The Aeneid (Robert Fitzgerald translation)

"The first book I’ve chosen, The Aeneid by Virgil , is an icon of the western literary canon. Not everyone would see it as a text about refugees but, for me, the central narrative is about a refugee called Aeneas, after whom the series of books is named. For some people, he’s a classical hero who sets up a new dynasty after fleeing Troy. Another way of interpreting it is that he is a refugee that flees a war in the Middle East, sails across the Mediterranean, and eventually, after a lot of difficulties and battles, ends up in Italy where he founds the dynasty that will later create the Roman Empire. Yes, I wanted to make this point because, in the European discourse, we sometimes forget that many of us are linked, in some way, to people that have had to move across countries or continents. I certainly am. We forget that many of the classics of our literary canon, like the Aeneid or the Odyssey , are about people on the move — either refugees or migrants. In the Bible , Jesus is an economic migrant when he’s born in Bethlehem and then quickly he turns into a refugee because he has to escape to Egypt. I like the Aeneid because it is a gripping story about someone who is escaping from a war and is searching for a better life, but I also think it’s an important text to bear in mind in discussions about refugees because it reminds us that so many books and cultural references in Western culture are about refugees and human flight. Human movement has always been a key part of our history and our culture and it is important to remember this in times when people are so wary of welcoming people who’ve come from other lands. It’s a book I read at school. I love the poetry in it. Just as a work of literature, it is very beautiful. Some of the images from it are ones that still affect me, even ten years after I read it. For example, there is a scene as Aeneas, the main character, leaves Troy and he has with him, holding his hand, his son, and his old father is on his back. I remember being on the island of Lesbos and seeing a Syrian dad with his little son in his hand and another child on his back. It reminded me of this scene of Aeneas also being on the move. This is one of the comparisons that made me reinterpret the Aeneid as a book about a refugee rather than just a classical epic that is a big part of Western literature but nothing more."

"I so recommend it. There’s a wonderful translation by Robert Fitzgerald. To me, it is the greatest founding myth that a nation has ever been blessed with. He was writing at the birth of what really is the Roman Empire: it’s when Augustus comes to power and has just beaten Mark Antony for control. Up to then, it has been a rather chaotic triumvirate. Augustus comes along and becomes the sole ruler. But because this is the end of the Republic, he needs to justify this new arrangement. He creates, through Virgil, this fantastic myth. “Religion is still so important in people’s lives because it does something that nothing else does quite as well.” Anyone who knows the Iliad and Odyssey will know the wonderful story of the defeat of Troy. Aeneas is the Moses-type figure who leads his people from Troy, through many adventures on the way, to Italy, and founds a state there. This is the story of the founding of that state of Rome and it’s an extraordinarily moral story. Virgil constantly calls Aeneas “duty-bound” and his mission, as he knows, is to bring “the whole world under law’s dominion.” Rome is like — and it’s a cliché to say it — an ancient American Empire. America too, through the neo-cons, very much sees its role as a moralizing role, as bringing huge benefits of law and order and democracy to the world. Virgil gives Rome that same function. To some extent Rome did bring law and order to every region that it conquered and this is Virgil’s role, to cry up that. He’s a wonderful propagandist and exaggerates. For instance, the battle of Actium, which ends the war with Mark Antony, was in real life a rather shoddy affair. It was a civil war and civil wars are quite nasty and people change sides. Virgil portrays Augustus as the wonderful general behind this battle, but actually it was his second in command, Agrippa. there were very few deaths and it was not a very notable battle. But nonetheless, through Virgil’s eyes, it becomes the moment when the Roman Gods defeat the Egyptian Gods, when “monster forms of Gods of every race, from the dog God Anubis barking, were defeated by our Neptune, Venus and Minerva and Mars engraved in steel.” These are the great Roman virtues beating the decadent east of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Absolutely right. I think what’s also fascinating about the Aeneid is that it’s an epic that shows Rome on the cusp between Christian virtues and warrior virtues. Aeneas is both the self-denying Christian man, and the self-assertive warrior man. The greatest moment in the Aeneid is at the end, when he is forced to choose between the Christian virtues of mercy and compassion and the old warrior virtues of vengeance and fighting and being strong and showing no mercy, which would have been a terrible sign of weakness for Romans. The confrontation is between a pagan king and this founder of Rome, Aeneas. Aeneas in fact, as it ends, as we know it, shows no mercy. He reverts to his old warrior virtues. But it’s an incredibly moving moment and I think a lot of scholars aren’t sure whether this was the ending that he really intended, because he died before he could revise it. The emperor Augustus preserved the manuscript against his wishes. Virgil died in 19BC. It’s at the point when those kind of Christian virtues are coming in, even before Christ. The great cult Isis — which should really have won the battle of world religion against Christianity — is beginning to show those kind of loving virtues. It’s very beautiful and moving. The other thing is that for me, Turnus, the pagan warrior, is a far more interesting and sympathetic character than Aeneas the noble, duty-bound, denying his love of Dido. He’s a much more attractive character and you want him to survive at the end, but he doesn’t. There’s always that tussle in Christianity, between free will versus God determining. I think in most religions that’s a problem — how do you reconcile those two things? Islam has the same problem. In a sense it’s wonderfully acute in Christianity, because the whole thing with Adam and Eve gets going by the assertion of Adam and Eve’s will against God’s. It’s always that tussle between authority and fate versus taking command of your own life. And that’s there from the very start of Judaism and Christianity…"

"It’s beautiful and poetic. Fitzgerald was a poet by calling. And I find this the most beautiful and high-flown of the mid-century American translations. After the Second World War came the GI Bill, which funded university education for people who never could have dreamed of it before; these were the GIs returning from the war. They were now flooding into state and public and private universities by the tens of thousands. What to teach them? It certainly couldn’t be Classics on the British model, because none of these people had any Latin or Greek . Hence many translations were published, the American version of Penguin Classics. I really like Fitzgerald on aesthetic grounds. In our culture poetry is so often lost. Ancient poetry is sometimes even presented in prose—the Penguin Aeneid is in prose. This is a travesty because, for the ancients, poetry was the primary mode of expression. You get prose developing only quite gradually, and its status is lower, with many works falling into a category modern scholars call “sub-literary.” Fitzgerald sings. He’s simple, noble and rapid. Those are the characteristics that Matthew Arnold praised as essential in his essay on translating Homer. Of course, he’s speaking of his time, as everybody does, but I think he nailed it. I believe Fitzgerald, as an English translation, nailed it, too. As much as authoritarianism is on our minds, and on our TV screens, and is a tremendously important issue right now, we are missing the point as this big debate goes on and on: was Virgil a propagandist or was he an independent, self-respecting writer? I would say that he was absolutely neither. He was a poet. He played an important role in promoting the Augustan political program but he had a much longer, much more general life in the world’s culture, because his words transcend anything Augustus set out to do with him. Compare the American presidential inaugural poet we saw back in January, a very lovely young person of colour in a stunning headdress. Nobody I know has in mind even a single word of the poem that she recited. The recital wasn’t broadcast in any version of the inauguration that I saw. Nobody paid any attention to it. This was apparently the best that that the ceremony’s organisers could do for her; at one of the Obama inaugurations, the crowd turned like a tide, almost ran, the moment poetry recitation was announced—I remember laughing out loud at the footage. The organisers tried to promote Obama’s inaugural poem, but it was awful, a vague hymn to the future like an investment company’s ad; I was one of the people who panned it in a review. “We know almost nothing about what was in Virgil’s head” This time, the public wasn’t even going to be allowed to judge the new regime’s efforts at literary inspiration: we would just be shown an image to which no decent person could object, a beautiful young person of color taking the stage to speak on behalf of another old white guy who’d been chosen to lead the country. A week later, she was rewarded with a modeling contract. In the ancient world, the poet was both a professional, an absolute master of the forms of the craft, and someone inspired by the divine breath, uttering words of sublime beauty at the behest of the gods. It had nothing fundamental to do with politics. It was a given that you were going to be speaking for your nation; that was unavoidable. But you were first and foremost a poet. Augustus, though he presided over a stable of mostly docile poets, did not get control of poetry by any means. Distinctly independent poets kept popping up in succeeding generations, poets like Lucan and Persius; they could do this because the status of poetry was undiminished."

"It’s an obvious choice in a way, because part of Virgil’s project is to set out to write the great epic of home in a way that will combine the two great epics of Homer. It combines the Iliadic epic of war with the homecoming epic of the Odyssey , but in a weird way. In the Odyssey , the home that Odysseus returns to is the same home that he left twenty years before, whereas in the Aeneid , the home that Aeneas is coming back to is a home that he’s never been to before. It’s a home that has to be invented. Moreover, it’s a home that lies in the future, rather than the sense you get from the Odyssey that going home means coming back to the past. For Aeneas, coming home means beginning the future that won’t actually exist for another five hundred years. The Aeneid is interesting as a poem deeply engaged with rewriting the Odyssey and re-imagining scenes from it. Reading it right after the Odyssey , you’re going to pick up echoes, for instance, at the start of Book 5, when Odysseus wants to leave Calypso. Sent by Zeus and Athena, Hermes comes down and informs Calypso that she has to let him go. In Aeneid Book 4, we have that same set of tropes: Mercury comes to Aeneas and tells him he must leave Dido and his adulterous love affair, and instead go found Rome. It’s the same scenario and even the same god (Mercury/Hermes), but also totally different. For one thing, nobody comes to tell Dido to let Aeneas go; the divine apparatus is all focused on the (Western) man, not the (African) woman. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s also radically different because Odysseus longs to go home, having got tired of being subordinate to Calypso, after seven years which presumably started out well. In the case of the Virgil passage, the Aeneas-Dido relationship is amputated much more abruptly, and there’s no unambiguous indication that Aeneas actually wants to go; in fact, he says he doesn’t ( Italiam non sponte sequor: “I’m heading for Italy against my will”). Unlike Odysseus, Aeneas doesn’t make a choice based on his own feelings or his own sense of himself; he has to go, to return to a home he doesn’t know yet. Of course, many people are going to be reading both the Aeneid and the Odyssey in translation, so the words are going to be a set of choices by an English-speaker, rather than by a Latin or Ancient Greek speaker. But even if you’re reading translations, you can see how the same story (or more or less the same story) can be absolutely transformed. I’ve talked already about Calypso and Dido, but there are other examples: how the athletic games of the Phoenicians are then re-invented in the athletic games in Book 5 of the Aeneid , or how the shipwrecks and storms at the beginning of the Aeneid are clearly modelled on the shipwrecks and storms of the Odyssey , or how the encounters with the dead in Book 6 of the Aeneid are modelled on the encounters that Odysseus has with the dead in Book 11 of the Odyssey . One of the most moving parts of the Odyssey becomes one of the most moving parts of the Aeneid . Odysseus attempts to embrace his mother, but she’s dead. He tries three times to embrace her, but she’s just a shadow; there’s nothing there. Maybe it goes back to Helen . What is it that you’re trying to hold onto with somebody else? Then, Aeneas does the same thing with his father—three times he tries to embrace him, and he can’t. There’s something wonderful about how there are so many ways to construct meaning. There are so many ways to tell a story and make it mean something specific, but a rich specificity that has many layers to it. “There’s something wonderful about how there are so many ways to construct meaning” I’m also excited by the way stories can accrue meaning by using the language of another story. Alluding to an earlier text or quoting an earlier movie in a later one can just be a game or gimmick. But with the Aeneid , as well as Euripides’s Helen , it’s not just a gimmick—it’s a way of explaining the story. It would be an utterly different text if there weren’t this earlier story hovering behind it. It becomes a commentary on that story, and draws your attention to the very deliberate departures and shifts from that story, as part of what it’s saying."

"According to Stephen Fry, “Virgil’s Aeneid gives an account of the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy.” Some us will have been slightly taken aback, when reading the Iliad , not to hear anything about a wooden horse, probably the first image many of us remember about Troy from childhood stories. The story is first recounted in the Odyssey , but it’s the Roman poet Virgil who really brings it to life. The Aeneid also has a heart-breaking account of the end of the war and Aeneas, his father on his back and holding his son’s hand, all fleeing from the doomed city as refugees. The Aeneid was written by Virgil in the age of Augustus as a founding myth for the emerging Roman empire and has been recommended a number of times on Five Books."