From Harper's Magazine:
The Aeneid is a different sort of holy book. It has found its English voice countless times. The most recently heralded version was done by Robert Fagles, and written about approvingly in these pages by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi. I like the Fagles too, but first liked the Fitzgerald. He hooked me early in that unfinished epic’s first book with a series of lines I love. The moment comes as Aeneas, who had fled Troy during its destruction by the Greeks, is later marooned by a storm on an unknown shore. Through wilderness and woods, he comes upon a glorious city. Beautiful though it is, he worries that he and his hidden ship will be taken for infidels and destroyed like so much else they’ve already lost. Still brave, Aeneas enters the temple at the city center in the hope that he might make himself known to its elders. While he waits uneasily, he notices that upon the walls of the temple are many murals. The scenes that they depict seem familiar to Aeneas, and so he examines them. He does not believe his eyes: they are panoramas of Troy. Of the great war, the battles with the Greeks, the terrible invasion, the torching of the city—images of Trojan bravery even in defeat, everywhere visible within this foreign shrine:
Here Aeneas
Halted, and tears came.
“What spot on earth…
Is not full of the story of our sorrow?
Look, here is Priam. Even so far away
Great valor has due honor; they weep here
For how the world goes,and our life that passes
Touches their hearts. Throw off your fear. This fame
Insures some kind of refuge.”
He broke off
To feast his eyes and mind on a mere image,
Sighing often, cheeks grown wet with tears…
He stood enthralled, devouring all in one long gaze.
Here, Aeneas finds solace in the ordered universe of art in the wake of life’s disorder. Sarah Ruden, who has also done versions of Lysistrata and The Satyricon, now has done an Aeneid (Yale) that gives readers another chance to find solace in Virgil.
More here.
