The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by Dryden, Fagles and Heaney

[nwhyte]

Rather than the second paragraph of Book III, I’m taking the second paragraph of Book II as my sample text, because it includes the single best known quotation from the poem:

P. Vergilius Maro

Primus ibi ante omnis magna comitante caterva

Comments

[johnny9fingers]

Thank you very much for this. I thought the doubled ter conatus... ter frustra... echoed part of book 16? (IIRC) of the Illiad in the aristeia of Patroclus, but when I looked again (in my Loeb edition) I found it was not repeated

[nwhyte]

Thanks. I have read a couple of short sf stories by Bonfiglioli, one in England Swings SF, edited by Judith Merril, the other in The Visitors’ Book, an anthology of stories by foreign writers living in Ireland, and enjoyed them both.

[johnny9fingers]

I've gone mad. Dryden not Milton. I now check for more signs of early onset. :(

[redfiona99]

Because I am not a classicist, my brain went "oh of course it's gate. Hell has gates, it's a thing," and then wondered why I thought that, since I wouldn't know the Latin for gates from the Latin for doors or my elbow. I think Dryden may have had a greater influence than suspected given I've not read his translation either.