Barry Powell, acclaimed translator of the Iliad (OUP, 2013) and the
Odyssey (OUP, 2014) now delivers a graceful, lucid, free-verse
translation of the Aeneid in a pleasant modern idiom. On-page notes
explain obscure literary and historical references, while the rich
visual program lightens the text and educates students in the
history of Western art by presenting a single topic as represented
over 2,000 years. The Aeneid's first sentence charts the poem's
historical plot, taking us in one sweep of seven lines from Homer's
Troy to Augustus' Rome. These two layers of time are felt all the
way through the poem, from the distant past of Aeneas' heroic and
quasi-mythological time, over 1100 years before Vergil, down to the
"now" of Augustus' Rome, when Vergil was writing the poem between
30 and 19 BC, a period of ongoing political experimentation. The
story of Aeneas-moving from one continent to another, undergoing
and enforcing great transformations in the process-transplants
contemporary Augustan preoccupations with transition, continuity,
and change into the remote time of the poem's action. In the course
of the poem we move from the East to the West, from Troy to Italy,
as Aeneas moves from being a Trojan towards being something else, a
kind of Roman in embryo. The poem's migratory movement, together
with its wholescale assimilation of Homer, acts out another great
transition, the transition of Greek culture to Italy: just as the
people of ancient Italy become the inheritors of Troy, so the
people of Vergil's Italy become the inheritors of Greece. The very
location of the poem in time is transitional, at the pivot between
myth and history: the poem's characters are moving out of the era
of Homer into the era of what Vergil would have considered
non-fabulous history. In all these ways the Aeneid is a great poem
of history, both as lived experience and as something constructed
by people responding to the needs of society. Featuring a stellar,
up-to-date introduction, on-page notes, embedded illustrations,
five maps, a timeline of Roman history, and a genealogical chart,
Powell's Aeneid offers a full immersion into the mythological and
political workings of the poem. It is a book both good to think
with, and good to teach with.
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