#AENEID FITZGERALD EXCERPT PROFESSIONAL#
Mackail’s fine edition of the Aeneid 2-“designed not so much for professional scholars and students… as for readers and lovers of great poetry”-and also of Haecker’s Vergil: Vater des Abendlandes, a book to which T.S. This is a literature which reached epic proportions in our own century and shows no signs of abating as we approach the millennium one of its highpoints was the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth-around 70 BC-in the 1930s, which saw the publication of J.W. Still extant is the voluminous commentary compiled by one Servius in the fourth century AD it was the forerunner of a huge proliferation of exegesis, criticism, and controversy that began with the first printing of Virgil’s poems sometime around 1469.
#AENEID FITZGERALD EXCERPT FULL#
Virgil was already famous in Rome long before his death, not only for his Eclogues and Georgics but also for the as yet unpublished Aeneid, from which he had read excerpts for Augustus and his family and which his younger contemporary Propertius heralded in the famous lines: “Make way, Greek and Roman writers! Something greater than the Iliad is being born.” 1 With the publication of the full text Virgil became the Roman classic, studied in schools and annotated and analyzed by commentators and critics over the centuries. Perhaps this was one of the features of his work that established his reputation, in medieval times, as a magician, one who could put a stop to a visitation of bloodsucking leeches or turn the fountains at Pozzuoli into medicinal baths that cured all diseases.
Tennyson called his line the “stateliest measure/ever moulded by the lips of men.” Later Latin poets-Ovid, Lucan, Statius-would learn from him but though one or the other might occasionally rise to Virgil’s level in sweetness and elegance, none could hope to rival his mastery of the inner harmonics of a line that seems at times sheer magic. “He is,” says Dryden, “everywhere elegant, sweet and flowing in his hexameters.” But it was not only Augustan English poets that fell under his spell. Virgil’s lines are also the medium of a subtle and powerful music which has stamped his words unforgettably on the memories of countless readers in the Western world ever since. He has previously paid Virgil the compliment of adapting his words for his own opening address: Or sei tu quel Virgilio… “Are you that Virgil…?” It is an unmistakable echo of the half-incredulous question Dido addresses to her Trojan guest as he reveals his identity: Tune ille Aeneas… “Are you that Aeneas…?” This poetic style is what Dante learned from Virgil, as he tells him when they meet at Hell’s gate: “You alone are the one from whom I took the fine style that has brought me honor”- lo bello stile che m’ha fatto onore. They drew on the achievements of his predecessors in the epic meter-Ennius and Lucretius-to create a Roman epic style and a poetic eloquence of enormous range, one that moves effortlessly from the impassioned rhetoric of Dido’s denunciation of Aeneas to the pastoral tranquillity of Evander’s humble dwelling on what will one day be the site of Rome’s great buildings from the love songs and banter of imaginary Sicilian shepherds to the fire and slaughter of Troy’s destruction. They were lines that opened up new vistas for Latin poetry by the originality and dexterity of their adaptation of the Greek models-Theocritus, Hesiod, and, above all, Homer. Virgil had lived only fifty-one years, but, in spite of his slow rate of composition (seven years for the 2,183 lines of the Georgics), he left the huge legacy of three works that contain close to 16,000 hexameter lines.
Among the few items in the highly unreliable biographical tradition that have a ring of truth are his remark that he created a poem like a she-bear, gradually licking it into shape, and the report that as he lay dying at Brindisi in 19 BC, he ordered his executors to destroy the manuscript of his major work, the Aeneid, because it lacked a final revision (an order, fortunately, countermanded by Augustus).
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