The author has composed this companion for instructors, students and general readers who wish to study Virgil’s poem with a deeper understanding of its historical context, as well as a critical appreciation of its themes and artistry, but who must do so in English translation rather than its own Latin verse. As a teacher of the Aeneid in both Latin and translation, Christopher Tanfield explains in his Preface that he was hoping another scholar would undertake this task, comparable to efforts to make the Homeric poems similarly accessible to English-only readers. He eventually decided to do the job himself, further preparing detailed commentaries on Books I-VI and VII-XII in a second and third volume. (This review will focus on the first volume only.) For his readers’ reference and comparison, Tanfield has chosen the two “most purchased” English translations, one in prose by David West (Penguin, 2003), a second in verse by Robert Fagles (Penguin, 2006). He juxtaposes phrases from both renderings in his notes, West’s prose being more literal and word-for-word, Fagles’ verse freer and more sense-for-sense. The three volumes together provide a comprehensive introduction, commentary and even ready-made “trot” for students of the Latin text as well. In his concluding survey of the many different renderings of the Aeneid into English over the centuries, Tanfield suggests, following George Steiner, that all reading in any age and in any language is in itself a kind of translation, a rendering of the authors’ words on the page into the impressions and ideas they create in the minds of their recipients. Poetry may be “what is lost in translation,” as Robert Frost once quipped, but Tanfield hopes to minimize that loss, rescuing something of the poem’s resonant glamour to “the eye and ear,” while still uncovering “the turbulence of the ideas that underlie it” (173).
The author sets out to maximize this more complex experience of Virgil’s epic for readers of the poem in both English and Latin. This reviewer teaches medieval vernacular languages and literatures to undergraduates, but also early epics and sagas from around the world in translation—ancient, medieval and a few collected in more recent times. The syllabus varies not only because the subject is “target-rich” for texts worthy of comparison, but also because works once more regularly offered by Classics departments do not always make the cut in the contemporary Humanities curriculum. The publication of this student- (and instructor-) friendly set of volumes for a teacher of comparative literature is truly welcome, though most useful as a resource for student essays and research projects rather than regular reading assignments on the course syllabus.
Tanfield opens with a unit on the historical background of the poem, reviewing rival traditions of Rome’s origins that Virgil selectively adapted and amplified in his own account, but here these sources are compared with what we can learn of ancient Italy from archaeological excavations up to the traditional founding of Rome in 753 BCE. Much subsequent Roman history finds its way into Virgil’s retelling through prophecies, graphic depictions or other allusions to the first kings through 509 BCE; the early Republic through 133 BCE; the later Republic, Civil War and establishment of the Principate in 27 BCE. Virgil died eight years later in 19 BCE, by which time Augustus himself had become a fan of his work and thus an implicit presence in the poem. The new emperor and his sister Octavia were two of the Aeneid’s most attentive auditors during the process of its composition, Tanfield notes. Epic poets, just like their translators, have a “target audience,” so that in this case the imperial siblings served as male and female stand-ins for the Roman people as a whole. Minna Skafte Jensen in Writing Homer: A Study Based on Modern Fieldwork (2011) describes the inherent “inclusivity” of traditional epic poetry, even when replicated in specially staged dictations by interested sponsors. Epic poems “are so sophisticated,” she writes, “because they were orally composed” (my emphasis, 213). Virgil drafted his long poem in writing, of course, but delivered it to mixed audiences of listeners in an artful imitation of oral-traditional epic performance as illustrated by Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, Tanfield notes that one of the earliest complaints about the Aeneid is that its diction is too demotic or “low-brow” for what had come by that time to be seen as the elevated register of classical Greek epic (166). Virgil himself, hailing from the boondocks of Mantua up in Cisalpine Gaul, knew better. His art may have engaged the emperor as his prime auditor—the princeps as first listener among equals—but Augustus himself served the poet’s purpose as a kind of conduit or filter through which his poem could flow to the Roman people as a whole. Virgil’s epic is thus generous, even expansive in its evocation of the diverse origins of the populus Romani. He reimagines their ethnogenesis as former enemies leading up to a current imperial present. Like most epic narratives, the Aeneid describes through a tale of long ago how its recipients came to be the people they are now. The poem became the site of a broader cultural formation, the mine-face at which the Roman people could excavate and confront their past conflicts and contemporary resources of common identity. Through the story of Aeneas they could rethink their ethnic, civic and regional loyalties, interrogate their parochial views of the world and cherished values, a project in which the voice of their poet and his listening prince led the way, providing not necessarily clear answers to issues of identity and allegiance, but episodes demanding their further thought and analysis. Augustus boasted that he had found Rome brick and left it marble, but the epic poem produced during his rule turned out to be not so much the polished, stately edifice of imperial power, but rather porous and edgy, a work more in progress than a clear and present promise for the future. The course of Rome’s fate never did run smooth and Virgil’s poem dramatizes how the story of Rome was and is conflicted by multiple wills, interests, impulses and animosities, both internal and external, human and divine—an overdetermined patchwork of causes and their effects. An inexorable fate is adduced to preside over all these competing influences, Tanfield observes, but its ends are indeterminate and still incomplete. The story is not yet over, so that Virgil’s poem poses more questions than it answers for the SPQR, the Senate and People of Rome, as they embark upon their new political experiment. It becomes the very site of collective self-scrutiny and reflection, where the poet and his people are challenged to do their hardest thinking about who they were, who they are and who they want to be.
Tanfield turns next to what is known or surmised of Virgil’s own life and artistic career, including his invention of the “Virgilian Wheel,” his cycle of works often imitated by ambitious poets in subsequent centuries, moving from his pastoral Eclogues to the agrarian Georgics to his epic grand finale, establishing these genres and their conventions in incremental dignity and poetic heft.
Next the author examines Virgil’s characters, addressing some criticisms thereof, complaints Tanfield examines by comparing ten key figures in the poem: the Trojan and Italian rivals Aeneas and Turnus; the jilted Carthaginian mistress Dido; the hero’s son Ascanius and father Anchises; the native Latinus, his queen Amata and their daughter Lavinia; the Greek Evander; and the “transgendered” woman warrior Camilla, who is elevated and objectified at the same time. She is superior, but exotic and soon to be obsolete, à la Edward Said’s Orientalism (1977), a female embodiment of the chaste beauty and natural vigor of antique Italy now owned lock, stock and barrel by a patriarchal Rome.
Even more searchingly, Tanfield explores the theological infrastructure of the Aeneid, that is, the role and character of divinities who intrude so aggressively upon the fortunes of the human beings in the story, their support for or resistance to an importunate fate, a somewhat ambiguous providential imperative that perseveres through time, whatever the will of the mighty gods themselves. Fate is not impervious to divine hostility and caprice, but trudges doggedly on through the endless exigencies of the ages, just like the pious hero himself.
This excursus leads Tanfield into a more detailed consideration of Virgil’s own philosophical musings, his attraction to Orphism and Pythagoreanism, as well as his debts (sometimes in resistance or reaction) to Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans and Stoics, but especially his engagement with the philosophical writings of the poet’s older contemporary Cicero.
In Chapter 6, Tanfield provides a thumbnail sketch of Roman society in Virgil’s own day, a culture still highly conservative in many ways, but undergoing new challenges and ferment from foreign influx as its empire grew. He covers an emergent sense of Romanitas through time, and explores a Roman understanding of family relations, the role and status of women, religious assumptions and beliefs, and the distinctive Roman culture of military service and enculturated violence. The key components of this amalgamated “Romanness” include multiple friends, enemies and “frenemies,” all of whom, even the Carthaginians, brought their own contributions to the institutions and culture of Rome. But perhaps most obviously, Roman family values are prioritized by the hero’s own pietas, his patrilineal “devotion” to his father and son, and faithful conveyance of the Penates, the guardian spirits of home and hearth, a commitment that the high god Jupiter himself identifies as the singularly Roman virtue. For Virgil, military preeminence is essential to the project of empire, but its purpose and point are domestic, to bring “a settled pattern upon … the works and ways of peace” (6.852), one extended to the four points of the compass. The wandering Trojans are homebodies at heart who offer stolid peaceful domesticity as their gift to the world.
Tanfield next turns to the conventional literary features of the Aeneid—Virgil’s techniques of characterization and narrative development; his use of ekphrasis, similes, extended speeches, and poetic diction, and his prosody. Tanfield offers advice on how to read the poem with a sensitivity to its internal chimes and cross-references, as well as its responsiveness to other epics and literary antecedents, some of which are obvious, others more suggestive or conjectural.
A very substantial and detailed survey of the reception of the Aeneid is offered in the penultimate Chapter 9, covering the first 150 years after Virgil; the second to fifth centuries CE (Servius and Macrobius); the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including most famously Dante’s Divine Comedy; and the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries, our time, where the purport and significance of the poem have been sharply scrutinized and re-evaluated by successive schools of contemporary critical theory, those inflected by Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, deconstructive or other approaches. Some current critics, Tanfield believes, feel obliged to seek “out within the Aeneid the corrosion of its own Augustan vision” (163), but the main thrust of his understanding of the poem most closely approximates what a “New Historicist,” Stephen Greenblatt, has said about the English playwright in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988): “The subversive voices are produced by and within the affirmations of order; they are powerfully registered, but they do not undermine that order” (quoted 162). The Aeneid is a tense and often intense Rorschach image, Tanfield suggests—complete in itself, but fraught and rapidly shifting in its impressions upon the reader.
The final Chapter 10, as noted above, provides a survey of the many efforts to translate the Aeneid into English, among which Tanfield most admires that of John Dryden (1697). He concludes this first volume with maps and genealogies, endnotes to the chapters, and a very useful index (62 pages) to all three volumes. A select bibliography, including online resources, is offered to students, but the notes and following commentaries contain many more detailed bibliographical references to secondary literature on the poem.
Every future teacher and serious student of Virgil’s Aeneid will want these volumes close to hand or readily available in the library.