Every age gets the Greek and Latin literature it deserves. Prologue to the tumultuous decade to follow, Richard Lattimore’s 1961 translation of the Iliad begins, “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son Achilleus/ and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.” Thirty years later Robert Fagles gives us a post-Vietnam Homer by rendering the same lines as “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles,/ murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.” One need only appreciate the psychological bent of “anger” versus “rage,” or the more euphemistic “pains thousandfold” versus the body count of “losses” in order to see how the translation of classical literature often says more about the era from which it springs than it does about the ancient world. Cue Emily Wilson’s recent descriptor of Odysseus as a “complicated man,” and once again we hear the contemporary played out through the classical.

Virgil’s Aeneid is no less susceptible to such massaging, even though it is more a poem of action than character: Achilles rages; Odysseus avenges; Aeneas simply moves on, in David Ferry’s new translation, to “the future/ He was required to look at” when he spurns Dido.1Whereas Rolfe Humphries’s 1951 version begins, “Arms and the man I sing, the first who came,/ Compelled by fate, an exile out of Troy,” three decades later Robert Fitzgerald offers a more blunt assessment: “I sing of warfare and a man at war.” Ferry initially would seem to return to Humphries’s more