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The Essential
AENEID
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Virgil
The Essential
AENEID
Translated and Edited by
Stanley Lombardo
Introduction by
W. R. Johnson
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
iii
Aeneid Essential-00Bk Page i
Copyright © 2006 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For further information, please address:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
P. O. Box 44937
Indianapolis, IN 46244-0937
www.hackettpublishing.com
Cover design by Abigail Coyle and Brian Rak
Interior design by Meera Dash and Elizabeth L. Wilson
Composition by William Hartman
Printed at Dickinson Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Virgil.
[Aeneis. English. Selections]
The essential Aeneid / Virgil ; translated and edited by
Stanley Lombardo ; introduction by W.R. Johnson.
p. cm.
Abridged edition of Lombardo’s translation of the
Aeneid, published in 2005.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87220-791-9 — ISBN 0-87220-790-0 (pbk.)
1. Aeneas (Legendary character)—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry,
Latin—Translations into English. I. Lombardo, Stanley, 1943-
II. Title.
PA6807.A5L583 2006
873’.01—dc22
2005022889
ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-791-2 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-790-5 (pbk.)
Adobe PDF ebook ISBN: 978-1-60384-061-3
Black process 45.0° 133.0 LPI
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Contents
Map vi
Note on the Latin Text viii
Introduction ix
Aeneid (abridged) 1
Glossary of Names 198
Suggestions for Further Reading 210
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Note on the Latin Text
This translation is based on the Oxford text of R. A. B. Mynors. I
have consulted the commentaries of T. E. Page and R. D. Williams,
and occasionally I have adopted their readings. It was once the cus-
tom to begin the Aeneid with four introductory lines (first quoted
by Suetonius, now rejected by most editors), placing the Aeneid in
the context of Virgil’s earlier works, the Eclogues and Georgics, so
that the poem opened as follows:
I am the poet who once tuned his song
On a slender reed and then leaving the woods
Compelled the fields to obey the hungry farmer,
A pleasing work. But now War’s grim and savage
Arms I sing. . . .
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Introduction*
The Aeneid is an epic poem about the destruction of civilizations
and their resurrections. Its insistence on the human capacity to
hope, even when—especially when—that hope is tested on the
brink of ruin, lends the poem what many have felt to be its univer-
sality and has enabled it to exercise its hold on the imagination of
the West for just over twenty centuries. Yet Virgil’s epic is no sim-
ple tale of hope and triumph. Most epics concern themselves with
celebrating the defeat of the enemies who had threatened doom to
the community for which the epic poet composes his victory poem,
and the Aeneid, in this regard, resembles other specimens of its
genre. But in constructing his celebration of Rome’s empire, Virgil
never loses sight of the huge costs of the victory he is praising and
never forgets that most winners were once losers. Impressed by this
steady emphasis on suffering and loss, some readers of the poem
feel that its representations of imperial glory tend to be overshad-
owed by an opposing tragic vision. What fuels the poem, however,
is neither triumphalism nor defeatism but its pervasive tension
between exaltation and lament. This severe dialect—a counter-
point of defeat and triumph, abjection and salvation, death and
rebirth—is the Aeneid’s mainspring. The steady equipoise of this
double vision arms the Aeneid with its unique power to comfort as
well as disturb readers even today.
The enduring appeal of this epic over the past two millennia is
easy to appreciate. Spend an hour or so leafing through the pages
of The Times Atlas of World History and you will quickly be
reminded of how, from the earliest days to the present, the
boundaries of the tribes and nations of Europe (and elsewhere)
are continually and sometimes radically erased, renegotiated,
redrawn—by invasion, by civil war, by “barbaric” incursions.
The peoples of Europe have always understood what it means to
be displaced and exiled, to be conquered, to be an immigrant or
an émigré, to lose one’s homeland and to search, desperately, for
a new one. To such readers down the centuries, the closing verses
of Book 2—where Aeneas, the epic’s hero, prepares to lead the
survivors of burning Troy to safety—have always spoken with an
incomparable and poignant clarity:
*An expanded version of this Introduction first appeared in Virgil, Aeneid
(Hackett Publishing Company, 2005).
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