Imperiumsinefinism

Colin Burrow

• Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History; Times, Names and Places by Richard Jenkyns
  Oxford, 712 pp, £50.00, November 1988, ISBN 0 19 814033 9

Virgil is the only Western writer to have been a set work for schoolchildren more or less continuously from the moment his verse appeared. No sooner were the Eclogues and Georgics published, in the mid-20s BC, than they were taught as canonical works; children in European schools have sweated over the grammar of the Aeneid ever since 19 BC. To add to the poet’s misfortune, his work has attracted more, and more various, commentary than any Western text apart from the Bible. This makes it difficult – perhaps uniquely difficult – to read. Critical opinion is deeply entrenched, and most of it sounds as though it were originally uttered by retired colonels. He is ‘the father of the West’ (Haeker); ‘the classic of all Europe’ (Eliot); and, worst of all, a panegyrist of empire: ‘the intention of Virgil was to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus through his ancestors’ (Servius).