The Aeneid

What It Is

An epic in twelve books, 9,896 lines of Latin hexameter, written over the last eleven years of Virgil's life and unfinished when he died in 19 BC. He asked for the manuscript to be destroyed. Augustus overruled him, and the poem became the central book of Western education for the next eighteen centuries.

Its relationship to Homer is deliberate and structural. The first six books answer the Odyssey, the last six answer the Iliad, and Virgil expects you to notice. He is not imitating. He is arguing with the tradition he inherited, in the only form available to him.

Virgil wrote under Augustus, after a century of civil war had ended with one man holding everything. The poem was understood at the time as the founding story of the new order, and it is.

Fifty-eight lines in the text we have are metrically incomplete: half-lines, broken off, exactly as he left them. Nobody has ever had the nerve to finish them.

Why It Matters

For most of European history the Aeneid was not a book you read but the book you were made of. Dante takes Virgil as his guide because Virgil is the poet who taught Europe how to write. Milton read him, Dryden made an English poem of him, and every empire that wanted a literature of its own started here.

The reason to read it now is different. The word for the hero is pius, and no English word carries it: not piety, not duty, not devotion, but something closer to the obedience owed to a claim you never agreed to. The poem is about a man carrying a claim he never agreed to, and it is unsentimental about what carrying it costs.

Since Adam Parry's essay of 1963, readers have talked about the two voices of the Aeneid: the public voice that celebrates Rome, and the other one, running under it, that counts the cost. That second voice is why the poem outlived the empire it was written for, and Virgil is not hiding it.

Before You Read

Twelve to fifteen hours, and easier going than the Iliad: shorter, tighter, faster, written by a man who could assume his readers knew Homer.

A book a night for a fortnight is the right pace. The books have their own architecture and want to be taken whole.

Homer first if you can, particularly the Odyssey, because half of what Virgil does is a reply and you will feel it. But the poem stands alone.

Some readers find the going slower once they are past the middle. Stay with it. Virgil is building something across all twelve, and it does not resolve early.

Which Translation to Read

• Robert Fagles (Viking, 2006) — recommended. Fast, spoken free verse with enormous drive, and the version most likely to carry a first-time reader through all twelve books without a stall. Bernard Knox's introduction is one of the finest essays on Virgil in English. The cost: Fagles heightens. He adds pressure where the Latin is restrained, and the restraint is not incidental — it is the source of the grief. Knox discusses the poem in full, so read him afterwards. View on Amazon →
• Sarah Ruden (Yale University Press, 2008; revised 2021). One line of English for every line of Latin, in a spare and exact iambic pentameter. The most disciplined Aeneid in the language, and often the most moving, because it refuses to help. The cost: the austerity can read thin beside Virgil's density.
• Robert Fitzgerald (Random House, 1983). The most beautiful English version of the twentieth century, in blank verse of real distinction. The cost: freer than Ruden, and there are passages where the poetry is more Fitzgerald's than Virgil's.

Fagles to be carried, Ruden to be exact, Fitzgerald for the English poetry. Dryden's version of 1697 is a great English poem and a poor guide to the Latin.

The Folio Society issued a limited edition of 1,750 copies in 2010 using the Fagles translation, with plates from the wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here the best collectible and the best reading text are the same words.

Getting the Most From This Book

Listen to some of it. Simon Callow's recording of the Fagles translation for Penguin Audio is a real performance, and this is a poem that was read aloud to its first audience, including to Augustus.

Watch the similes and the small figures at the edges — the ones with a name, a father and a home town, who exist for six lines. Virgil puts them there on purpose. They are the ledger the poem keeps.

Read the introduction afterwards. Almost every introduction to the Aeneid walks through the poem in full, and Virgil's effects depend on arriving unwarned.

The common mistake is to read it as propaganda and stop there, or as anti-propaganda and feel clever. It is neither. Virgil could see exactly what his civilisation had bought and what it had paid, and he declined to pretend the second cancelled the first.