This collection of essays from a diverse group of scholars represents a multidisciplinary redeployment of the Aeneid that aims to illuminate its importance to our present moment. It provides a rigorous and multifaceted answer to the question, "Why should we still think about the Aeneid?" The book contains chapters detailing previously undocumented modern literary receptions of Vergil’s epic, addressing the Aeneid’s relevance to understanding modern political discourse, explaining how the Aeneid assists in making sense of the pressing current issues of trauma and damage to one’s sense of identity, and even looking at how the epic can shape our future. The chapters build upon and extend beyond reception studies to provide the most current and complete answer to the question of the epic’s current relevance. The primary audiences for this collection are undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional academics from all disciplines. This collection should be of interest to readers whose academic interests include textual and cultural studies, classics, comparative literature, pedagogy, medical humanities, veterans studies, trauma studies, immigration studies, young adult fiction, world literature, communication and political discourse, citizenship studies, and ethnic studies.

A masterpiece from one of the greatest poets of the century In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that "there's one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas's venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years--the golden bough, Charon's barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father." In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and sophisticated poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of James Wood, "created something imperishable and great that is stainless--stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism: it lives singly, as an English language poem."

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.

This is a book for people who love a good story--this story has truly stood the test of time. Millions of people continue to discover it and love it, generation after generation, even 2,050 after it was first made available to the public. It's about the hero's quest; it's about a good man dealing with incredibly difficult decisions. If you've always wondered who Aeneas was, who Dido was, what all the famous artwork is about, and what the opera Dido and Aeneas is about--this book will give you all the background, in easy-to-read language. If you're looking for a book that's a page-turner, that has characters who stay in your imagination long after you've finished reading, then this is the book for you. Below is an excerpt: -- This story is about a man-Aeneas-who endured hardships on sea and land to fulfill his destiny and establish a city that would become the epicenter of a vast and mighty empire. The gods had blessed Aeneas with courage, strength, beauty, humility, wisdom, and skill in warfare. He was the one who had been chosen to father a race of men who would one day rule the world. The goddess Hera, wife to Zeus, had a deep and abiding hatred for the Trojans. Long ago, in a beauty contest for goddesses, a Trojan named Paris had failed to select Hera as the winner, wounding Hera's pride and profoundly offending her. At another point in the past, a beautiful Trojan man named Ganymede had stolen the hearts of many gods, Zeus among them. This was another offense that Hera could not forgive. And there was the prophecy stating that the city that Aeneas planned to establish would one day destroy Hera's beloved city of Carthage. For all these reasons, Hera devoted herself to thwarting the Trojans at every opportunity. Her fondest wish was to eliminate every last Trojan from the Earth. Aeneas and his brave Trojan refugees, from their ships, spotted the coast of Italy in the distance. Finally! After years spent traveling-years facing obstacles and dealing with setbacks-they were now about to reach their destination. Hera, seeing this, became enraged. Desperate to stop them, she thought of the various ways she could annihilate this stubborn Trojan remnant once and for all. Hera visited King Aeolus and asked him to send a storm that would sink all of Aeneas' ships. King Aeolus had been designated by Zeus as the keeper the Earth's winds. To keep the Earth safe, King Aeolus kept the winds locked in a mountain. In exchange for Aeolus' help, Hera promised to give him a nymph he had long loved. Aeolus pounded the mountain one time with his fist, and a portal opened up in the rock. The two strongest winds-Eastwind and Southwind-came screaming out, furious at having been locked away so long, and eager to do as much damage as possible in the shortest amount of time. They immediately swept towards Aeneas' ships. Aeneas and his companions saw the clouds thicken suddenly. Where there had been sunlight, now there was darkness. They felt the boat lift up, lurch to the side, and then sink down freefalling in a twenty-foot swell. Without the slightest warning or signal, they found themselves in the midst of a hurricane! Aeneas tried to keep an eye on the other ships, but the swells and the walls of crashing water made it impossible. All he could do was hear. He heard the shouts of his men as they fought to survive the storm. He heard the screams and cries of others as they were pulled overboard by the angry sea. He heard ropes snapping and breaking. He heard wood creaking and cracking. Above it all he heard the roar of the storm, the wind and water pounding his ship again and again. -- Experience the unforgettable story for yourself!

"Fitzgerald's [translation] is so decisively the best modern Aeneid that it is unthinkable that anyone will want to use any other version for a long time to come." —New York Review of Books Virgil's great epic transforms the Homeric tradition into a triumphal statement of the Roman civilizing mission—translated by Robert Fitzgerald.

The message of Virgil's Aeneid once seemed straightforward enough: the epic poem returned to Aeneas and the mythical beginnings of Rome in order to celebrate the city's present world power and to praise its new master, Augustus Caesar. Things changed when late twentieth-century readers saw the ancient poem expressing their own misgivings about empire and one-man rule. In this timely book, David Quint depicts a Virgil who consciously builds contradiction into the Aeneid. The literary trope of chiasmus, reversing and collapsing distinctions, returns as an organizing signature in Virgil's writing: a double cross for the reader inside the Aeneid's story of nation, empire, and Caesarism. Uncovering verbal designs and allusions, layers of artfulness and connections to Roman history, Quint's accessible readings of the poem's famous episodes--the fall of Troy, the story of Dido, the trip to the Underworld, and the troubling killing of Turnus—disclose unsustainable distinctions between foreign war/civil war, Greek/Roman, enemy/lover, nature/culture, and victor/victim. The poem's form, Quint shows, imparts meanings it will not say directly. The Aeneid's life-and-death issues—about how power represents itself in grand narratives, about the experience of the defeated and displaced, and about the ironies and revenges of history—resonate deeply in the twenty-first century. This new account of Virgil's masterpiece reveals how the Aeneid conveys an ambivalence and complexity that speak to past and present.