Salvete! For a Latin course I’m doing we are studying book 12 of the Aeneid (specifically lines 600ish to the end), and I was wondering if there are any student level/intermediate commentaries (Pharr style, ideally) of it?
We haven’t been provided with many resources except an English translation and so the classes are a lot more like guesswork/matching up the translation with the Latin rather than actually reading it, so I’d like to go through it properly (as much as is possible) independently. If you could help point me in the direction of any resources of this kind that’d be great! The only resources I can find so far are for books 1-6 (which I’m planning on doing in the future, but right now I need to pass this course).
An excellent and relatively recent commentary on Aeneid XII by Richard Tarrant is available in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series (“Green and Yellow”).
Tarrant is excellent-I used his commentary for Seneca’s Thyestes and was impressed with his in depth (virtually exhaustive!) analysis. I’m sure he brings the same level of scholarship to the Aeneid. It’s a little extra money, but well worth it.
Tarrant is one of the contemporary giants of Latin studies. He edited the OCT Metamorphoses, and he’s at work on a new OCT Horace to replace the ancient and inadequate old edition.
If you are having difficulty reading the passage I doubt you will find Tarrant much help. Its great on literary issues and offers some linguistic help but it is aimed at a more advanced reader who doesnt need the kind of help Pharr provides in books 1-6.
Why doesn’t your teacher give you some resources? If he he/she is no help post your questions here.
Thank you for the recommendations! I’ll have a look at Tarrant, that sounds like a great help for understanding and appreciating the text. And that vocab list website is amazing, thanks so much for the link!
I’m not entirely sure honestly. It’s a continuation of a beginner course I did except the requirements of us now (i.e. to read the Aeneid) are much higher than the level we realistically have got to - so the solution is apparently “memorise the English translation so you can write it down when asked”, rather than “let’s actually read Virgil”. It’s frustrating but the way it’s being taught isn’t going to change unfortunately.
What would your advice be for going through it independently? I’m at a level where I’m able to translate some Ovid (but with assistance for the harder spots) so translating 300ish lines of the Aeneid without a grammatical commentary isn’t really plausible. My plan is just to go through very slowly and use the translation to figure out how the Latin fits together and learn all the vocab I need, but is there a better method I could be using?
Vergil is not as difficult as you might think. When I was learning Latin in secondary school 60 years ago a teacher once told me that 14-15 year-old students were capable of beginning to read Vergil after a year of Latin, but he was reserved for the fourth year of Latin, i.e., 16-17-year-olds, because the younger students lacked the maturity to appreciate him,
The vocabulary of the Aeneid is not too difficult. The Georgics, with their technical language, are a different story.
What is difficult at first is getting used to the word order – in particular the elaborate and seemingly artificial patterns of hyperbaton in adjective-noun pairs, which sometimes interlock around a verb. This is a salient feature of classical Latin verse, not just Vergil. If you pay attention to these patterns as you begin reading, they will come to seem quite natural, and you’ll begin to appreciate Vergil’s artistry.
You’ll enjoy Vergil much more, and you’ll understand him more readily, if you learn to scan the hexameter and train yourself to read metrically, silently or aloud. It’s not hard: start by writing out the scansion of, say, 10 or so verses each day and then go over them, reading aloud. Pay attention to caesuras.
This is not a view a shared by Peter Jones (preface to Reading Virgil. : “Virgil is not easy”)
Perhaps young students might be introduced to simpler (ie less rhetorical) passages but I doubt that students after one year of study could manage a whole book. If they could I doubt they would understand it much.
Anyhow, Eheu fugaces Postume Posthume… things are not what they used to be.
