Virgil wrote during the reign of the Emperor Augustus and, in The Aeneid, he drew upon legendary stories of the links between ancient Troy and the founding of Rome to produce a great national epic. It has been one of the cornerstones of Western literature ever since and English poets from Dryden to C. Day-Lewis have produced translations of it. Robert Fitzgerald’s fully realised ambition was to make Virgil’s work as readily accessible to his own age as earlier poets had made it to theirs. The Aeneid is here rendered so as to bring vibrantly to life one of the great works of Western civilisation. The major set-pieces of Virgil’s poem – the flight from the sacked city of Troy, the doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage, the journey into the underworld –retain the dramatic and poetic power of the original in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation.
