The Aeneid of Virgil
Aeneas flees burning Troy, loses his wife in the smoke, courts a queen in Carthage, and descends to the underworld before founding the city that will become Rome. Virgil's epic is a poem about duty and empire, but its best moments are private: a ghost refusing to speak, a lover abandoned on the shore, a son too young to understand the armor he is given.Allen Mandelbaum's verse translation for Bantam Classics keeps the Latin's gravity while making the narrative available to readers who do not want to wrestle with the original. The Aeneid asks whether a man can build a civilization without wrecking what he loves along the way, and it has the honesty to leave the answer complicated. For readers who want their epics to end in triumph but suspect the cost is always higher than the poets admit.
