How They Took the City”, which tells of the use of the Trojan horse, Book IV, “The Passion of the Queen”, which has Aeneas breaking Dido’s heart leading to her suicide, and Book VI, “The World Below”, which has Aeneas descending into the Underworld (but does this last one sound familiar?). The last six book are along the lines of the Iliad, and get a little nationalistic, with allusions to Augustus Caesar, Antonius (Marc Antony), and others … and this was of less interest to me.Certainly readable but can’t touch The Odyssey.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Several reviews characterize The Aeneid as a slog and I agree. Compared to The Iliad and Odyssey it definitely is a more difficult story to get through. Partly for its self-aggrandizement of the Roman people and foundation, partly for its huge chunks of backstory and wild justification, but mostly for the insufferable gods and goddesses. Oh my head that was painful. Everyone it seems has a stake in Aeneas’s fate, but of course they are almost all at odds with each other and none seem to know what the others were doing. Every once in a while Zeus/Jove/Jupiter gets involved and lackadaisically makes a decision, but for the most part Venus and Juno get to butt heads and see who can mess with the participants the most in order to fulfill her ends.To some degree it’s a foregone conclusion since Vergil is writing this epic to give validation and divine permission to Augustus (his patron) and the Claudian and Julian families for crushing the life out of the Roman Republic. That means that Aeneas has to be perfect. Noble. Brave. Clear-sighted. Righteous. Determined. Bor-ring! There wasn’t enough humanity about Aeneas for me to connect with him. He was the correct embodiment of all that Roman Patrician families strive for in their men and he came off robot-like and stilted. Give me the much-maligned Odysseus any day.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I liked The Aeneid. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure read, but I liked it in the way you like arduous things (and by arduous I mean reading all 300+ pages of epic prose in 3 days) once they’re over. If you’ve ever read Grapes of Wrath maybe you know what I’m talking about. There were a lot of slow parts, many of which involved an excess of names, but there were also plenty of gripping parts that had me actually forgetting to watch the page numbers tick by as slowly as the minutes. For example, the last four books are almost entirely devoted to one long, drawn out, dramatic, and incredibly visceral battle scene. I may have cringed at least once a page, but I certainly wasn’t bored! Two Sentence Summary: After the sack of Troy, Aeneas escapes with a group of Trojan warriors and sets out for the shores of Italy, where he will found New Troy (aka Rome). He must first overcome the obstacles of a vindictive meddling goddess, and then conquer the land destined to become a great empire.I’m guessing most of you have heard of The Aeneid. And maybe you’ve heard whisperings of comparisons to The Odyssey. Maybe some have you have even read it. If you a) haven’t and b) have read The Odyssey and didn’t loathe it, I recommend The Aeneid as a good companion read. It’s an excellent microcosmic example that for all the energy the Romans put into dissing the Greeks, they put at least as much or more into imitating (and in their minds, improving on) them. Naturally it’s chock full of meaty themes as well, like the conflict between duty and desire, the martyrdom of present happiness for future greatness, learning what to let go of and when, the ephemerality of human life and connection, the entanglement of place and identity... the list goes on. And Virgil wasn’t kidding around. He knew his way around a vivid description (see: incredibly visceral battle scene). I’ve never read such inventive – and numerous – descriptions of dawn. They put Homer’s lovely, if repetitive, “rosy-fingered dawn” to shame. And that’s pretty much Virgil’s goal in a nutshell: outdo Homer. Whether he succeeds or not is up to you.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Even though "pious" Aeneas isn't as clever or as entertaining as wiley Odysseus, he's still pretty cool.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A classic - it is what it is. I had never studied this in college, so looked forward to reading one of the foundations of classic literature. For a modern reader, it was a slog - especially the battle scenes which listed every person killed, their back story and the gory detail of how they died. I got a little tired of vomiting blood and meddling gods. What I did appreciate was the context of the piece. It's basically a paean to Augusta Caesar by telling the family myth of illustrious and goddess-born ancestors therefore legitimizing Julius Caesar's and Augusta's own deifications. Virgil also manages to highlight a few other powerful men and their roots among the Aeneas' followers. I'm afraid I can't comment on the quality of the translation, but I found it readable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Aeneas is the son of a goddess. His wife is dead. His home is destroyed because someone decided to run away with the wife of a Greek King named Helena. A prophecy is guiding him to Latium, an area of Italy where his descendants will become the greatest empire of mankind. But first, there is an epic that has to happen.The story is not entirely unlike The Odyssey. There are some parallels, and there are some things that are put in to place to basically say, "This is happening at the same time" because it is.Suicidal queens, vengeful royalty, and large sea voyages are abound in this epic tale.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Aeneid is one of those staples of an education in Latin with which I was acquainted during my high school and college years, but only from a translation standpoint. In other words, I would be assigned to translate passages from The Aeneid as homework, but never really read the epic in its entirety until now.I love poetry, but epic poetry is something I've never quite been able to wrap my head around. I think it's because, with epic poetry, it's so much about the story and so little (In many cases) about the symbolism that I run into trouble. The conventions of the poetic form make it difficult to follow what would be, in prose, a normal sentence over several lines. By the time I get to the end of a "sentence" in an epic, I've lost the entire meaning of the thought because of the twists and turns of the poetic dialogue.So, basically, this was a bit of a slog for me.Keeping in mind that, in both Greek and Roman mythology, the gods and goddesses are petty and vengeful and really, really like to indulge their whims, I really thought Juno was spot-on. She was upset that Paris chose Venus as the best goddess (That's such a reductive way to state this, but there you have it), so she decided to take it out on Aeneas. However, she didn't really take into account that Aeneas would be protected by some other gods and goddesses, so she just ended up killing a bunch of people close to Aeneas without ever really being able to touch him. I guess that's the "Hurting those closest to your target hurts more than actually hurting your target" theory of vengeance.Aeneas is one of those characters that ran kind of hot and cold with me. At times, he seemed to be the heroic, noble founder of Rome from legends. At other times, he was kind of boring. For being the title character of this epic, I found him pretty blah.I did find myself, during battle scenes, grimacing quite often whenever someone was slashed/impaled/beheaded/what-have-you, as Vergil was quite fond of the term "gore" and all that went with it ("Thick gore," "thick black gore," "clotted gore" -- You get the idea). Much more effective than a lengthy description of blood spurting several feet from a decapitated trunk, if you ask me.Overall, I liked The Aeneid well enough to see why it's a classic in higher education. However, for those of you squeamish of epic poetry, I'd suggest finding either a prose version (I'm sure they exist somewhere) or a version that offers summaries of each of the books.My rating: 7/10
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In what you'll recognize as a classic "reading group review" (if you've been paying attention . . . and why would you be?), some thoughts from The Aeneid Week 1:-I haven't been this excited about a reread in a long time.-Indeed, what is fate here? That which must be? The desultorily enforced whim of Zeus? Its own proof, because if you just did something awesome, some god or other must have been on your side?-I read that Virgil studied under Sino the Epicurean. I'd always thought of V. as more of a Stoic. Will read with that in mind.-What is all this about them braving Scylla and the cyclops? Like, Aeneas did everything Odysseus did, only offscreen? Burn!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I read this in Latin and survived the experience only because I was young and stubborn. In truth, the Odyssey is a much better written tale.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A bit of a slog. Much harder to get through than Odyssey, less poignant than Illiad. Still, the section on Dido was moving and the bit in Book 6 (?) about the Queen of the Latins was worth the price of admission.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Penguin Classics edition provides a 42-page preface, an extensive glossary, and some maps. This material contributed greatly to my immense enjoyment of Dryden's luxurious translation, most in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, like much of the verse of the eighteenth century.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Unlike Homer, to whome I can lose long nights bound by his captivating cadence, Virgil's Aeneid took me a full season--nearly six months--to finish. The tricks of the trade that were novel when I saw them in Homer lost some of their luster in Virgil's derived forms, though there were some passages and stories here that provide almost universal archetypes to the lineage of western literature.The first remarkable thing is how little has changed in Mediterranean cultures' sense of heroicism in the many hundreds of years that elapsed between the Homeric epics and Virgil's lifetime in the first century CE. Without an academic familiarity with Imperial Roman culture, it's hard to determine how much of the poem's epic content is supposed to reflect ideals that are still relevant to its contemporary audience versus how much--and knowing Romans' captivation with the-good-old-days-had-real-heroes, we-are-only-sad-imitations, I sense that this might be closer to the mark--the glories of the past and the founding of Rome are a legacy of god-like men and endeavors that cannot or even should not be emulated. If one were to prune out the portions of the poem that are weak echoes of Homer's mastery, those pieces that are hackneyed homages to Caesar Augustus, and perhaps pare down some of the martial descriptiveness, one would have something very close to perfect. When Virgil allows himself to be narrative--maybe at slight expense to the propagandistic tack--wonderful things happen. Pious, predictable Aeneas is no crafty Odysseus, and besides performing the prescribed role of establishing Roman history, seems to be less dimensional than some of the epic's other notable characters. Where Homer's women are mostly reduced to submissive pale sketches unless deities (Athena, for example, is always inspirational no matter who writes about her), Virgil gives us a couple of plausible inspirations. Dido pulls of tragic without simpering, and even in the underworld refuses to be a doormat. Camilla is nothing short of fantastic.But in the end, there is a lot of poring over gory and repetitive battle scenes. Important to the epic genre and the symbolic completeness of the story? Likey. But to the modern reader or at least one disinterested in military history, not terrifically impactful. A required read in the Western Canon. But a touch too much work to be enjoyable.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In my opinion, the greatest of the Classical epics. The Aeneid does not merely praise the glory of Rome and Augustus by exhalting Aeneas; it conveys a melancholy for everything that Aeneas, the Trojans, and even their enemies underwent in order to bring about fate. Rome's enemy Carthage, and even Hannibal who lead the invading army, is here depicted as the eventual avengers of a woman abandoned by her lover not for any fault of her own, but merely because the gods required him to be elsewhere. The Italians are shown as glorious warriors, whose necessary deaths in battle may not be worth it. Finally there is the end, not with the joy of triumph, but with the death moan of the Italian leader. The translation by David West perfectly captures the tone of the original.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a classic of course. This translation in particular is quite well done. It has excellent notes and references. I love this work particularly because of the context in which it was written which gives depth to many of the events and/or the way in which they are portrayed.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I found this easier to get through than [book: The Iliad], I think because at least for the first half there was stuff going on besides warfare. But I think I'm kind of epiced out after those two and [book: Paradise Lost] all this semester.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The fact that this is unfinished makes me want to gnaw on my own liver - because it ends right when things start (finally) getting interesting. Still an interesting read, however, if only to get glimpses into the way the ancient Greeks thought.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A lot of comparisons are being made between the Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey, but I personally find the Aeneid to surpass the former. Aeneas is portrayed with more compassion, I think, than Odysseus and a comparison isn't really very useful as Aeneas is a Trojan sailing with nowhere to go and Odysseus is a Greek victor who is just cursed to take ten years to get to his homeland.As far as the Aeneid on its own is concerned, you really get a feel for all of the characters involved (except, oddly enough, Zeus/Jove), and all of their points of view are justifiable, more or less. The personal drama and the battles are gripping, and you really sympathize with all of the characters.This translation in particular is a very easy one to read and I think true to the simplicity of the Latin original; Latin isn't a stuffy language and this is not a stuffy translation.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A bit slow, but it certainly follows the whole "odyssey" thing.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Aeneid is basically a sequel to the Iliad by Homer but told with a slant to Roman ideology and history. What Virgil has done with the Aeneid is to take Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and combine them into one work that takes the best out of the two originals and makes them valid and relevant to Roman sensibilities. (Just as Homer himself took the old legends and mythology of the Greeks and used them to create his two epic poems.)Virgil does a wonderful job of keeping the reader engaged through the first half of his story. (Which is modeled after the Odyssey.) There is a real sense of adventure and finding love throughout this section of the book and the pacing moves it along rather quickly. Towards the end of this portion however, the book takes a turn in my opinion when Aeneas has to travel into the Underworld to visit the spirits of the dead. Things in this portion got a bit drawn out and dull to me and the climax of this scene was nothing more than a direct homage to the Roman rulers and their fine lineage. Basically, it was just a bunch of brown-nosing for the benefit of the ruling Caesar.The second half of the book is the war section (the Iliad part of the book.) The pace once again picks up and we are rewarded for our persistence with an epic battle between the two grand heroes.All in all, I found the Aeneid to be an entertaining read. Virgil does a nice job filling in missing events from the Iliad and Odyssey while also creating a continuation of the tale itself which leads to the founding of the Roman Empire.If you're into the classics of literature, this is a must read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sometimes you just enjoy the book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Virgil deals with war and peace, love and hate, gods and men, historic fact and pure fancy. Aeneis escapes from fallen Troy and founds Rome.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting, humorous, informative and rather pleasant for the most part. To be honest with you, the parts I remember best are some of the races and the campfire stories and antics of some of the soldiers.I bogged down in some of the battles and other long descriptive parts, enjoyed the stories of people. The gods and goddesses were quite annoying, and if that isn't a good description of demons, I don't know what is. Petty, self-serving, envious and interfering to their own ends. Prayers and supplications made no difference, they were answered only as it suited the immortals ends, and their ends were always wrapped up in malice. As opposed to God, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." Jeremiah 29:11
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I have a feeling that I'm going to get crucified by someone for only giving this book one star out of five. However, I feel it's entirely justified, because while I do recognize the historical and cultural imporance of the book, it still almost put me to sleep on several occasions before I was able to finish it. One of the things I found most noteworthy, and almost most sad, about the Aenid is that it seems to suffer from some sort of inferiority complex. Virgil quite obviously wanted to write something on par with the work of Homer; however, the transparency of that desire greatly reduces the quality of it. The prime difference, I feel, is that Homer seemed to write to transmit the culture and history of his people: Virgil wrote to create propoganda and justify the existence of an empire. As an early example of art being used to political ends, it is interesting, but beyond that I could not enjoy it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The rating (3 stars) and review refer more to Patric Dickinson's translation than to the epic itself - which is at least 6 stars out of 5.Dickinson's translation suffers many of the same problems that plague other verse tranlations of Vergil and Homer: an inability to translate the prosody of an inflected language into the prosody of an uninflected one. Much of the prosody of the Aeneid relies on syntactical figures, such as chiasmus or interlocking word order. Those are simply unable to be replicated into English. This lack is in addition to the inability to translate puns and other audio affects from any language to any other. And, since contemporary English poetics does not value meter, even the near approximation of moving Vergil's hexameters into English pentameters is lost in this translation.This is not to say that the translation is without merit or is a particularly poor one. It is quite serviceable, quite readable, and quite faithful (as much as possible without the full range of poetic effects at its disposal) at preserving the original's sweep.But, to be honest, a good prose translation is probably better at conveying the content and the sentiment. The purpose of a verse translation ought to be to translate into English not only the content but also, as much as possible, the form - either through mimicry or through adaptation. Dickinson's translation, like so many others, does not do enough of either.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The epic poem of Aeneas who escaped from Troy, wandered the Mediterranean for years and eventually triggered the founding of Rome. Virgil presents a vivid tale, filled with heroic adventures largely for the purpose of giving Romans a legitimate claim to an ancient heritage that could rival the Greeks, to whom they felt culturally envious.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoy Fitzgerald's translation... I think he hit a home run on this one, although I'm not as hot on his Homeric translations. The Everyman's Library edition is quite an attractive one as well. As for the Aeneid, it's a fine tale of love and war, an interesting bit of propaganda, and some nice poetry. Those interested in Vergil as alchemist, rather than as author, should check out Avram Davidson's novels (particularly The Phoenix and the Mirror).