This book is of more value than meets the eye—but first some perspective. Fewer than sixty of its 220 pages carry C. S. Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid, with a commensurate number carrying the original text from the Loeb edition (not Lewis’ primary text). Whereas we have all that Lewis translated of the epic, we have only 15 percent of the twelve books of the poem itself: all of Book I, much of Book II, about half of Book VI, and snippets thereafter (including prose summaries by Lewis). So even though he was at work on this translation for half his life, until his death in 1963, the work is both abbreviated and unfinished.

Machinery includes a foreword, a preface, and the editor’s introduction (as well as manuscript pages, maps of Aeneas’s journeys, a convenient glossary, and a name index). The first, by Walter Hooper (Lewis’ renowned steward and editor), describes the provenance of the manuscripts and their rescue from a bonfire. The second, by the classicist D. O. Ross, discusses the translation proper, especially in light of Lewis’ thinking on Renaissance humanism (he was not a fan), and does so to suggest that he had just read the great classical critic D. S. Carne-Ross on translation (and perhaps John Talbot on Carne-Ross lately in these pages [May 2011]).

A. T. Reyes’ introduction lays out what there is of Lewis’s engagement with the Aeneidand with Virgil (vocations and their price looming large), his religious importance