THE AENEID

Blending solid scholarship with poetic sensibility, classicist Bartsch delivers a new version of the foundational poem of Imperial Rome.

Why a new Aeneid? Because every decade or so a new version of a literary classic should appear, sometimes displacing an older one. And why the Aeneid at all? Writes University of Chicago classicist Bartsch in a long, circumstantial introduction, the poem raises endless intellectual problems. Is it “pro-Augustan,” a celebration of Octavian, who would become Augustus Caesar? Was it a subtle paean to the fallen Republic? Why did Vergil ask that the poem be burned as he lay on his deathbed? Such questions keep people pondering the great poem. Writes Bartsch, at least the origins of the poem seem evident: Vergil “died in 19 BCE, not knowing how the Augustan era would turn out. It was definitely safer—at least for his posthumous reputation—to write about Octavian’s ancestor, Aeneas.” Bartsch notes that the poem is in all events a celebration of empire that joins the peoples of ancient Troy to those of ancient Italy to form a new world power (one that would crush its rival Carthage, with ties to Troy all its own). As for the poem itself, Bartsch delivers a translation that gives some sense of the Latin and the tautness of its lines; most other English versions are fully 30% or more longer than the original, but not hers. The very opening suggests her poetic values: Vergil sings not of “arms and the man” (arma virumque) but “war and a man,” and the next verses have a Beowulf-like alliterative quality: “Remember for me, Muse. Tell me the reasons. What pain, / what insult to her power, moved the queen of gods / to drive a man famous for piety through misery / on misery? Can such anger grip gods’ minds?” Through seductions, treacheries, murders, deicides, and other episodes, Bartsch—her scholarly notes as vigorous as her verse—produces an excellent companion for students of the poem and of Roman history.

A robust, readable, reliable translation of a hallmark of world literature.