Fratantuono, Lee. Review of James Morwood's VIRGIL, A POET IN AUGUSTAN ROME. BMCR January 10, 2009.

Morwood, James. Virgil, a Poet in Augustan Rome. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

Morwood's (hereafter M.) volume in the Cambridge Greece and Rome: Texts and Contexts series is one of the latest in the unabating stream of books on Virgil's verse, this time apparently aimed at an audience that will not be reading the poet's three works in toto anytime soon. For M.'s book provides a survey of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, taking us though each work with prose translations of selected parts, short summaries of the many omitted sections, brief annotation (and illustration) relevant to the excerpted lines, and numerous discussion questions to stimulate classroom exchange. Rather than being a guide to Virgil's opera, M.'s book is a substitute for reading the originals. Something of a throwback to late antiquity, this volume embodies a disturbing move to epitomize the work of masters. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090110.html.

Howard, Jennifer. "Measuring the AENEID on a Human Scale." CHRONICLE REVIEW May 16, 2008.

For more than 2,500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for, and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. One could certainly describe Virgil's Aeneid as a manly poem. From its arms-and-the-man opening to its climactic blood bath on the battlefield, the Latin epic tells a tale of exile, combat, and slaughter, with a body count rivaling that of Homer's Iliad. Women figure mostly as collateral damage. In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil's dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden. . . . Bringing a sense of personal passion to the task, modern translators are reminding readers that for all the fierceness and grandeur of the events it describes, the Aeneid is also intimate, at times even tender. It raises an urgent question — What price empire? — even as it creates a foundational myth of how a great empire came to be. In an age that has had its fill of war and foreign adventures, Virgil's epic, written 2,000 years ago, still speaks volumes. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i36/36b00901.htm.