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.

With its epic models, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid ranks among the greatest poems, not only of classical antiquity, but of all time. It tells the story of Aeneas, who leads a band of survivors from fallen Troy through wandering and war to found the city that will become imperial Rome. Fully equal to Homer in narrative sweep, dramatic power, and lyric intensity, Virgil's epic outshines its models in the passion and compassion with which its characters, even its hero's formidable opponents, are delineated: Dido, the African queen and femme fatale who would hold him back from his mission; and Turnus, the proud Italian prince he must overcome--ultimately in single combat--to fulfill it. Even the gods above are all too human. A fairy-tale? Of course; but the grandest fairy-tale of western culture, whose later literature it has fundamentally shaped. Not surprisingly, few works have been so often--or so inadequately--translated. It's not just a matter of classical Latin into modern English; in itself, that's not so hard. It's the 'aura' of the great original: its classical flavour, cultural significance, and stately poetic style have never been, perhaps never can be, captured. Yet that is what this translation sets out to do. It begins from our side of the classics, from the western literature the poem has so deeply influenced, and reflects the narrative fluency, dazzling lyricism, and distinctive dignity of Virgil's poem in a fresh and unstilted blank verse resonant with English and American tradition. The result is the most readable version ever. The problems and principles such a project involves are aired in an introduction that illuminates Virgil's great work as never before. Enjoy!

This book makes available Ronald Knox's hitherto unpublished lectures on Virgil's Aeneid delivered at Trinity College, Oxford, as part of a lecture course on Virgil in 1912. Written with Knox's customary incisiveness and with frequent allusions to contemporary life, the lectures are devoted to the appreciation of the Aeneid and focus on what he called the 'essential and dominant characteristics' that make up its greatness. They deal with Virgil's political and religious outlook, ideas of the afterlife, sense of romance and pathos, narrative style, sources, versification and appreciation of scenery. His interpretation of the relationship between Dido and Aeneas renders redundant the question, much debated to this day, of whether Aeneas loved Dido, and also portrays Aeneas more sympathetically than is currently fashionable. The additional introductory and critical essays by the contributors place the lectures in their historical and scholarly context, bring out their enduring relevance and illustrate how Ronald Knox's distinctive approach might be still developed to advantage. As Robert Speaight noted in his presidential address to the Virgil Society in 1958, 'many of us who love our Virgil will now understand him better because Ronald Knox loved and understood him so well'.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

Filled with history and legend, Virgil's classic narrative poem glorifying the genesis of the Roman Empire is one of the towering works of Western civilization. Dickinson's modern translation captures the magnificence of Virgil's timeless poetry, making it compelling to contemporary readers while preserving the tone, epic sweep, and grandeur of the original. Includes a map and three appendices.

For more than a century, critics of the Aeneid have assumed that all or most of its episodes must propound something about Aeneas and his mission to found the Roman people, and through them about Rome and Augustus; whether that is their positive aspects, or their brutality and destructiveness, or the contrast between the public "voice" of their achievements and the private "voice" of the suffering they cause. This book argues that this assumption is wrong; the Aeneid's main purpose was to present a series of emotionally moving episodes, especially pathetic ones. This book shows that the Aeneid makes more sense when regarded primarily as a series of emotion-arousing episodes than as expressing a pro-Aeneas, anti-Aeneas or two voices message. That is how it was regarded into the nineteenth century and that is what the ancient Greeks and Romans assumed was the main purpose of literature.