Vergil: The Poet's Life

"One interesting book for fans of the great epic poem of the Augustus years, the Aeneid, is a literary biography of its author, Vergil. Vergil: The Poet’s Life is by American scholar and translator Sarah Ruden. Other than his poem, we don’t know much about the author, so Ruden has to do a lot of heavy lifting, but why not? Ruden recently translated the Aeneid , and you can read her Five Books interview about Vergil here. There are also new books out, or due out shortly, about some of the later Roman rulers, including Julian, the subject of Gore Vidal’s 1964 historical novel . Philip Freeman, a professor at Pepperdine University, brings us Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor , about the man who tried to ditch Christianity and return the empire—by then based in Constantinople—to paganism. Newly translated from the German, there is also Theoderic the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans , by Hans-Ulrich Weimer , about the man who ruled over the Western Roman Empire from Ravenna and whose mausoleum you can still visit there. Delving further into the past and much broader in scope is a new book called Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE by Christopher Ehret , a professor at UCLA. Ehret rejects the “artificial separation of our human story into something called ‘history’ and something else called ‘prehistory’” and starts his story in 68,000 BCE. I love this approach and just wish it was taught more in school. As he writes, “Barely more than fifty thousand years ago, the primary ancestors of every single human being alive today lived in eastern Africa. World history to that point was African history.” Another new history book that’s reliant on other disciplines is the latest by Cat Jarman, a bioarchaeologist. In her book, The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo Saxons , she turns her attention to chests at Winchester Cathedral that are purported to contain the bones of various kings—and one queen, Emma—of the kingdoms that sprang up in the British Isles after the Romans left. Winchester was in Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, and one of the more powerful ones. As in her previous book (about the Vikings ), Jarman likes to combine straight history with imagining what it must have been like. The new knowledge that DNA brings to this period, when England was so much in flux, is fascinating. There have been a host of new biographies out recently. If you like reading about tech bros, Walter Isaacson, author of the fantastic Steve Jobs biography , has turned his pen to Elon Musk . It’s not as good a book—it’s doubtless hard to write with the distance a biographer needs about someone who is not only alive but very vocal and opinionated—but the chapters are short and it’s a very easy read for an overview of where Musk came from and how he got to where he is. Also out is a book by the great Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried, the one-time cryptocurrency billionaire who is now on trial for fraud. As always with Lewis it’s a good read for anyone who wants to understand what that was all about and the sheer scale of money involved. However, in the preface, Lewis admits to having been completely taken (in) by Bankman-Fried, who is always referred to in the book as Sam. In addition to the Vergil book, there are a couple of other books about writers out. Eva Hoffman has taken on the Polish poet and Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Czesław Miłosz, in her latest book: On Czesław Miłosz . It’s a personal response to Milosz’s life and work, about a man who experienced firsthand some of the horrors of the 20th century."