Book review: The Aeneid, by Virgil
For anyone who thinks Virgil is a character off Thunderbirds, this august work is a touch more distinguished than that and takes about 9.5 hours to read, if you don’t bother with the foreword, so expect something equivalent to tackling the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are two caveats to this association because (a) although both are unconsolidated stories with lots of side-tracking, The Aeneid as a novel isn’t as well written a fantasy as LOTR — I’m not a Tolkien nerd but am resolute in that opinion — and (b) you will never receive the full effect of reading The Aeneid in prose when it was devised to be delivered as poetry, in another language. The weight and rhyme of a line or a couplet can only be degraded by translation and the change of media format, so the poem in ancient Greek probably is worth five stars for all of Virgil’s ability and cultural impact, but any prose approximation in English is not going to be.
The plot is really the spoken history of a tribe (sensu Old Testament, an origin story but this time told by the Romans), precipitated by the disastrous demise of a noble kingdom (Priam’s Troy, fallen to Agamemnon), then following a Trojan leader as he seeks a new homeland prophesied for his people. The fleet of armed refugees try one place after another, gun down a seagull, encounter a divine oracle, sea serpents, goddesses and historical figures like Dido the Queen of Carthage in North Africa and explore the gloomy Underworld to meet once more with the dead they’ve left behind [including a somewhat annoyed Dido who took her own life when Aeneas dumped her to continue his journey, sensu the Odyssey], but all attempts to settle fail until they reach the Kingdom of Latium (to become Rome and the Latin people). The story incorporates the Romulus and Remus legend, weaned from a she-wolf, some golden-haired Gauls being antisocial in striped leggings like Obelisk, a sort of peace treaty [goes wrong twice] at which the entertainment is animal sacrifice and a recounting of the legend of Hercules. Both sides claim descent from the same demigod, which makes them family, then there’s another huge falling out at the end over who the king’s daughter is supposed to marry. An alternative title might just as well be No Wedding and Four Thousand Funerals. It’s a riot.
Even in translation, there are some beautifully competent literary descriptions in this, an example being: “He spoke no more; but they all bent rapidly to the work, allotting their labours equally. Brass and ore of gold flow in streams, and wounding steel is molten in the vast furnace. They shape a mighty shield, to receive singly all the weapons of the Latins and weld it sevenfold, circle on circle. Some fill and empty the windy bellows of their blast, some dip the hissing brass in the trough. The cavern groans under their anvils; they raise their arms mightily in answering time and turn the mass of metal about in the grasp of their tongs.” Now consider that the previous passage op.cit. was written sometime between 30 and 19 BC and it still has the beat of a living engine within it.
In translation, Virgil uses several lines which have become phrases still in everyday use today: ‘thick and fast’, ‘silent night’, ‘run up the flag’, ‘Arms and the Man’ (GB Shaw), ‘twittering’ and the ‘star spangled’ banner.
I read this because I’ve always felt the classics are good for my education, but found I enjoyed a good proportion of the story too. Some passages are slow and some of the mythology is borrowed from the Greeks to endorse the status of the Romans, replacing Zeus with Jupiter, but the princess bursting into flames and running about the palace igniting the curtains or when sea serpents rise up the shore and strangle their coils around peasants you get the impression this was one awesome blockbuster at the time it was written.
