I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I missed out on The Aeneid in my schooling. When I ran across a recent review of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Virgil’s classic epic, I decided that I needed to remedy that problem.
I have always enjoyed mythology, and I recently finished teaching The Odyssey again, so the terrain of The Aeneid is familiar. As the Greeks destroy the city of Troy, Aeneas (with his aging father, his son, and a small band of warriors) sets out to find a new homeland. He receives a prophecy that Jupiter will allow him to build a new city in Italy and that his descendants will build an empire there. Before he can reach Italy, though, he and his men wash ashore in northern Africa, where the love of Queen Dido tempts him to stay. When Aeneas does finally reach Italy, he has to engage in a bloody battle to win the land that Jupiter promised.
While the story occasionally becomes bogged down in long lists of names, The Aeneid is an amazing adventure. In this new translation, Lombardo does for The Aeneid what Seamus Heaney did with his translation of Beowulf—he makes an ancient epic fresh, full of life, readable, and relevant.
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