The series of Hermes Books from Yale University Press, under the general editorship of John Herington, has the laudable aim of bringing humane and humanist attention to the Greek and Roman classical writers. Between the Scylla of philological minutiae and the Charybdis of clamoring critical jargons Hermes escorts its little ships. The series harks back to the general-interest books of Richard Jebb and Gilbert Murray, yet it also exacts an awareness of how such modern writers as Eliot, Pound, and Joyce have forever changed our perception of the classics. The series’ successes to date have been Herington’s own Aeschylus, Sara Mack’s Ovid, and, especially, D. S. Carne-Ross’s exciting and innovative Pindar. Now comes Virgil, by David R. Slavitt, a prolific poet, translator, and novelist.
This has, notoriously, been a tough century for Virgil.
This has, notoriously, been a tough century for Virgil. High Modernism gleefully shattered the public bust of the noble bard; Pound was hostile to Virgil as Eliot was to his conscious heir Milton. After millennia of worship—as the saint manqué of Dante, as the Augustan prophet of Dryden, as the mellifluous musician of Tennyson, he became a bit a sort of Roman Longfellow, passé patriotic poseur and classroom bore. The spotlight swung to sexy Catullus, savage Juvenal, sublime Lucretius, as it did in English to Donne, Pope, and Blake. Recent decades have seen some righting of the balance. The Eclogues, Virgil’s ten early pastorals, are now read as meditations