VIRGIL’S AENEID IS, of course, a major poem; it is also a great and beautiful one. The scope of an epic requires, in the writing, a designed variety, a calculated unevenness, now and then some easy-going carelessness. So the reader win find, here and there, transitional passages, the stock epithet, the conventional phrase, a few lines of vamping, and, in this or that line, what the Spanish call ripios. Over and above these matters of small detail, in the large panorama the reader will find valleys as well as peaks, dry ravines as well as upland meadows: the landscape is not always the same height above sea level, and its flora and fauna vary more than a little. The epic terrain of the Odyssey differs greatly from that of the Iliad, and both Iliad and Odyssey differ from the Aeneid, but there is nothing obtrusive in Virgil’s relatively studied concern with composition. Less wild and “natural,” the demesnes of the Aeneid have their full measure of more than pleasant countryside, loftiness also, majesty, grandeur.

Virgil, we have been told, wanted to burn the Aeneid; he was not satisfied with it. This attitude, it seems to me, reflects fatigue and exhaustion of spirit rather than considered literary judgment. The last revisions are always the most enervating, and Virgil, one can well believe, having worked on the poem for over a decade, had reached the point where he felt he would rather do anything, including die, than go over the poem one more time. If we had never known the poem was believed incomplete, we would, I think, find it difficult to decide which were the unsatisfactory portions. Who wants an epic poem absolutely perfect, anyway? and how could the Aeneid be improved, really?

A charge is brought against the Aeneid that it is propaganda. I do not know when this criticism first came to be brought; I suspect it is only our own time, with its persistent devotion to all the aspects of advertising and sloganeering, that feels sufficiently guilty about these activities to project the accusation across twenty centuries. Virgil, with whatever cheerfulness his nature was capable of, would readily have agreed that the Aeneid was propaganda; but then he did not know the invidious connotations of the word,—he would have taken it to mean only “things that ought to be propagated.” An institute of propaganda analysis would be completely baffled by the Aeneid; the conclusion might be that the poem was either the best or the worst propaganda that had ever been written. What kind of propaganda is it to begin a nationalist epic with the sorrowful sigh, “It was such a great burden,—a millstone around the neck—to found the Roman race”? What kind of propaganda is it to make the enemies, by and large, more interesting and sympathetic and colorful fellows than our own side? Lausus and Mezentius, for example, are a far more engaging father-and-son combination than Aeneas-Anchises, Aeneas-Ascanius, or Evander-Pallas. Dido and Camilla command our admiration much more than the blushing Lavinia or the fading Creusa. We respond to Turnus, and are at best coldly respectful to Aeneas. What goes on here, anyway? Shouldn’t some patriotic organization investigate this subversive writer, secretly in the pay of a foreign power? On the other hand, it is just possible that this is the very best form which national propaganda can take, the implicit and pervasive doctrine that great and good as our enemies may be, we can admire them, surpass them, be just to them, and not be afraid of them, either.

A word or two about the character of Aeneas. It may be that the trouble with him is really the trouble with us. We are not mature enough to accept, as epic hero, a man who is imaginative, sensitive, compassionate (everywhere except in parts of Books IV and X), and, in short, civilized; in other words, a paradox. There seems to be almost no aggression at all in the character of Aeneas: even in his dreams he wants to get out of trouble and avoid fighting. We don’t like this; we find most satisfactory those moments when he is telling Dido off, or making bitter sarcastic speeches at Lucagus and Liger. We object, further, that when he does fight, he knows very well that he is protected by the gods and by magic armor. (Yet we do not mind the latter in the case of, for instance, Superman; and would we rather have our hero sponsored by devils?) In the matter of invulnerability we are, I think, a little unjust: Virgil takes some pains to show that he can be hurt: he rushes in, unarmed, to preserve the truce; he is grievously wounded by the death of Pallas. In any event, we need not feel too guilty if we are not crazy about Aeneas; there is little in the record to show that the Romans left enthusiastic encomia, either.

As between Virgil and Homer, there can be no real comparison. Judged by any standard, Homer is the greater writer; judged by our own, Virgil is sometimes the better one. His immediate audience consisted of men much more like ourselves than did Homer’s; and Virgil is considerate of their special sensitivities in a way that Homer did not have to bother to be. What he thought he might require of Homer, of course he went and took; it seems to me that in the taking he always modifies, often, from our point of view, improves. He will, for one thing, always design and order more carefully: Book VI, for example, is much more artistically worked out than the descent to the dead in the Odyssey. And the games in Book V, though many details are lifted entire from the Iliad, have quite their own quality, a light-heartedness in the horseplay, a humor and gaiety entirely different from the uncouth bragging and brawling of the Homeric competitors. I think it is only literary scholars who could possibly look down their noses at this book. And in his scenes and stories of battle Virgil, it seems to me, is far more respectful to the modern reader’s sense of credulity than Homer is; no student of a work rather current in 1917, Small Problems of Infantry, would have any difficulty in understanding what went wrong with the mission of Nisus and Euryalus in Book IX.

It is too bad that the Aeneid, as a whole, is not better known in America. The general practice in our secondary schools has come to be that of reading Books I, II, IV, and VI, and that’s all. This seems to me a peculiar way to deal with a work of art, like looking at selected portions of the Venus of Milo. I do not see how any intelligent American boys or girls can go this slowly, unless they stop to scan every line, note every example of synecdoche or synizesis, and parse all the grammatical constructions, with special attention to the poetical dative of agent and the Greek middle voice accusative of respect. And where the impression grew that the last six books are inferior in interest to the first I do not understand. Virgil, for one, did not think so. Maius opus moveo.

It is a peculiar, paradoxical kind of great poem, this Aeneid. For us, I think, its greatness can be found in ways that may have had less appeal to the Roman mind. Its references may mean less, its music more. Not only the music of the lines, but the music of the whole: this is a composition, and the pleasure comes in listening to it as one would to a great symphony (and not too much attention, please, to the program notes). This is a composition, the Aeneid, beautifully wrought, beautifully balanced. Professor Conway has written an illuminating essay dealing with the poem in terms of its architecture; in detail, his analysis is excellent, but the central metaphor is a little unhappy if it leads you to envisage the Aeneid as an impressive pile, frozen and static. The poem moves, in more senses than one: the thing to do is to feel it and listen to it. Hear how the themes vary and recur; how the tone lightens and darkens, the volume swells or dies, the tempo rushes or lingers. Take in the poem with the mind, to be sure; take it in with the eye as well; but above all, hearken to it with the ear.

This translation is a quick and unscrupulous job. I am not being modest: a modest man would never have started, and a scrupulous one never finished. I have, nevertheless, been not entirely without principles. I have been trying to translate the poem, rather than transliterate its words. In doing so, I have transposed lines, cut some proper names and allusions where I thought they would excessively slow down reader interest, substituted the general for the specific or the specific for the general, and in short taken all kinds of liberties, such as no pure scholar could possibly approve. But I doubt if there is any such thing as an absolutely pure scholar, anyhow. A loose iambic pentameter has seemed to me the most convenient medium, though in some passages, where the tempo runs faster, you might not recognize it; and I have, by no means faithfully following Virgil, occasionally used his device of the half-line. I have preferred solecisms to archaisms: thus I have never used the second person singular pronoun. I know I have committed anachronisms, but, then, I know Virgil did too, and I have, in my opinion heroically, resisted one or two obvious temptations in this regard. What I have tried to be faithful to is the meaning of the poem as I understand it, to make it sound to you, wherever I can, the way it feels to me. Working on it, I have been impressed, more than ever through the thirty-odd years I have read it, by its richness and variety: to mention only one point, the famous Virgilian melancholy, the tone of Sunt lacrimae rerum, is, I begin to notice, a recurring, not a sustained, theme. There is much more rugged and rough, harsh and bitter, music in Virgil than you might suspect if you have only read about him. A recent essay by Mark Van Doren has given me considerable heart in offering this new translation: there is a kind of scholastic snobbishness, he points out, in the insistence that no man knows anything who has not read the classics in the original. It is better, no doubt, to read Virgil in his own Latin, but still—I hope some people may have some pleasure of him, some idea of how good he was, through this English arrangement.

Rolfe Humphries

New York City,
January, 1951