Word: aeneid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tuchman seizes on the legend as evidence that such folly "is an old and inherent human habit." But her purpose seems deeper. The tale, told most memorably by Vergil in the Aeneid, portrays the Trojans as victims of fate. Despite the urgings of citizens that the Greek gift be destroyed or at least broken open, Troy's leaders take it in, hidden Greeks and all, because the gods have so ordained. That excuse will not do for Tuchman. "The gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind," she writes. "The gods' interference...
When the Renaissance rediscovered the originals of the Homeric epics, Virgil's reputation started to tarnish. The Greeks had clearly borne great gifts to the Roman poet. The Aeneid now looked suspiciously like a pastiche. Its first half, recounting the wandering of Aeneas and his vanquished colleagues after the fall of Troy, owed more than a little to The Odyssey. Its last six books, in which the hero wages war on Italian tribes and fulfills his divine destiny to found the Roman Empire, showed the bloody imprint of The Iliad. Furthermore, Aeneas himself, compared with the Homeric heroes Odysseus...
...sing of warfare and a man at war." Fitzgerald's version of The Aeneid's first words ("Arma virumque cano") veers sharply away from the traditional reading in English, enshrined in the title of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. Yet singing of arms and the man was not all that Virgil's fellow Romans in the 1st century B.C. would have understood him to mean. They had already been thoroughly schooled on who Aeneas was and what he had, in legend, accomplished; neither his identity nor his military prowess could have been...
This explanatory impulse pervades Fitzgerald's Aeneid and brings both the story and its main character back to life...
...Victorian era, Aeneas emerged in the English of William Morris and other writers as a Romantic brooder well versed in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. Fitzgerald's version, a century hence, may seem equally dated. But if translations capture the essence of their culture, then this Aeneid, in its supple beauty and clarity, is the best news this age has had in a long time...