Tennyson makes a bold attempt at using classical Greek and Latin metre in English poetry. See the poem here and the illustrated blog post here.
Tennyson combines his admiration for Milton’s poetry with his love of ancient poetry, and in particular his love of Alcaics, the Greek metre that Horace used for his loftiest themes in the Odes. You can decide for yourself how far the experiment succeeds, and use the links to compare Tennyson’s poem to some of Horace’s poems in the same metre, here.
This selection is composed of extracts in narrative order from each of the twelve Books of Virgil’s great epic devoted to the glory and divine origins of Rome and Aeneas’s Continue Reading
We announce the completion of the Pantheon Poets Aeneid – 61 extracts read in Latin with English translation, telling the story of Aeneas from the fall of Troy to the establishment in Italy of a new settlement which will one day become Rome and a dynasty which will culminate in the Caesars and the Emperor Augustus. See it here.
Pantheon Poets’ latest project is an intensive journey through Book 6 of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas visits the underworld. He was not the first: Odysseus had paid a visit in Homer’s epic, and Greek myth was full of gods, demigods and heroes who attempted to visit the land of the dead and return. Nor perhaps does Book 6 have the immediacy of Book 2, the most compelling account in real time that we have in ancient epic of the fall of Troy, or the tragic effect of the failed love affair between Aeneas and Dido in Book 4. It is, however, probably the work on which the exceptional standing of Virgil in the post-ancient world most strongly rests.
The Virgil of Book 6 especially came, as the possessor of a vast creative imagination, to be seen as transcending mundane humanity: someone whose ability to conceive a world so outside human experience, beyond the general run of myth and story, marked them as possessing occult knowledge and power.
This side of him most definitively entered European culture when Dante chose him as his guide through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the Divine Comedy, written in 13th century Italy. But it existed already before Dante: there are many references in ancient writers to the use of Virgil’s works as a prophetic medium. Choose a random passage, and it would provide you with an oracle through which to consider the question that was preoccupying you. This practice, known as the sortes Virgilianae, survived long into the modern world, famously, for example, being followed by King Charles the First in 17th century Oxford.
If Virgil’s status as a magician has receded, Book 6’s enduring influence on the European literary imagination has been more durable. Dante, re-imagining the Hadean journey in a Christian age, Milton in his blindness imagining Satan on the throne of Hell, Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s progress, Thomas Gray in the mid-1700s personifying the enemies of human happiness (in his ode on a distant prospect of Eton College), as Virgil did in Book 6, were all stepping in his footsteps. So too were writers as diverse as Tolkien, taking hobbits under the mountain for riddles with Gollum or to dodge Balrogs in the Mines of Moria, and Jules Verne with his travellers to the centre of the Earth.
Enjoy. You can link to the first extract and make the acquaintance of Aeneas’s guide, the Cumaean Sybil (illustrated above), here.
A mighty epic ends as Aeneas plunges his sword into the wounded Turnus’s heart. Hear the final extract from the poem in Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Pantheon Poets has posted the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas in extracts from all twelve books of Virgil’s mighty epic for you to hear in Latin and follow in English. Binge, browse and link to the illustrated blog post on each extract. Use this link to access the selection, and see the illustrated blog post here.
Epic journeys need impressive beginnings. Virgil obliges. He uses the same stately metre as the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odysssey, which stood at the pinnacle of both Greek and Roman literary culture, and echoes the opening lines of each.
There is a recording of the opening lines of the Aeneid here, along with links that you can use to compare it with the openings of both Homeric poems in Greek with a translation. Pantheon Poets also now contains many other extracts from the Aeneid, and you can follow them in narrative order by navigating from the links at the foot of Virgil’s poet page here.
The Trojan War, and all the trouble that came from it for both the Greeks and the Trojans, including Aeneas, began when the Trojan, Paris, was asked to judge a beauty contest between three goddesses. Understandably, but unwisely, he chose Venus, who promised him the most beautiful woman in the world as a reward. Juno, the Queen of the Gods and the goddess of marriage, was not amused. Siemiradski’s painting reconstructs the scene.
Translations of poetry in another language are often our only option. They tell us, sometimes more and sometimes less precisely, what the original “meant”, but can’t fully replicate it with all its subtleties, allusions, deliberate or accidental ambiguities and aural effects. Translating poetry is rather like trying to bake an identical copy of an elaborate cake using only a random few of the same ingredients. But, with all the inevitable problems, the best translations can be marvelous. For me, no English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid that I know is as good as the German poet Friedrich von Schiller’s version of Books 2 and 4, covering Aeneas’s account of the fall of Troy and the story of his catastrophic love affair with Dido. It does not mimic the original in style or metre, but has pace and energy, telling the story powerfully while also giving full expression to its moments of great pathos. It is a pity that Schiller did not translate more than these two books. Here is a selection, with links that will take you for comparison to the original Latin. The Latin and the German are both recited in the original with an English translation.
The Scene is North Africa. Following the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, the Trojan prince Aeneas and his followers are wandering the Mediterranean in search of a new home. Bad weather has blown them here, where the Phoenician queen-in-exile, Dido, is founding the city of Carthage, and makes them welcome. We know something that neither Dido nor Aeneas does: in centuries to come, the Carthaginians and Aeneas’s Roman descendants will fight long and bitter wars in which their very survival is at stake. Sitting at table, and invited by Dido to tell his story, Aeneas is recalling the fall of Troy.
A Trojan, Laocoon, sacrificing as the priest of Neptune, hears that the besieging Greeks have gone, leaving a huge wooden horse which his countrymen are considering bringing into the city: a force of Greeks is hidden inside. He delivers Laocoon’s warning.
Laocoon’s warning is wise, but he is terribly punished for it by two monstrous serpents, which destroy him and his sons before disappearing into the temple of Minerva.
The Trojans bring the horse into the city, where, under cover of darkness, the Greeks emerge and the sack of the city begins. Aeneas is visited by the ghost of the greatest Trojan warrior, Hector, son of King Priam, who urges him to escape with the city’s sacred relics.
Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, is now dead, but his son Pyrrhus finds and kills King Priam in the royal palace.
Captivated by Aeneas, Queen Dido falls in love. Matters come to a head on a day when she and her retinue accompany Aeneas and his Trojans on a magnificent hunt.
It looks as though Aeneas might stay with Dido in Carthage, but the Gods send a stern command to remember that he has a mission of his own to found a new home that will grow to become the great city of Rome. Before he has told Dido, she learns that he is preparing to sail away and leave her. She is devastated.
The Trojans’ preparations continue.
Distraught, Dido has a great pile made of the possessions that Aeneas has given her. The intention is supposedly to burn them, but they become her funeral pyre as she stabs herself with Aeneas’s sword. She dies a lingering death. The scene is set for the struggle centuries hence between Rome and Carthage.