Simile World

Denis Feeney

  • BuyVirgil: Georgics translated by Peter Fallon, notes by Elaine Fantham
    Oxford, 109 pp, £7.99, July 2006, ISBN 0 19 280679 3
  • Virgil: The Aeneid translated by Robert Fagles
    Penguin, 486 pp, £25.00, November 2006, ISBN 0 7139 9968 3

Within a generation of Virgil’s death in 19 BC the trajectory of his poetic career had become iconic, with its apparently teleological progression from the slim one-volume collection of ten Eclogues to the more ambitious four-volume Georgics and finally to the 12 volumes of his imperial epic, the Aeneid. The progression could be seen as a poetic instantiation of rhetorical theory’s division of style into the low, middle and high; by the Middle Ages, Virgil’s path from pastoral through didactic to epic had become emblematic for theories of decorum and poetic style, and Milton’s career is the clearest example of the way Virgil’s successors could plot their poetic autobiographies into a hierarchy of genres.

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[*] Fagles mentions me in his acknowledgments, with characteristic over-generosity; I read his final draft and made a small number of suggestions.