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Some time during the Middle Ages, perhaps in the twelfth century or slightly earlier, an Irish scholar set out to translate Virgil's Aeneid into his native tongue ? according to Stanford (1970: 37) this is the earliest vernacular translation in existence. The Irish redactor was probably motivated by the Aeneid's importance as a text book of the medieval schools and by a desire to integrate the Roman origin legend ? a popular genre in medieval Irish textual culture ? into a growing body of texts in Irish about significant events in classical antiquity, such as Togail Troi, the Irish version of De Excidio Troiae Historia attributed to Dares, or the compilation about the life and deeds of Alexander. The Latin Aeneid was well-known in Ireland from the early Middle Ages onwards, probably in a combination of text and commentary (Hoftnan 1988). The project of the Irish translator of the Aeneid was strikingly different from that of a modern translator, of Virgil or of any other author: Whereas the modern translator will

Vergil's Aeneid, the epic of national identity, was produced at a time when in all probability nobody in Italy (including quite possibly the Princeps himself) could have been easily confident of the significance of what history had now brought to pass.2 This essay accordingly seeks to contemplate the poem as an artifact in dialogue with its immediate audience's practical assumptions and expectations about new political realities in the Res Publica that Augustus so determinedly claimed to be resuscitating. Amid all "the very high level and density of relations and communications that united the Roman civic body in every direction" in the Republic, curiosity about the sentiments of the Populus Romanus still seems neglected.3 Excited interest in popular feelings was characteristic of many republican principes and consequently ever fundamental to political life at all manner of occasions for rhetorics of self-presentation, whether mundane or more extraordinarily charismatic, in the civic spaces of the city. But modem analysts have not always been ready to ponder whether in fact Vergil's artistry succeeded not only in pleasing the community at large but thereby also in communicating aesthetically a regime's legitimacy.4 The Aeneid quickly commanded great authority in Rome and so ever after

AS any good survey of recent Virgilian scholarship will remind us, the last several decades have been marked by a number of subtle, sophisticated readings of the Aeneid which depart radically from the approach that dominated scholarship at the beginning of this century.1 The traditional approach, set forth by Heinze, nuanced by Pbschl, and disseminated in the Anglophone world by Eliot, is basically optimistic: Aeneas serves as the ideal hero of ancient Rome, the Aeneid celebrates the achievements of Augustus and his age, and the poem endures as a monument to the values of order and civilization.2 The new approach, developed initially by Brooks, Parry, Clausen, and Putnam, is profoundly pessimistic, for it finds that the Aeneid speaks in two voices, as Parry puts it, those of personal loss as well as public achievement. That is, the poem's successes are accompanied by failure--of Aeneas, of the Augustan order, and of human nature in general and its ability to attain its ideals.3 The traditional approach still dominates German scholarship

This is the first detailed commentary on Aeneid 7, fully covering problems of metre and prosody, lexicon, style, grammar and syntax, poetic and prose sources, as well as issues of religion and topography. Full account, however, is also taken of recent developments and tendencies in Virgilian studies. There is an introduction, text, translation and indices.

This paper attempts to investigate an episode of the final book of Vergil's Aeneid about which criticism has been remarkably reticent. The episode, Aeneid 12.391-429, is that in which Iapyx, a doctor absent from earlier battles in the epic, attends the wounded Aeneas. This battlefield-surgeon heals the hero at once with a miraculous drug provided through divine intervention. Apart from commentaries which elucidate individual points of grammar or clarify obscure aspects of medical lore, no full interpretation of the episode exists, at least not one that satisifies the criteria that I argue need to be met. Such a full interpretation should take account of the mythological and cultural perspective of the passage. Its narrative function, its Homeric and post-Homeric antecedents, and what can be called the "medical fictions" in the minds of its original audience, all deserve attention. This requires a mixture of structuralist, new-historicist, readerresponse, and philological tactics in approaching the text, but the understanding of the text, not the method or combination of methods, is paramount, because the intent is to show that the passage is not some sort of minor digression, as the absence of full, critical discussion might imply, but is carefully wrought and ought to have a substantial impact on readers' reaction to the climax of the Aeneid. The treatment of Aeneas' wound by the doctor Iapyx in Aeneid 12.391-429 has an obvious source in Iliad 4.190 ff. There, Machaon, who is both a warrior-chieftain and a battlefield-surgeon, is summoned by Agamemnon's herald Talthybios and comes to treat the wounded Menelaus. Vergil knew Homer's descriptions of battlefield-doctoring either from Iliad 4.213-219 or from 11.828-848, where Eurypylos gets surgical and pharmaceutical help from Patroklos, while Machaon and Podaleirios are busy fighting. But Vergil makes considerably more of these scenes than he found in Homer. And the first thing to consider is Vergil's manipulation of these Homeric passages. Over the past two decades criticism has made it quite clear that Vergil engages in what has been called the "creative imitation" of his sources generally. And even the subtle changes that Vergil makes in Homeric material transform it, often with the effect of emphasizing the distance between Homer and himself or between his world and the world of Homeric epic.l Thus, while acknowledging Vergil's

Parmi les sources de la «Consolation de la philosophie» de Boece, l'A. montre que l'epiphanie de Madame Philosophie s'inspire de l'intervention de Venus dans l'«Eneide» de Virgile. Comparant les deux figures maternelles, l'A. y repere une lecture symbolique et allegorique du theme neoplatonicien de l'errance de l'esprit dans la douleur et le desespoir humains.

It seems to be a fact of literary history that Vergil's great Roman epic, the Aeneid (29-19 B.C.), is the most popular work of the imagination in the history of Western civilization, in the sense that it has probably been read by more people than have read any other literary work in the past two thousand years. Naturally, it has often been translated, but the most prestigious translation remains that by John Dryden (1697), which itself ranks as the third most popular translation in English literature, behind only the King James Bible and Pope's Iliad. Dryden's work is also the only long poem of merit in English literature between Milton and Pope. Yet it is almost impossible to find an annotated translation of the Aeneid, that is, a translation with the kind of introductory and explanatory material that would enable readers to understand and appreciate Vergil's achievement. Similarly, Dryden's translation has not been as available as it deserves. To meet these needs, Howard Clarke offers Vergil's story in Dryden's version, with the kind of information that would make the experience of reading these two classics both convenient and informative. A small bonus has been the addition of Vergil's "Fourth (or 'Messianic') Eclogue," the brief poem that predicted the birth of a wonderful child and thereby made Vergil seem something more than just a pagan poet. Since Dryden's translation was a product of its time, the late seventeenth century, when the conventions of translation were much looser than they are now, his work has sometimes been criticized for its liberties and inaccuracies. Both the Introduction and the Notes to this edition take account of these complaints and single those passages where Dryden has significantly deviated from Vergil's original. Also, Dryden's spelling and punctuation have been modernized to facilitate reading.

T HE AENEID'S conclusion has been a source of enduring dissatisfaction for Vergil's readers. A suppliant Turnus stretches his hand forward, begging Aeneas to remember a parent's grief and not to press his hatred further. Aeneas hesitates, momentarily allowing the reader to expect that he will show mercy. But the sight of Pallas's baldric incites Aeneas to anger and revenge; he buries his sword in Turnus's breast and sends him to the shades below. From Servius to the present day, readers have shared two basic complaints about the Vergilian ending: Aeneas is unduly cruel in slaying his adversary, and the epic, with its abrupt and violent close, is narratively incomplete. The body of criticism that Torquato Tasso inherited as a sixteenthcentury reader of the Aeneid also attacked the poem's solution. It did so with a new critical vocabulary drawn from the re-discovered Poetics of Aristotle, and influenced by a revival of interest in the Ethics. The sixteenth-century Italian critics endlessly compared Vergil with Homer and scrutinized his invention and diction for flaws.' One aspect of neo-Aristotelian criticism that became particularly fashionable in connection with discussions of the Aeneid's conclusion was the newly re-defined concept of honor culled from the Ethics. In 1547, in a series of lectures delivered at Rome, Antonio Bernardi was among the first to discuss affairs of honorparticularly with regard to duels-in connection with Aristotle's theory of ethics.2 Bernardi's

IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica exercised a profound influence upon Vergil, and that Apollonius' poem makes frequent use of etymological aetiologies.1 But the influence of Apollonius on Vergilian etymological wordplay is overlooked or underappreciated by most commentators. This paper will present four examples of Vergilian etymological wordplay modelled on etymological aetiologies in the Argonautica, all but the last from one section of Aeneid 3.

infelix Dido, verus mihi nuntius ergo venerat exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam? funeris heu tibi causa fui? per sidera iuro, per superos et si qua fides tellure sub ima est, invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi. sed me iussa deum, quae nunc has ire per umbras, per loca senta situ cogunt noctemque profundam, imperils egere suis; nec credere quivi hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem. siste gradum teque aspectu ne subtrahe nostro. quem fugis? extremum fato quod te adloquor hoc est.2