Rating: 
Summary: Great translation of an imperfect epic
Review: Virgil's Aeneid is more than just an epic adventure; it's a declaration of its author's patriotic love for the Roman Empire. Likewise, Aeneas is not just a literary hero, but a symbol of Rome's eventual fortitude and Virgil's vision of the progenitor of Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor. Aeneas is the perfect heroic archetype: loyal to his family and his people, fierce and brutal to his enemies, and a stud with the ladies. He is, in the minds of Virgil and probably all Roman men of the day, the ideal for the Roman man.The background of the story: The goddesses Juno, Venus, and Minerva are arguing over which of them is the most beautiful. They decide to let a young man named Paris, a prince of Troy, judge them in a sort of beauty contest. Each goddess offers Paris a bribe, but the one he accepts is Venus's, which is the promise of the love of Helen, queen of Sparta. Paris and Helen run off together to Troy, which enrages her husband Menelaus and incites the Greeks to declare war on Troy. After many years of fighting, the Greeks topple Troy and the few Trojan survivors, with Aeneas as their leader, set sail across the Mediterranean to search for a new home. It is roughly here that the Aeneid begins. It is prophesied that the Trojans will end up in Italy in the general area of what is now Rome, where Aeneas's descendants far into the future will build a Roman state of majesty and prosperity. However, they have to endure many hardships along the way because Juno is still holding a grudge against them over the outcome of that beauty contest. She besets them with a multitude of obstacles: They're tossed around at sea by storms, attacked by harpies, and pursued by cyclopses. (There are, of course, direct references to the Iliad and the Odyssey.) Along the way, Aeneas is courted by Dido, the queen of Carthage, but he is impelled to leave her and continue his pilgrimage. After a side trip to the underworld to visit his dead father, Aeneas and his cohorts finally arrive in Italy and make friends with the native people. However, Juno sabotages this friendship and instigates a war between the Trojans and the Italians. The remainder of the Aeneid chronicles this war with graphic descriptions of battles, ending with Aeneas's slaying of Turnus, his nemesis. I found Fitzgerald's translation easy and enjoyable to read; the grammatical structure and choice of words are very "modern" while still maintaining the poem in its proper context. Fitzgerald himself points out that the Aeneid is not perfect; it's incomplete and has some continuity errors. But it is still a fascinating window on the hearts and minds of a civilization of antiquity.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent translation of this classic epic
Review: What can be said about this classic masterpiece in epic poetry? Virgil clearly emanated the Homeric style of epic, and his debt to Homer is very apparent in this work. Still, it retains a style and flavor all its own. The poem tells the story of Aeneas, the Trojan hero from the Iliad who survived to found the Roman race in Italy. The first half of the poem are his adventures in reaching Italy (comparable to the Odyssey), and the second half deal with the war that results from his landing there (comparable to the Iliad).
It is said that Virgil wrote this poem at least partially in hopes of fostering the national sentiment of the Romans, of making them proud of their heritage, and of uniting them in a common ancestry. His motives are very clear--there are a number of references to the future glory of Rome, and various visions of the leaders and generals who would bring Rome her greatest glory. Interestingly, this poem was never completed, and Virgil, on his deathbed, asked that it be destroyed. It was preserved, however, by Augustus, and so we have it in its mostly finished form today.
This translation by Fitzgerald is excellent. Like his translations of Homer, Fitzgerald's Aeneid flows very smoothly, and stays true to the feel of the original. Also, there is a postscript in the back detailing both the history of the times, and various events in Virgil's life. This postscript is very helpful in understanding the world in which the poet lived.
There is also a glossary of names in the back, very useful for keeping all the people, places, and deity straight. All in all, this version of The Aenied is very satisfying. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: FITZGERALD vs. MANDELBAUM
Review: What happens when you read a work you know is great, know is evaluated highly by those more learned than you which you simply do not like? The 'Aeneid ' like the pious Aeneas himself was for me one of the works most difficult to get through. Plodding, serious, structured and fierce it moves ahead like a Roman legion devastating and conquering all before it. There are of course humanly moving elements in the work, the cry of Dido at her abandonment by Aeneas, the burning of the city and the dramatic rescue upon the shoulders, father and son- but the work as a whole including its many battles and slayings rated high along with Spenser's ' Faerie Queen' in my mind as one of the most boring of all the great masterpieces.
This of course says more about my own limitations as a reader than it does about the work itself. And I should at least mention the virtues of loyalty and courage so clearly embodied in this most Roman of works. However no matter how I try this celebration of Augustus Empire, this Roman prelude to the greater Dante always seemed to me so relentlessly humorless ,
as to be skimmed through rapidly rather than really chewed and digested.
Rating: 
Summary: Vergil writes poor English verse
Review: What kind of poetry is this? The words don't even rhyme! I guess in Vergil's day there weren't so many rhyming words in English. It takes real a poet, like Maya Angelo or Jewel, to rhyme words properly. "My hands are small, I know/ But they're not yours, they are my own." Now THAT'S poetry. But turning to the plot of this "poem," I don't understand what this Juno has against this Aeneas guy. He seems like a straight fellow, but she's always trying to drown him and stuff. And what's the big deal about Rome? It seemed so stupid that Aeneas had to go off and found this city and couldn't stay with that chick who killed herself. I've been to Rome. It's not all that great, and they don't even speak English. Aeneas is not a good role model for kids.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Stunning and Influential
Review: When the Roman armies conquered the remnants of Alexander's empire in 168 B.C., they recognized something in Greek culture that was more impressive than anything Rome, itself, had achieved. The result is that Rome adapted itself to the model of Greece. Among the adaptors of Greek culture, none was more brilliant, original or influential than the poet Virgil. He faced a formidable challenge in that everyone who encountered Greek culture recognized how much it had been shaped by Homer. To write a Roman equivalent to The Iliad or The Odyssey required the ability to think, a way with words, and a storytelling capacity that would enable a poet to do for Rome what Homer had done for Greece. Only one poet succeeded and that was Virgil. Virgil began working on The Aeneid with an advantage Homer lacked: he was literate. Unlike the Greek aoidos, Virgil did not learn his art from oral storytellers. As his hero, Virgil chose a Trojan fighter whom Homer describes briefly in The Iliad. Virgil kept the outlines of Homer's Aeneas, but he developed the character in new and profound directions. The Aeneid resembles The Odyssey in recounting a series of Mediterranean adventures and an eventual homecoming (Books 1-6). It resembles The Illiad in recounting a war to capture a city (Books 7-12). But the home to which Aeneas sails is a new one, and his quest is to establish something that had not before existed rather than to return to something he once knew, as Odysseus does. The Aeneid is a founding myth and virtually every episode is symbolically charged with the weight of Aeneas's historic destiny. This destiny is the very thing that enables Virgil to reshape the character he found in Homer, transforming a warrior hero into a man who would influence the world for centuries to come. We see Aeneas gradually changing in a series of crises throughout the first half of the poem. Virgil presents Aeneas's departure from Troy as a departure from the values that had defined Homer's story of the war to capture Troy. One of the most memorable portraits of Aeneas is his weeping in Carthage as he contemplates depictions of the Trojan war: "there are tears for passing things; here, too/things mortal touch the mind." The tears of a Homeric hero have never had such weighty moral and historic implications. Readers of The Odyssey will recognize that Virgil has modeled Aeneas's affair with Dido (Books 1-4) on Odysseus's affair with various females on his way home from Troy. Aeneas's departure from Carthage has many parallels with Odysseus's departure from Ogygia, where he lived for seven years with Kalypso. In both cases, the foremost of the gods (Zeus for Homer and Jupiter for Virgil) sends the messenger of the gods (Hermes for Homer and Mercury for Virgil) on an impressive descent to the place where the hero is detained. Also, in both cases, the messenger speaks to someone about the necessity for the hero to leave and a loving female is abandoned by the hero. But the Dido episode is not just an imitation of Homer; it is a total reinterpretation of what such an episode means in the context of historic destiny. Rich with symbolic and historical implications, the Dido episode is also a poignant tragedy. The foundation that Aeneas lays in The Aeneid is for "the ramparts of high Rome," but he lays it symbolically, and he does not found a city, he captures one. Here, Virgil is treating readers to what today would be termed historical fiction. The real foundation Aeneas lays is for the moral fabric of an ideal Rome; an ideal Virgil, himself, hoped for in the Rome he knew. That is why it was so important for Virgil to transform the character of Homer's hero into the new sort of hero he had in mind. During Virgil's lifetime (70-19 B.C.), Octavius Caesar defeated Marcus Antonius at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., becoming the unrivaled source of power and taking the title "Augustus" to signify the importance of his position. One way to read The Aeneid is to say that Aeneas is an idealized version of Augustus; the battle of Actium is depicted at the center of Aeneas's shield, even if Aeneas does not know what that depiction signifies. The Aeneid, however is far more than flattery. Just as Aeneas has to lose Troy in order to establish Rome, so he loses something in victory, when he defeats Turnus in Book 12. The victory is the culmination of his quest in Italy and it is necessary for his destiny to be realized. It also anticipates the military success of Rome in Virgil's own day. But it also involves terrible loss which tinges the victory with tragedy. We are reminded of our own mortality everywhere in this story. If Rome is built on an awareness of this mortal insight, as Virgil seems to suggest, its greatness is justified and it may perhaps endure.
Rating:
Summary: definitely very cool
Review: wow
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