The Aeneid (Penguin Classics)

Even though Virgil's The Aeneid (c. 29 BCE-19 BCE) was written c. 700 years after The Iliad c. (725 BCE), Virgil picks up the story of Aeneas after the fall of Troy as if it just happened. Aeneas leaves with his father, son, and a small contingent of Trojans after the Greeks slaughtered everyone in Troy and destroyed the city, and they sail away. The gods give Aeneas a mission to find a land which he can call home. That land with eventually be Rome. Virgil's The Aeneid, while a well written story with a lot of action and wars, was actually a piece of propaganda commissioned by the first emperor Augustus to glorify his reign and to promote the values of Rome after Julius Caesar.It is a good read, though. Aeneas shows the embodiment of piety, duty, and honor, all of which would become Rome's ideals. He make mistakes by falling in love with Dido and breaking her heart by leaving. He travels to the Underworld and tries to apologize to her by saying it was his fate and the god's will. She turns away. Calypso, however, give him good advice on how to avoid mistakes while sailing.Eventually, he makes it Latium, which will become Rome, where he fights several battles. It shows that Rome has a long history that starts with Aeneas.

This Penguin classic is a beautiful translation and a nice publishers paperback. While used and slightly annotated in margins, it is a treasured classic which I am enjoying and will love to have access from now on from my bookcase.

Virgil is notoriously harder to render in English verse than Homer. The haunting rhythm of his hexameters and his stately diction, enriched with archaisms, have arguably never found a comfortable equivalent in our language. Yet David West's version, in plain, modern English prose, somehow evokes the feeling of Virgil's epic better than any other version I know. It's not just his close fidelity to descriptive detail, but also the cadences of the prose, natural, unforced yet richly suggestive.

I've always wanted to know the classics on which so much of our western culture is based, and this is an easy to read translation of Virgil's great writing.

so good I loved it. I RECOMMENDED it to all ancient history loversTo be honest though it gets a little weird at times.But overall a great read.

For those who believe, with Robert Frost, that poetry is what gets left out in the translation, a fine prose Aeneid can be a joy and a treasure. David West's Aeneid rendering is both. Lively, lucid, thoughtful, and briskly paced.

Excellent story of Aeneas. Octavian had Virgil write this for him, to show that he was a decendent of Aeneas...the great Trojan hero.

Enjoyed this prose version as the first read. Going to try a poetic version next.