A review of the popular and important poem the aeneid

Life and works[ edit ] Birth and biographical tradition[ edit ] Virgil's biographical tradition is thought to depend on a lost biography by VariusVirgil's editor, which was incorporated into the biography by Suetonius and the commentaries of Servius and Donatusthe two great commentators on Virgil's poetry. Although the commentaries no doubt record much factual information about Virgil, some of their evidence can be shown to rely on inferences made from his poetry and allegorizing; thus, Virgil's biographical tradition remains problematic. Modern speculation ultimately is not supported by narrative evidence either from his own writings or his later biographers. Macrobius says that Virgil's father was of a humble background; however, scholars generally believe that Virgil was from an equestrian landowning family which could afford to give him an education.

Every age since that of Augustus has sung the praises of the Aeneid and its wan, reserved poet. We hear of no Horace-style roistering and the sex-crazed mad eloquence of Catullus is entirely absentno government appointments or military commands — there is the work and nothing else he shares this concentration with his near-contemporary the historian Livy, with oddly similar results.

And what a work! Virgil had done willing poetic service for Augustus before, writing his Georgics and Ecologues in part to extol the virtues of old-fashioned Roman morals but also, crucially, in part to offer an instruction manual to demobbed legionaries on what the hell you do with an apiary.

Those two earlier poem-cycles did something else, too: Augustus and Maecenas had their national poet. Virgil took the assignment and went to ground, laboring for ten years sometimes, if legend is to be believed, at the rate of only a line or two a day.

There were work-in-progress readings given to friends and colleagues who assured those not present that a great work was being bornand we may presume that when Augustus met with Virgil in Athens in 40 B.

But even after ten years, there was no finished epic. Aeneas Introducing Cupid Dressed as Ascanius to Dido by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, But even given the occasional outsized particular, this is still a familiar enough outline. To give you an idea: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, they had to condense.

In more recent times, inspiration has yielded pride of place to translation. The Earl of Surrey rendered fragments of Virgil into the very first English blank verse, and full-scale translations with portentous forwards and copious annotations have become virtually a rite of passage for classically-minded public intellectuals since the days of Dryden whose Aeneid is justly proclaimed the ne plus ultra in English, despite the fact that its diction creaks rather audibly to the modern ear.

Jackson Knight did in prose, as half of all Aeneids have been for Penguin in was one of their best-selling titles for several decades, and the late 20th century saw much-heralded and much-lauded versions by Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and just a few years ago Robert Fagles.

Every one of these translators has loudly cried the enormity of his task. It has always been easy to argue that it is the best poem. An anonymous reviewer in put it pithily enough: Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight.

Homer gives us figures that breathe and move, Virgil usually treats us to waxwork. Homer has the full force and play of the drama, Virgil is essentially operatic. From Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance than from Homer back to life. The work gets the last laugh on this accusation, however.

People keep reading it. And into this Olympian fracas has quietly slipped a new contestant, again produced by Yale three cheers for the great academic presses!

Sarah Ruden, whose Aeneid marks the first full translation of the poem ever published by a woman. Dryden has no greater appreciator under the sun than I, but still, years is a good enough run for anybody. War racked him too, until he set his city And gods in Latium.According to the commentators, Virgil received his first education when he was five years old and he later went to Cremona, Milan, and finally Rome to study rhetoric, medicine, and astronomy, which he soon abandoned for yunusemremert.com Virgil's admiring references to the neoteric writers Pollio and Cinna, it has been inferred that he was, for a time, .

A bibliography, by definition, is the detailed listing of the books, journals, magazines, or online sources that an author has used in researching and writing their work.

A review of the popular and important poem the aeneid October 6, by Leave a Comment The An overview of the infamous battle of the bulge Italian writer Elena Ferrante notes in an interview.

but the interest in Welcome! The Thomas Gray Archive is a collaborative digital archive and research project devoted to the life and work of eighteenth-century poet, letter-writer, and scholar Thomas Gray (), author of the acclaimed 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' ().

UPDATED 09/13/ Homer's "Iliad" is a truly 5-star great work of literature, and I certainly agree with all the other reviewers who extol its virtues, but the person who translates this epic poem into English from the archaic Greek is all-important to one's appreciation and enjoyment of it.

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