A quick note, and then I may have to disappear for a while. If you aim to read beyond bk.1—as I trust you do, you have to read bk.2—I’d recommend R.D. Williams’ comm. (+ text) on bks.1-6, readily available and a bargain. It’s less discursive than Austin but should give you everything you want (and not much that you don’t).
And Bart, thanks for the feedback.
Gotta go.
Giles Lauren’s Aeneid is perhaps great as well. Though not strictly scholarly, it provides the FULL TEXT accompanied with ample lexical, grammatical and literary notes, so an intermediate student like me could afford to have all the 12 books in a single binding. A good starting point, I guess.
Disclaimer: I have only used Giles Lauren’s Caesar’s De Bello Gallico - the description above is from Amazon review.
Giles Lauren’s Aeneid is in fact R.D. Williams (reformatted), acc. to Amazon.
Thanks for your information 
Off-topic: what a pity that Giles Lauren (R.D. Williams) did not publish Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 books in a single volume!
AP Latin Literature: Vergil’s Aeneid is an ideal study companion to the main text, though it’s a bit too thick and does not contain as much analyses as other student editions. However, if one wants to review all the grammar, this is the book. Check on Amazon - hope it’s now not out of print after the curriculum revamp a couple of years ago.
#148
Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est
seditio, saevitque animis ignobile vulgus,
iamque faces et saxa volant—furor arma ministrat;
tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem
conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;
ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet,—
sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor,
The very first simile of the Aeneid and one that is both remarkable and revealing. It is in a way an inversion of the Homeric simile, in which events in the human world tend to be compared to events in nature. Here it is of course the other way around: the sea getting calm is compared to an orator or a politician keeping a mob under control: Roman politics entering the world of myths & epic heroes.
It’s also very clear where Vergil sympathies are: pietas versus furor, the strong man versus the ignoble vulgus.
The abrupt ending of line 151 -si forte virum quem- suggests the sudden start of the mob, so Austin tells me. And right he is, of course. It’s a remarkable metrical effect.
And then the implied believe in the force of the spoken word that can check the masses like Neptunus controls the waves.
Very nice.
I’ll be stoned for this.
I suggest you not use a commentary. It will kill the experience. If you have basic Latin, Virgil is quite accessible. The grammar and vocabulary aren’t very hard. You don’t need to understand every reference, every insinuation, every possible shade of meaning. Regular people have been appreciating Virgil for ages without any commentaries. He has been analyzed and prodded to death.
To truly appreciate Virgil, you need to get caught up in the story. You also need to discover for yourself the poetical devices he uses, notice for yourself the beauty of the way something is expressed.
Here comes seneca2008.
Regular people have been appreciating Virgil for ages without any commentaries
Everyone should be free to approach Virgil as they wish and I would not want to be prescriptive. Although it is possible to read Virgil without a commentary it is not true that they are a modern invention. Commentaries first began to be written shortly after his death. If you consult “Jan M. Ziolkowski, Michael C. J. Putnam, The Virgilian Tradition. The First Fifteen Hundred Years.” you will find the following:
“Quintus Caecilius Epirota, a freedman of Cicero’s friend Atticus, is reported by Suetonius to have begun lecturing on Virgil already by about 25 b.c.e. Likewise, Hyginus, a freedman of Augustus, is said to have written criticism of Virgil’s poetry. These two exemplify the intense interest that Romans showed in commenting upon Virgil’s works almost as soon as they became available to a reading public.”
So whilst it has always been an option to ignore commentaries it is illusory to imagine that there was a substantial period time when readers enjoyed Virgil free from the commentary tradition. Indeed all later Latin writers engage in more or less explicit ways with Virgil in their own texts.
I am not sure what “regular people” means. But there cannot have been many people in antiquity who had the leisure to read Virgil for pleasure. Boys of course were forced to read part of the Aeneid as it very quickly became a school text. In the early modern period manuscripts were reproduced with scholia and liberal helpings of Servius’s commentary which itself incorporated earlier commentaries. So commentaries were hard to escape. This would have been a nightmare for Nesrad!
I agree that one needs to be careful that concentrating on a commentary does not lead to losing sight of the text itself. But “the beauty of the way something is expressed” is a subjective judgement. From the 17th century onwards Virgil’s stock rather fell as knowledge of Greek spread and Homer came to be regarded as a more “authentic” voice. The idea of Virgil as a pale imitation of Homer rather than a clever intertextual game might strike us as odd but nevertheless it is part of the history of Virgilian reception.
I hope Sparknotes would not be the end of reading the original text - this I say not only for Latin and Greek but also for English Literature.
I had never heard of “Sparknotes” before. Cribs have always existed and yet people still read texts. They are not the kind of commentaries I had in mind.
Maybe this kind of discussion should be taken elsewhere rather than diluting a thread about Virgil?
My main reservation about using commentaries is the one I expressed earlier in this thread: “Commentaries are a rather controlling genre.” But they’re also informative, and it’s absurd to imagine that having “basic Latin” is all anyone needs to appreciate the Aeneid.
But back to the poem. Bart, I’m glad you fastened on that passage, which sets the stage for what’s to come. Now we’ll be alert to Vergil’s handling of the epic simile, and we’ll be interested in discovering how stable this characterization of Aeneas turns out to be and how effective his words, and how the themes struck here will play out as the poem proceeds. I reckon we haven’t heard the last of furor.
You can appreciate the Aeneid without even basic Latin, in translation. No commentary, not even any Latin. How is that “absurd”?
Nesrad, I think you’d have done better to read my post as being sympathetic, even supportive —up to a point. We evidently disagree about what it means to “appreciate” the poem, but I’m not getting into an argument with you about that.
Let’s try to increase the Vergil-to-noise ratio of this thread.
#174
Ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates,
Succepitque ignem foliis, atque arida circum
nutrimenta dedit, rapuitque in fomite flammam.
Why the dative silici? Instead I would expect an ablative, either of means (‘with a flint’) or of separation (‘from the flint’).
As curiosum: the very first translator/ reteller of the Aeneid in Dutch, the 13th century poet Van Maerlant, thought that silex goes with Achates, and that Vergil was talking about an agate stone. So in his version of the story pious Aneas isn’t accompanied by a trusty companion, following him around the Mediterranean, but by a talisman of stone.
The dative indicates the person (or thing, in this instance) on the receiving end of an action (like the basic indirect object). Grammars tend to categorize it as dative of reference, ethical dative, dative of possession. Here the ablative wouldn’t have meant the same thing. It would have indicated the means (not separation with this verb), which is not what the poet was trying to convey. He means that the spark was actually in the silex, and that Achates banged it out (presumably with a stone, which might have been in the abl.).
Can’t silici be ablative? That’s how I’d take it.
Hilarious anecdote. What did he make of 120? The agate had a ship to itself? — Or was it only here? I learn from Austin that Servius discerned a pun here (“adlusit ad nomen”).
Forgive the noise (as Achates might have said).
Pharr says dative of separation. Ganiban says ablative. Take your pick?
How can silici be ablative of silex? Nesrad’s explanation is how I’ve always understood this line.
The only variant reading noted by Mynors is silicis, which appears in some, but not all, of the 9th century mss.
Thanks. I can see how a dative makes sense here.
Van Maerlant and his agate stone: I did some looking up, and alas, as with many good anecdotes, it’s only partially true. The theme of the agate stone as talisman appears to be very common in medieval retellings and adaptatations of the Aeneid, for example in the most famous of them all, Benoit’s Roman de Troy. Its introduction is probably not due to a translation mistake. However there does seem to be a link with the perceived ethymological origin of the name Achates. One of the first known sources to make this link was the 4th century commentator Servius, partially quoted by mwh. The full quote:
ACHATES adlusit ad nomen; nam achates lapidis species est. bene ergo ipsum dicit ignem excusisse. unde etiam Achaten eius comitem dixit; lectum est enim in Naturali Historia Plinii quod, si quis hunc lapidem in anulo habuerit, ad custodiam eius proficit et gratiosior esse videatur. (Serv. in. Verg. Aen. 1, 174)
For anyone out there understanding Dutch, this is an interesting article dealing with this issue: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_tij003198801_01/_tij003198801_01_0013.php