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I examine a dialogue between the Renaissance Supplements to Virgil’s Aeneid by Pier Candido Decembrio and Maffeo Vegio. I argue that Decembrio’s short poem is not unfinished but instead provides the Iliadic ending to the Aeneid that Virgil withholds, namely a lament over Turnus’s body to match the lament over Hector at the end of Iliad 24. I then argue that Decembrio’s poem presents us with a dangerously unstable situation in Italy, dominated by commemorations of Turnus in such heroic terms that they threaten to displace Virgil’s hero Aeneas from primacy in his own story. Vegio’s response “corrects” this portrayal of Turnus in favour of a more orthodox Virgilian narrative in which Turnus is a tragically misguided enemy of Aeneas’s divine mission to Italy. I conclude with a new edition and translation of Decembrio’s Supplement, drawing on both of the extant manuscripts and addressing several textual difficulties., Nous examinons un dialogue entre les Suppléments à l’Énéide de Virgile composés par Pier Candido Decembrio et par Maffeo Vegio. Nous avançons que le bref poème de Decembrio n’est pas inachevé, mais qu’il fournit plutôt la fin iliadique à l’Énéide retenue par Virgile, à savoir une complainte sur le corps de Turnus qui correspond à la complainte sur Hector à la fin du chant 24 de l’Iliade. Nous suggérons ensuite que le poème de Decembrio met en scène une situation dangereusement instable en Italie, dominée par les commémorations de Turnus en des termes si héroïques qu’elles menacent de destituer le héros virgilien, Énée, de sa primauté dans son propre récit. La réponse de Vegio « corrige » ce portrait de Turnus en faveur d’un récit virgilien plus orthodoxe dans lequel Turnus, tragiquement dans l’erreur, est un ennemi de la mission divine d’Énée en Italie. Nous concluons en proposant une nouvelle édition et traduction du Supplément de Decembrio, en nous appuyant sur les deux manuscrits existants et en abordant plusieurs difficultés textuelles.

Venus and Vulcan, Venus and Aeneas, Pallas and Aeneas, Aeneas and Evander, Evander and Pallas: all of these pairs are seen embracing one another in Aeneid 8. Alongside these emotive scenes of embrace, the book is peppered with embrace-related vocabulary, imagery, and metaphor, often in surprising contexts. This article weaves together these embraces in Aeneid 8 in relation to the thematics of the book as a whole. It is proposed that, when read together, the embraces in Aeneid 8 tell a story about the possibilities of knowledge in relation to the senses. Vision is the supreme sense-modality of truth in epic, as embodied in the shield of Aeneas; and yet, in book 8, embrace emerges as a way of knowing that runs counter to optical discourses of knowledge. This leads to an exploratory reconsideration of hermeneutic principles in light of Aeneas’ much-puzzled-over response to the shield.

In the Aeneid, Ancient Rome’s seminal epic poem and Vergil’s greatest work, a queen falls in love and later commits suicide. This queen’s name is Dido, and her story contains some of Vergil’s best poetry, but it has also long been a source of interpretive debate by translators. This paper seeks to illuminate how popular, modern, English translations of the Aeneid have depicted this dynamic, tragic character. These translations (i.e. Ruben, Fitzgerald, Lewis, and others) are the ones read in classrooms and disseminated to the wider public. This paper will attempt to understand them by examining how a translator’s personality and philosophy affect their decisions about the translation’s fidelity, cadence, and expressiveness. It is a comprehensive outline of Dido’s journey through the modern age and how that journey may change as more translators come to the fore who have their own distinct, diverse stories. The Aeneid lives through its translators; it grows as the translators do, and it falters too when they do. Dido is the perfect case study for that.

This article investigates Irene Vallejo's 2015 novel El silbido del arquero, a narrative in the Virgilian tradition mostly inspired by Book IV of the Aeneid. We show how Vallejo reinterprets Dido and Aeneas's tragic love story by foregrounding minor characters, developing the setting, integrating popular subgenres and exploring communicative anxieties and gender issues. It is argued that patterns of dissatisfaction, self-delusion and disillusionment with human affairs ultimately collide with a message of hope voiced by the fictionalised Virgil., Universidad Pablo de Olavide

This review article of Joseph Farrell’s 2021 monograph on Virgil’s Aeneid (Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity, Princeton and Oxford) takes the cue from Farrell’s analysis of Virgil’s intertextuality with the Homeric epics and provides a methodological re-assessment of intertextuality in Virgilian studies and Latin literature more broadly. It attempts to retrace the theoretical history and some of the main applications of Latin intertextual studies and suggests some possible ways for Latinists to engage more profoundly with deconstructive criticism and post-critique.

This article focuses on Seamus Heaney’s posthumously published translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI. It does so through the lens of what the post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida terms hauntology. In this sense the repetition and return of the past is discussed in relation to the translation in a political and social sense, but also in the context of how Heaney’s earlier works often haunt the later works in terms of imagery, thematic output, and word choice. The article examines how the poet pluralises notions of identity through this translation and how this text is one that is haunted by the past in both a historical and literary sense. Cet article s’intéresse à la traduction par Seamus Heaney du livre VI de l’Énéide de Virgile, publiée de manière posthume. Le prisme adopté est celui de l’hantologie de Jacques Derrida. La répétition et le retour du passé sont analysés en lien avec la traduction au sens politique et social, mais également à travers la manière dont les œuvres antérieures de Heaney hantent souvent les œuvres les plus récentes s’agissant des images poétiques, des thématiques et des choix lexicaux. L’article examine la pluralisation des identités par le poète dans cette traduction et analyse la manière dont ce texte est hanté par le passé à la fois historique et littéraire.

In his treatise The Exposition of the Content of Virgil according to Moral Philosophy, Fabius Fulgentius allegorically interpreted the contents of Virgil's epic the Aeneid. The aim of our paper is to explain the main principles of Fulgentius' allegorization by analysing the first verse of Virgil's Aeneid. In Fulgentius' view, the 12 books of the epic depicted the three main stages of a human life as they follow the “natural order”: childhood, adolescence and adulthood. In his prologue (Fulg. Cont. 87. 4–6; 87. 11–89. 3; 89. 19–90. 17), the author supports his claim by presenting an allegorical interpretation of the first line of Virgil's epic (Verg. A. 1. 1), which contains three famous words: arma (“arms”), vir (“man”) and primus (“first”). According to Fulgentius, the first term arma (“arms”) represents virtus (“manliness”) in the sense of characteristics that are available to all human individuals during childhood. The second term vir (“man”) refers to sapientia (“wisdom”), which is related to the development of the ingenium (“mind”) during adolescence. The third term primus (“first”) symbolises the adult ability ornare (“to ornament”) what we have learnt in the first phases of our life. With life experience in childhood and adolescence, a person can gradually become princeps (“a ruler”). In other words, they can be “first” within a given society and thus conclude their personal development towards perfection. As such, the contents of Virgil's Aeneid correspond to these three terms: Books 1–3 to childhood, Books 4–6 to adolescence, and Books 7–12 to adulthood.

Since a problematic passage in Virgil's Aeneid (10.366–7) shows the same influence of Sallust (Cat. 58–60) as do the dozen lines preceding and following, it should not be deleted, as has been suggested.

One of the less appreciated literary influences on the Virgilian depiction of Aeneas' decision to slay Turnus at the end of the Aeneid is the first battle supplication scene in Homer's Iliad, the encounter of Adrestus with Menelaus and Agamemnon. Close consideration of Virgil's response to the Homeric scene sheds light on the poet's concerns in his presentation of the choice his Trojan hero Aeneas confronts in light of Turnus' appeal. Acrostics at the end of the Aeneid invite further reflection.

This article puts the spotlight upon the neglected 1632 translation of the entire Aeneid by the poet, puritan, and parliamentarian John Vicars, which, as the first complete translation of the Aeneid by an Englishman, should be more prominent in literary history. The article’s central argument is that the neglect of Vicars’ translation was, both at the time and thereafter, a manifestation of the class warfare that has long pervaded English society. This argument complements the view expressed by other scholars that the dismissal of Vicars was grounded in his radical puritanism and anti-Catholicism. The article analyses the paratextual materials that introduce the translation, including the dedicatory epistle, the address to the reader, and the poems of endorsement, as well as the poem itself, for signs of class struggle. By offering a close textual analysis, it argues that it is far from obvious that the quality of Vicars’ version is inferior. It concludes that the patent early hostility towards Vicars is more closely related to the person of the translator than the qualities of the translation; specifically, it attributes the failure of Vicars’ translation to dislike for the translator’s extremely humble origins, alongside his unfashionable religious and political views.

This book explores how Virgil in his Aeneid incorporates the ancient Stoics' thinking about how humans can exercise moral responsibility and how this can affect providential world fate. The third-century BC philosopher Chrysippus of Soli located this freedom in the way we can assent to courses of action, and Graham Zanker innovatively demonstrates how Virgil appropriates this concept in the way that Jupiter and Aeneas can assent to the world fate in which they have discovered they must play a part, or Juno and Dido can withhold their assent to it. Indeed, Virgil even offers the model to no-one less than Augustus: the emperor is invited to give his assent to ruling what was believed to be his 'world-wide' empire justly. The book is accessible to both students and professional scholars of the Aeneid, with all Greek and Latin translated into idiomatic English.

The translation of the Aeneid by a leading Symbolist poet Valerii Briusov, on which he worked most of his life, failed to gain favor with Russian readers because of its literalism. Combining various theoretical approaches with a close analysis of the text this essay explores why Briusov’s translation failed in the context of the cultural and aesthetic demands of the era in which it was composed.

A major aspect of Fascist manipulation of classical culture is the tendentious practice of translating texts in order to emphasize the points apparently consistent with the regime’s ideology: this process goes so far as to distort the meaning of the texts, which are used as means of political propaganda. This happened to the Aeneid, the most translated and probably the most misinterpreted poem in Italy during the Fascist period. I outline an overview of the translations made by Giuseppe Albini (1921), Francesco Vivona (1926), Giuseppe Lipparini (1928), Emilio Pratellesi (1930), and Guido Vitali (1930). I describe and illustrate with some examples the criteria followed by each author, with respect to lexical choice, sentence structure, and stylistic devices. Thus, I show how these translations (with the sole exception of that by Albini) are enslaved to their political purpose and betray the deep and complex message of the poem.

The composition of translations of Classical texts in the nineteenth-century Greek state was a complex issue entwined with politics, ideology, and the cultural identity of the new nation that sought to construct its identity by looking back towards its glorious Classical Greek past. It is, moreover, an issue tied to the so-called ‘language question’, the ardent debate on the type of the national Greek language (archaizing Greek, katharevousa, or demotiki). The intellectual elite of the new nation-state, led by the professoriate of the newly founded Ottonian University and a number of influential Greek intellectuals of the Diaspora tried to acquaint the newly-liberated Greeks with the classical writers of antiquity primarily through education. Since these elites favoured the katharevousa, a conservative construct of the spoken Greek language fashioned as a compromise between Classical Greek and the spoken vernacular of the time, the produced translations of the ancient authors had limited appeal across time, and they never aspired to address an audience beyond academia. Thus, all translations of the Aeneid published in Greece during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were literary failures. They were never meant to be read independently from the original Latin, and, inevitably, were largely forgotten following the death of their authors.

The first complete translation of Vergil’s Aeneid into Turkish was published in 1935–36, during the first decades of the Turkish Republic. The translator Ahmed Reşid (1870–1955) was an intellectual and statesman who not only witnessed but also played active roles in arguably the most radical sociocultural turn in the country’s long history. As Reşid did not know Latin, he used an intermediary French translation as his source text. If this alone might seem from a normative viewpoint an obstacle to success, a broader perspective that considers various approaches in current translation criticism reveals a more complete and nuanced image of Reşid's translation project. My aim here is to contextualize historically and to critically discuss this carefully made but too soon forgotten Vergil translation, by using a case-specific plurality of methods. I argue that Antoine Berman's hermeneutical model is especially useful for studies on classical reception including Vergil translations.

The Roman poet Virgil recounted this legend in his classical epic poem the Aeneid, where the Trojan prince Aeneas is destined by the gods to found a new Troy. In the epic, the women also refuse to go back to the sea, but they were not left on the Tiber. After reaching Italy, Aeneas, who wanted to marry Lavinia, was forced to wage war with her former suitor, Turnus. According to the poem, the Alban kings were descended from Aeneas, and thus Romulus, the founder of Rome, was his descendant.

The article examines the reception of the Homeric formula ἐπ’ εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης “on the broad back of the sea” in Greek and Latin poetry, and reconstructs (on the basis of scholia and lexical glosses) how Alexandrian exegesis evaluated this expression. Special attention is given to Vergil’s adaptation of this formula in the Aeneid: in one context Vergil translates the expression neutrally, reproducing Homer’s usage of εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης to speak of the open sea, but omitting the metaphor of the sea’s back (Aen. 7, К рецепции гомеровской формулы ἐπ’ εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης… 47 808–811); in another context, he faithfully reproduces the image, but applies it to the ridge of rocks on which Trojan ships were nearly wrecked (Aen. 1, 108–110).

I: A. 4.436 has caused commentators and interpreters serious worries and have done so for two millennia: (1) Which reading is correct, dederit or dederis? (2) Which varia lectio is preferable, cumulatam or cumulatā? (3) What does morte refer to? (4) What is meant by (veniam) remittere? These issues are constantly seeking some form of unified solution. The 19th century made several attempts at conjectures none of which gained ground. After discussing the best among these at length (Philip Wagner’s 1832 proposal) the time has come to move outside the well-trodden paths and make a new try at a solution. II: Taking his point of departure from an error in Hirtzel’s Vergil edition (OCT 1900) the author advocates a new text at A. 12.423, nullā for nullo, finding the resulting

Augustus also promoted the ideal of a superior Roman civilization with a task of ruling the world (to the extent to which the Romans knew it), a sentiment embodied in words that the contemporary poet Virgil attributes to a legendary ancestor of Augustus: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento—"Roman, remember by your strength to rule the Earth's peoples!"[175] The impulse for expansionism was apparently prominent among all classes at Rome, and it is accorded divine sanction by Virgil's Jupiter in Book 1 of the Aeneid, where Jupiter promises Rome imperium sine fine, "sovereignty without end".[198]

Chapter 6 reconsiders the Earl of Surrey’s reputation as an exemplar of English humanist translation. His translations of Books II and IV of the Aeneid reveal an idiosyncratic, highly experimental translator. Although often and rightly praised for his concise, scrupulously faithful rendering of the Aeneid, Surrey achieved this concision by selectively omitting words from Virgil’s original Latin. His compression of Virgil’s text was driven by his experiments to capture the formal effects of Latin metre. In certain passages, he sought exact line-for-line translations between his English pentameters and Virgil’s hexameters. However, his experiments in poetic form were not taken up by later English translators. Surrey represents only a modern ideal of English humanism, and is unrepresentative of wider sixteenth-century translation practice.

[No abstract available] Peer reviewed 2021-09-07

Throughout Vergil’s Aeneid, non-Olympian gods, acting on behalf of Olympian gods, attempt to persuade mortals to undertake various destructive actions. Apart from Juturna (Book 12), non-Olympian gods such as Iris (Book 5), Somnus (Book 5), and Allecto (Book 7) are unable to persuade their audience with words alone and resort to their irresistible divine appearance or abilities to achieve their ends. Although these speeches rarely attract critical attention in their own right, we can be certain that Vergil complicates these episodes to convey information not only about the nature of the non-Olympian gods (and their relationship to mortals) but also about the character of the resisting mortals. In particular, I will demonstrate that Juturna is able to persuade the Rutulians to break the truce with the Trojans in Book 12 because she—both as a recent mortal and sister of Turnus—understands human behaviour, whereas the other non-Olympians fail precisely because their speeches do not reflect a true understanding of their audience’s humanity.

SummaryThe poet Virgil in his Aeneid employs Gorgon imagery and its attendant connection to the goddess Minerva as part of his explication of one of the key themes of his Augustan epic, namely the progress from a Trojan past to a Roman future. Close analysis of the references to the Perseus myth and related Gorgon legends in the Aeneid reveals a carefully constructed web of intratextual allusions that serve in part to underscore the end of the Trojan order and the advent of the Roman.

The article describes the history of the complete translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid” into Russian (12 books), performed by A.A. Fet in the spring and autumn of 1887 with the participation of V.S. Solovyov as a translator (books VII, IX, X). The joint work of the famous poet, acclaimed ancient languages translator, as well as his major co-author, the classic philologist from Kazan, D.I. Naguevsky (comments and text revision), and Solovyov is chronologically reconstructed through the letters of both Fet and the rest of the participants and witnesses of this work (Solovyov, Naguevsky, J.A. Kulakovsky, N.N. Strakhov, A.V. Olsufiev, etc.). Not only does the analysis of this epistolary allow to determine the level of participation of each of the co-authors, as well as to restore the nature and details of this collaboration, but also to understand the essence of the disagreements that arose among them. Meanwhile in most studies Solovyov’s translation technique is contrasted with Fet’s not in favor of the latter without considering the available documents. Thanks to these efforts, the style of Fet has been supplemented by statements about the the poet’s basic principles of translation in which the term “literal translation” often sounds like a verdict when it is expressed in relation to Fet and Solovyov’s special “literalism” is recognized better than Fet’s. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that if Solovyov’s translation significantly differed from the principles established by Fet, this creative union would hardly be possible, or, knowing Fet’s scrupulousness, we would find Solovyov’s name on the title of the Aeneid as an equal, but different translator. Meanwhile, all parts of the translation are organic and are performed in the so-called “literal” method, persistenly declared by Fet, who strives for absolute transmission of the letter and spirit of the original.

This article argues that Juno’s speech in Horace’s Odes 3.3 includes a short series of programmatic allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid that assist Horace in promoting the distinct identity of his own lyric poetry. Juno’s speech asserts that Rome’s passage to greatness depends on not ‘rebuilding Troy’. Horace’s allusions identify the motif of Trojan restoration as a central theme in the Aeneid’s narrative, and, in a metapoetic sense, associate it pejoratively with the cultural performance of the epic itself in its canonical retelling of the Trojan story. In this way Horace uses Juno’s speech strategically to characterise the Aeneid as decadent and regressive; by contrast Juno promotes moral restraint as a virtue that characterises Horatian lyric.

Wordsworth's translation of Virgil's Aeneid I–III has been largely neglected by Romanticists and classical reception scholars, in part because it is considered to be an unfinished, failed artistic project. Amongst a handful of scholars, Bruce Graver has convincingly demonstrated the originality of Wordsworth's Latin translation. This article goes further to suggest the artistic coherence of Wordsworth's translation of Virgil . Aeneid I–III trace the arc of Aeneas's fall and exile from Troy and discovery of a new home. In translating Aeneas's journey, Wordsworth enacts a quest for a new poetic voice, at a time when his creative powers as an English poet were at a low ebb. His engagement with Virgil's Latin can be compared to his encounters with Nature and the River Derwent in earlier poetry; in both cases, the poet plays host to an alienatingly other, divine maternal presence which eventually rejuvenates and confirms the poet's voice in English.