The Aeneid (Penguin Classics)
by Virgil

List Price: $12.00
Our Price: $5.47
You Save: $6.53 (54%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of The Aeneid (Penguin Classics)

Book Review: "Fated to be an Exile..."
Summary: 5 Stars

If Virgil could lead the poet Dante through the wasteland
and Inferno at the end of the Middle Ages, perhaps the poet
Virgil, aided by the skill and inspiration of the translator
W.F.Jackson Knight, might perform the same needed function for
us, here at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st
centuries.
W.F.Jackson Knight, in his very interesting and insightful
"Introduction," makes the argument that "the AENEID of Virigl
is a gateway between the pagan and the Christian centuries."
That much, itself, might serve as the basis for some excellent
essays of analysis and interpretation. But Knight has his own
path to tread. So we should let him.
/> "In the beginning, Rome had been a tiny settlement
surrounded by enemies -- and it had needed a strong will:
proud,disciplined, and sustained -- to survive at all.
Rome did survive and was led on by successive hard-won
victories to world dominion.
The early history is obscure, but the process seems
to have taken at least five centuries of almost continuous
warfare, and during that period the Romans achieved
unparalleled success, apparently through unique merits
of their own, combined with a special share of divine
favor and good fortune [a nice touch of Pagan sentiment,
there, to counter-balance the perhaps over-emphasis on
the Christian tie at the beginning]. This spectacular rise
of Rome was a matter for wonder and a certain reverence
to the Romans themselves, especially when, in the
later years of the republican period, new chances of peace
and prosperity, AND A NEW ACCESS OF SKEPTICISM threatened
THE OLD HABITS OF LOYALTY, INTEGRITY, and SELF-SACRIFICE"
[capitals are mine].
---------
Knight continues with his excellent "Introduction" and talks
of Publius Vergilius Maro [usually denoted as "Virgil"], the
excellent, visionary poet and artist who created the epic
poem for Roman patriotic pride, values teaching, and national
identity -- THE AENEID.
I especially like Knight's discussion of the influences on
Virgil as he wrote the epic.
--------
"The AENEID is the third, last, and longest of Virgil's
poems. It is a legendary narrative, a story about the
imagined origin of the Roman nation in times long before the
foundation of Rome itself. * * * The AENEID, as any epic should
be, is an exciting story extremely well told and full of
incident; it can be read as a story and nothing more. However,
besides being a story, it is a kind of moving picture --
carrying allusive, and in a sense, symbolic meanings. * * *
In the poem [the gods and goddesses]communicate with mortal men
either directly or through dreams, visions, omens, and the
words of prophets and clairvoyants. Virgil had no doubt that
the affairs of the earthly world are subject to the powers of
another world, a world which is normally, but by no means
always, invisible, but no less real for that....
* * * The great poets have a way of making what is seen
reveal the unseen; and they seem to do this better if they
collect an enormous quantity of observations on life, their
own and other people's, and then condense it under strong
pressure so that even a few words have a great power of
suggestion and persuasion. No doubt they are all the time

choosing with precise accuracy what is most important. The
result is an allusive and partly symbolic kind of language
able to communicate not merely single happenings but the
universal truth behind them.
These greater poets also reach back across past time, and
represent a view of the world which belongs not to one man
or one generation of men but to the men of many succeeding
generations or even a whole civilization. The experience
which is distilled may be the experience of many centuries;
and it may be condensed and focused by a single genius in
a single poetic statement. That is what Virgil did to the
experience of the Greeks and Romans in the AENEID."
["Introduction." W.F. Jackson Knight. AENEID. Penguin
Classics.]
In talking of the other literary influences which helped
inspire Virgil and which he distilled into his own poetic
process with the helps of the fires of creative energy
and intuition, Knight mentions (of course) the fact of Homer
and his two major epics, the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY.
He also mentions the influence of Lucretius. But he says:
"Virgil knew his [Lucretius] work well and made free use
of many hundreds of his phrases in the AENEID, and let them
suggest ideas. But since HE VIOLENTLY DISAGREED WITH
THE MATERIALISTIC PHILOSOPHY of LUCRETIUS, he could not
adopt his thought. Indeed, he apparently delighted in turning
it upside down, and expressing something far more like the

idealistic philosophy of PLATO, even when the phrases of
Lucretius were influencing him."
I very much prefer Knight's "prose" English version of the
AENEID over most of the other ones which I have encountered.
His English prose flows like poetry, and is eminently readable
as well as instantly understood. One encounters that famous
opening, translated so well into intuitive, inspired English
prose: "This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be
an exile, he was the first to sail from the land of Troy
and reach Italy, at its Lavinian shore. He met many
tribulations on his way both by land and on the ocean; high
Heaven willed it, for Juno was ruthless and could not forget
her anger. And he had also to endure great suffering in
warfare."
Inspiring and instructive, for Romans, for Dante, and
for us!

Summary of The Aeneid (Penguin Classics)

Classics Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Classics
• Poetry