J. Sebastian's Reviews > The Aeneid of Virgil

Mandelbaum’s translation is beautiful. After the fall of Troy, Aeneas and his Trojans strive through tremendous pain and hardship to find their way home. Destiny and fate are always in view behind the suffering and the endless journey, and a beauty that is rich and deep emerges everywhere. It is the blending of destiny with heroic epic poetry that gives meaning and beauty to life, no matter how hard it can become.

Though Aeneas wanders through many lands, the great women of the book emerge as landmarks on his journey home. This begins with the loss of his wife Creusa, whom Aeneas loses when they are escaping the Greeks and the burning ruin of Troy; he turns, much like Orpheus when Eurydike is following him out of the underworld, and discovers that she is gone. Rushing back to find her Aeneas encounters Creusa's ghost; it is too late, but she tells him that another wife awaits him in Italy, and Creusa submits to fate. There follows the tragedy of Dido, who falls in love with Aeneas when he is shipwrecked in Carthage. He (in submission to the ordained fates) abandons her cruelly, and continues on his journey. Halfway through the book Aeneas will descend into the underworld following the Sybil, priestess of Apollo (as Theseus entered the Labyrinth with the help of Ariadne’s thread).

In the second half of the book the great heroine is Camilla, whose tragic death (like that of Dido) can move deep currents of pity in the reader. Foreshadowed from the very beginning of the poem, Lavinia, the promised bride awaits for him at the end of his journies; she is betrothed to another, and this will cause another war before the foundations of Rome can be laid.

Some examples of the happy success of Mandelbaum’s English translation: near the end of Book I, the scene is set thus for a great story, just before Dido asks Aeneas to tell the tale of his trials and wanderings:

And at the first pause in the feast the tables
are cleared away. They fetch enormous bowls
and crown the wine with wreaths. The uproar grows;
it swells through all the palace; voices roll
across the ample halls; the lamps are kindled––
they hang from ceilings rich with golden panels––
and flaming torches overcome the night.
And then the queen called for a golden cup,
massive with jewels, that Belus once had used,
Belus and all the Tyrian line; she filled
that golden cup with wine. The hall fell still. (I. 1008 - 1018)

Late in the poem, the young hero Pallas exhorts his men, who are being routed, thus:

“Where are you running, comrades? By your valor
and by the name of your own King Evander,
by victories you have won and by my hope
that now would match my father’s fame, you cannot
trust to your feet. The sword must hack a passage
through Latin ranks. And where their mass is thickest,
there, there is where your noble homeland asks
that you and your chief, Pallas, find a path.
There are no gods against us: mortals, we
are driven back by mortal enemies;
we have as many hands and lives as they.
Just see, the waters hem us in with their
great sea wall; there is no retreat by land.
Then shall we seek the deep or Troy’s new camp?”
This said, he charged against the crowding Latins. (X. 510 - 524)

He saves the battle here, but it costs him everything.

Perhaps the most amazing scene, full of wonder, is when Aeneas begins to weep, beholding the relief sculpture that decorates Juno’s temple in Carthage; this depicts scenes from the Trojan war in which he took part; he sees himself therein, his friends, his former king, his famous enemies. Here in this strange new land, Troy gone, he weeps, feeding "his soul on what is nothing but a picture” (I. 659), discovering that there is nowhere that the story of Troy is not known.

But there are so many rich, deep, meaningful, and wonderful passages that to tell them all is to rewrite the whole Aeneid. I will look forward to reading it again and again; it gets better every time.