The Aeneid Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  BOOK ONE - Safe Haven After Storm

  BOOK TWO - The Final Hours of Troy

  BOOK THREE - Landfalls, Ports of Call

  BOOK FOUR - The Tragic Queen of Carthage

  BOOK FIVE - Funeral Games for Anchises

  BOOK SIX - The Kingdom of the Dead

  BOOK SEVEN - Beachhead in Latium, Armies Gather

  BOOK EIGHT - The Shield of Aeneas

  BOOK NINE - Enemy at the Gates

  BOOK TEN - Captains Fight and Die

  BOOK ELEVEN - Camilla’s Finest Hour

  BOOK TWELVE - The Sword Decides All

  NOTES

  THE ROYAL HOUSES OF GREECE AND TROY

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  VARIANTS FROM THE OXFORD CLASSICAL TEXT

  NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION

  PRONOUNCING GLOSSARY

  Other Books by Robert Fagles

  Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays

  (Co-ed. with George Steiner, and contributor)

  The Twickenham Edition of Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey

  (Assoc. Ed. among others under Maynard Mack)

  I Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh

  TRANSLATIONS

  Bacchylides: Complete Poems

  (with Adam Parry)

  Aeschylus: The Oresteia

  (with W. B. Stanford)

  Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays

  (with Bernard Knox)

  Homer: The Iliad

  (with Bernard Knox)

  Homer: The Odyssey

  (with Bernard Knox)

  Other Books by Bernard Knox

  Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time

  Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Trans.)

  The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy

  Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater

  Essays Ancient and Modern

  The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics

  The Norton Book of Classical Literature (Ed.)

  Backing Into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Translation copyright © Robert Fagles, 2006

  Introduction and notes copyright © Bernard Knox, 2006

  All rights reserved

  An extract from Book Two (under the title “The Death of Priam”) and two extracts from Book Six (“Dido in the Underworld” and “Aeneas and His Father’s Ghost”) originally appeared in The Kenyon Review, Fall 2006.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  “Secondary Epic” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1960 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  The Georgics by Virgil, translated with an introduction and notes by L. P. Wilkinson (Penguin Classics, 1982). Copyright © L. P. Wilkinson, 1982. Used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Illustrations by David Cain. Copyright © David Cain, 2006.

  eISBN: 9781101371619

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Lynne

  tendimus in Latium

  INTRODUCTION

  ROME

  When Publius Vergilius Maro—Virgil in common usage—was born in 70 B.C., the Roman Republic was in its last days. In 71 it had just finished suppressing the three-year-long revolt of the slaves in Italy, who, organized by Spartacus, a gladiator, had defeated four Roman armies but were finally crushed by Marcus Crassus. Crassus celebrated his victory by crucifying six thousand captured slaves along the Appian Way, the road that ran south from Rome to the Bay of Naples and from there on to Brundisium. In 67 B.C. Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) was given an extraordinary, wide command to clear the Mediterranean, which the Romans claimed was “our sea”—mare nostrum—of the pirates who made commerce and travel dangerous. (The young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and held for ransom around 70 B.C.; he paid it but came back at once with an armed force and crucified them all.) In 65 B.C. Catiline conspired against the Republic but was suppressed in 63 through the action of the consul, Cicero. From 58 to 51 B.C. Julius Caesar added what are now Switzerland, France, and Belgium to the Roman Empire, creating in the course of these campaigns a superb army loyal to him rather than to the Republic, while in 53 B.C. Crassus invaded Parthia, a part of modern-day Iraq, but was killed at Carrhae, where many of his soldiers were taken prisoner and the legions’ standards displayed as trophies of the Parthian victory. From 49 to 45 B.C. there was civil war as Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy with his victorious army, which defeated Pompey’s forces in Greece at Pharsalus in 48 B.C. Pompey escaped by sea and took refuge on the shore of Egypt, the only country on the Mediterranean not yet part of the Roman Empire, but he was killed by the Alexandrians and his head taken to Alexandria to be given to Caesar when he arrived. Caesar went on to defeat another republican army in Africa at Thapsus, and in the next year vanquished the last republican army at Munda in Spain. Back in Rome he appointed himself dictator, a position that had always been held for a short term in an emergency, for ten years.

  But on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., Caesar was assassinated in the Senate House by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. However, Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Caesar’s right-hand man in Gaul as in Rome, and young Octavian, great-nephew and adopted son of Caesar, soon drove the republicans to Greece and defeated the republican army at Philippi. Brutus and Cassius subsequently committed suicide. Antony took over the pacification of the eastern half of the Empire, making Alexandria, where he became the lover of the Hellenistic queen Cleopatra, his base, while Octavian, making Rome his headquarters, dealt with problems in Spain and the west.

  Tension between Antony and Octavian grew steadily over t
ime, in spite of attempts at reconciliation, and in 31 B.C. Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet was defeated by Octavian and his admiral, Agrippa, off the Greek promontory of Actium. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide in Alexandria rather than walk to execution in Rome in Octavian’s triumph, and Egypt became a Roman province. Virgil died in 19 B.C. Octavian, who assumed the title of Augustus in 27 B.C., ruled what was now the Roman Empire until his death in A.D. 14, when he was succeeded peacefully by Tiberius.

  In his comparatively short life Virgil became the supreme Roman poet; his work overshadowed that of his successors, and his epic poem, the Aeneid, gave Homeric luster to the story of Rome’s origins and its achievement—the creation of an empire that gave peace and the rule of law to all the territory surrounding the Mediterranean, to what are now Switzerland, France, and Belgium, and later to England. Yet when Virgil was born in the village of Andes, near Mantua (Mantova), he, like all the other Italians living north of the Po River, was not a Roman citizen.

  Full Roman citizenship had been gradually conceded over the centuries to individuals and communities, but in the years 91 to 87 B.C. those communities still excluded fought a successful civil war against Rome, which ended with the grant of full Roman citizenship to all Italians living south of the Po River. The territory north of the river continued to be a provincia, ruled by a proconsul from Rome, with an army. Full Roman citizenship was finally granted to the inhabitants of the area by Julius Caesar in 49 B.C., when Virgil was already a young man.

  Virgil was an Italian long before he became a Roman, and in the second book of the Georgics he follows a passage celebrating the riches of the East with a hymn of praise for the even greater riches of Italy:

  But neither Media’s land most rich in forests,

  The gorgeous Ganges or the gold-flecked Hermus

  Could rival Italy . . . the land is full

  Of teeming fruits and Bacchus’ Massic liquor.

  Olives are everywhere and prosperous cattle . . .

  And then the cities,

  So many noble cities raised by our labors,

  So many towns we’ve piled on precipices,

  And rivers gliding under ancient walls . . .

  Hail, mighty mother of fruits, Saturnian land

  And mighty mother of men . . .

  The same has bred a vigorous race of men,

  Marsians, the Sabine stock, Ligurians

  Inured to hardship, Volscians javelin-armed.

  (2.136-69, trans. L. P. Wilkinson, et seq.)

  And in the Aeneid, Virgil’s poem about the origins of Rome, though his hero, Aeneas, and the Trojan invaders of Italy are to build the city from which Rome will eventually be founded, there is a constant and vibrant undertone of sympathy for and identification with the Italians, which becomes a major theme in the story of the Volscian warrior princess Camilla.

  Biographical information about Virgil is scant and much of it unreliable, but we learn from Suetonius’ “Life” of the poet, written probably in the early years of the second century A.D., that Virgil “was tall . . . with a dark complexion and a rustic appearance” and that “he spoke very slowly and almost like an uneducated man.” Yet when he read his own poems, his delivery of them “was sweet and wonderfully effective” (pp. 467-73, trans. J. C. Rolfe, et seq.). And we learn from the same author that when he read to Augustus and his sister Octavia the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid, when he reached in the sixth book the lines about her son Marcellus, who had died young, she fainted, and it was difficult to revive her. We know too that Virgil and his father somehow escaped the fate of so many of the landowners in the area that Virgil refers to as Mantua—“but Mantua / Stands far too close for comfort to poor Cremona” (Eclogues 9.28, trans. C. Day Lewis, et seq.)—confiscation of the land to reward the veterans of the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C. We know this mainly by inference from Virgil’s first poems, the Eclogues, published around 39 to 38 B.C.

  THE ECLOGUES

  Like most Roman poems, the Eclogues (a word that means something like “Selections”) have a Greek model. In this case it is the poems of Theocritus, a resident of the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily who, writing in the Doric dialect of the western Greeks, invented a genre of poetry that used the Homeric hexameter for very un-Homeric themes: the singing contests, love affairs, and rivalries of shepherds and herdsmen who relieved the boredom of their lonely rural life by competing in song accompanied by pipes and pursuing their love affairs and rivalries far from the city and the farmlands, in the hills with their sheep, goats, and cattle. Their names, and the names of their lady loves—Lycidas, Daphnis, Amaryllis—have become famous through the long tradition of pastoral poetry that began with Theocritus, flourished in Virgil, and had a splendid rebirth in the Italian Renaissance and in Elizabethan England; Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender was published in 1579, and Milton’s Lycidas (written in 1637) is a masterpiece of the genre. It reached what might well be considered its end in the parodic performance of Marie An toinette, queen of France, and her court ladies playing the role, at the Petit Trianon palace, of simple milkmaids.

  Not all of Theocritus’ poems feature shepherds; one of them, for example, is a delightful dramatic sketch of two light-headed, gossipy housewives on their way to the festival of Adonis in Alexandria, and another is a hymn of praise to Ptolemy II, the ruler of Alexandria and Egypt. Similarly, one of Virgil’s ten Eclogues, the fourth, has nothing to do with shepherds; it prophesies the birth of a son who will bring back the Golden Age on earth. Many Christians, from Lactantius on, later took this to be a prophecy of the birth of Christ, but it seems clear that Virgil was referring to the expectation that Octavian’s sister, married to Mark Antony and pregnant by him, would bear a son, and that this would heal the growing breach between the two leaders. But the child turned out to be a daughter, and in any case, Cleopatra’s hold on Antony was permanent.

  But Virgil differs from his model in one significant particular: he makes two of the Eclogues that are dialogues of shepherds, the first and ninth, reflect the sorrows and passions of the real world of 41 B.C.—the confiscation of land in the area north of the river Po, to reward the veterans of the armies of Octavian and Antony. The first Eclogue features Tityrus, who, as a result of a visit to Rome, has been granted, by a “young man”1 whom he will always worship as a god, a favorable response to his plea: “‘Pasture your cattle, breed from your bulls, as you did of old’” (1.45). But the speaker, Meliboeus, must go on his sad way,

  “To Scythia, bone-dry Africa, the chalky spate of the Oxus,

  Even to Britain—that place cut off at the very world’s end . . .

  To think of some godless soldier owning my well-farmed fallow,

  A foreigner reaping these crops!”

  (1.64-71)

  And in the ninth Eclogue, Moeris laments his eviction from his land, the day

  “. . . that I should have lived to see an outsider

  Take over my little farm—a thing I had never feared—

  And tell me, ‘You’re dispossessed, you old tenants,

  you’ve got to go.’ ”

  (9.2-4)

  It seems clear from all this that somehow Virgil, or rather Virgil’s father, escaped the fate of Meliboeus and Moeris. Either his farm was exempt from confiscation or he was given another in exchange. The “young man” can only have been Octavian, and somehow Asinius Pollio, who is mentioned in Eclogue 4, and who was a patron of poets and the arts, sensing the young Virgil’s talent, brought him to Octavian’s notice and secured his future education in the capital of the province, Mediolanum (Milan), at Rome, and later at Naples and at nearby Herculaneum, where his name appears on a burned papyrus as a student of Epicurean philosophy. At some point he was brought to the attention of Maecenas, who was Octavian’s friend and another benefactor of poets. We have from Virgil’s friend and fellow poet Horace an account of their meeting on the way to Brundisium (Brindis
i) with Maecenas on his mission to Greece to negotiate with Antony in 37 B.C. In his fifth Satire of the first book, written in hexameter verse, Horace describes the journey from Rome with Maecenas; at Sinuessa they meet with another group, of which Virgil is part. O qui complexus et gaudia, “Oh what embraces and joy!” And later at Capua they stay for the night at an inn. Lusum it Maecenas, writes Horace, “Maecenas goes off to exercise,” dormitum ego Vergiliusque, “and Virgil and I to bed” (1.5.43, 48, trans. Knox).

  Virgil’s Eclogues were an immediate success and soon gained all the trappings of general approval—some of the dialogues of shepherds were performed in theaters, quotations and parodies abounded. But what made them a landmark in the history of Latin poetry were the music and elegance of the hexameter verse, the exquisite control of the rhythmic patterns.

  The Latin hexameter, modeled on Homer’s, had been used by Latin poets ever since Quintus Ennius (239-169 B.C.) had adapted it to celebrate in his Annales the history of Rome from the founding by Aeneas down to his own day. Virgil knew and often used phrases of this poet; he also knew the great hexameter poem of his older contemporary, Lucretius, whose De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) celebrated the Epicurean philosophy of which Virgil was a devotee: Virgil’s lines often show the influence of Lucretius’ poem. But only Virgil’s own poetic genius can explain the lightness, the dexterity, the rhythmic music of the Eclogues, and this is even truer of his next, and most perfect, poem, the Georgics.

  THE GEORGICS

  This poem, of more than two thousand lines in four books, was first read to Octavian soon after the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 B.C., which made him sole ruler of the Roman world, at Atella near Naples by Maecenas and Virgil in 29 B.C. It is, like the Eclogues, modeled on a Greek poem, Hesiod’s Works and Days, but whereas Hesiod writes of farming from firsthand experience, Virgil has to draw on a prose work written on the subject, the De Re Rustica of Varro, which had been published in 37-36 B.C. Of Virgil’s four books the first is on field crops, the second on trees, the third on herds, and the fourth on bees. The only source of sweetness available to the ancient Western world was honey—hence the importance of bee-keeping. Virgil’s poem, with its devotion to the land, the crops, and the herds, fits admirably into the old Roman ideal: the Roman farmer is equally adapted to work on the land and to do the work of a soldier in the legion in time of war. The model was the legendary figure Cincinnatus, who in 458 B.C. was called from his farm and given dictatorial power; he rescued the state by defeating the Aequi and, after holding supreme power for sixteen days, resigned it and returned to his plow. But the Georgics is no more a real manual for the soldier turned farmer than the Augustan ideal of the Roman soldier-farmer was realistic; as a manual for farmers the Georgics has huge omissions and as a practical handbook would be as useless as Augustus’s program of re-creating the Roman farmer-soldier was impractical. Most of Italy was cultivated by slave labor on land owned by absentee landlords who lived in Rome. The Georgics is a work of art—as Dryden declared, “the best Poem by the best Poet”—on which Virgil worked for seven years; he compared his work on it to that of a mother bear licking her cubs into shape.