A Companion to the Aeneid in translation, Christopher Tanfield, Bloomsbury Academic, £108.48

Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem…

‘Unspeakable pain, my Queen – that’s what you bid me reawaken,

In telling how the tragic kingdom of Troy with all its wealth was eradicated…’

With these words Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, embarks in Book II on recounting to Dido, queen of the African city of Carthage, the gruesome story of the Sack of Troy. It was a tale familiar from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, epic songs composed in Greece some seven centuries earlier, and known to Virgil and his Roman readers in intimate detail. Writing towards the end of the first century BC at the behest of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, Virgil expanded the tale to make it the basis for describing the achievement of another hard-won glory, the foundation by the legendary Aeneas of a place that was to grow into the greatest city in the world: Rome.

Readers today, who for the most part come to the epics in translation, cannot expect to grasp the depth, purpose, and brilliance of Virgil’s recreation of the story, let alone the details (who is Queen Dido? why is Aeneas in Africa? who are the Danaans?) without the help of an explanation or commentary. Latinists have long had the benefit of scholarly commentaries that introduce Virgil’s books and give comments on key words and aspects of the Latin text. Christopher Tanfield has set out to provide such a commentary for readers of the Aeneid in English – that is, in the most commonly read English-language translations in prose and verse, those of David West and Robert Fagles. It is a huge enterprise, and Tanfield has done it splendid justice with this magnificent companion, which deserves to be widely used by anyone interested in the Aeneid, Virgil, and Latin literature.

Published as three volumes, the first gives a clear and erudite introduction to a comprehensive range of themes and issues – historical, cultural, and literary – that provides readers with essential background (it also has voluminous and helpful indexes to the whole). The second and third volumes provide generous and scholarly line-by-line commentaries on books 1-6 and 7-12 respectively. Such a monumental task cannot be approached, however, without some tension between the goals of clear exposition and the demands of deeper scholarship, as well as the author’s personal perspective on what needs to be said.

The non-specialist reader who alights on Book II may be surprised, for instance, to find it being introduced with ‘Augustine, bemoaning his childhood waywardness…’ Though St Augustine’s readings of the Aeneid are often invoked, readers are likely to have little sense of the value of what Tanfield calls the Christian bishop’s ‘precocious literary criticism’. We are then given a list of (mainly fragmentary) sources, from the ‘epic cycle’ and Stesichorus to Varro, Euphorion, Naevius, Accius, Plautus… a helpful compilation, for sure, but one that inevitably invokes names that most readers will find thoroughly obscure, even if part of its purpose is to lead us to the important reminder that ‘by an irony of literary history, Aeneid Book II is the most complete account of the Greeks’ sack of Troy that has survived antiquity’.

Such detail makes it evident that, despite its ostensible aim to make the Aeneid accessible to the epic’s readers in English, the Companion aims to be no less useful to students who are more deeply engaged in Latin language and literary culture.

The excerpted words or passages for commentary (‘lemmata’ is the technical term) are given in bold print, cited from both translations (with Fagles’ verse renderings in italics), thus occasionally allowing for a comparison of versions that elicits sensitive commentary in itself. One of the most quoted and notoriously untranslatable lines of the epic is line 462 of Book I,  sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (literally ‘there are tears of things and mortal matters touch the mind’). It is spoken by Aeneas when he sees murals on a Carthaginian temple depicting the Trojan Hector’s suffering, whereupon he draws the happy conclusion that he has not fallen among heartless savages.

The lemma reads there are tears for suffering and men’s hearts are touched by what man has to bear / the world is a world of tears and the burdens of mortality touch the heart. Tanfield notes that this phrase, ‘taken out of its context of encouragement, has been turned into a melancholy banner for the whole epic…’ But, he asks, is it in fact meant as ‘a message of compassion (West) or of pessimism (Fagles – and further interpretations of these words are possible)’? His answer is that ‘West’s rendering seems more in keeping with Aeneas’ upbeat mood, but it would be typical of Virgil to intend what Fagles expresses at the same time’. Much interpretative ground is covered here, while leaving more for the reader to ponder.

Tanfield intermittently cites the Latin text, but, given the work to which the reader is in any case put by his erudition, he might have done so more often. The first speech of the epic in Book I is that given by the goddess Juno, fuming that the hated Trojans appear to be getting away unscathed. Line 37 has her raging to herself ‘Shall I give up what I have set in motion?’ The lemma on the line is as Juno brooded / said to herself: Tanfield notes ‘Her second word in the Latin [incepto] means “initiative taken” – appropriately for the divinity who sets the action going.’ He does not comment, however, on the most audacious instance of wordplay in the epic, since Juno’s first words, mene incepto, correctly read with elision as menincepto, includes the Greek word menin – the first word in Greek of Homer’s Iliad, meaning ‘anger’. The allusion has considerable force, since Virgil will make his epic the story of Juno’s anger (ira), which, like the menin of Achilles in the Iliad, will have to be assuaged for the story to reach its conclusion.

That conclusion only comes after much pain and hardship on all sides, and Virgil remarks (1.33) So heavy was the cost of founding the Roman race / Such a long hard labor it was to found the Roman people. ‘It is up to the listener to define what constitutes ‘founding a people’”, Tanfield notes, observing ‘The word used here for “found” recurs in a different sense at the end of the poem, for “burying” a sword in someone’s body”’. He is cautious, rightly in my view, not to draw particular attention to this echo of condere. But the word is also commonly used in Latin to mean ‘compose poetry’, and surely there is a metapoetic implication of the phrase that might have been worth commenting on, since the ‘founding of the gens Romana’ is precisely what Virgil has achieved by his ‘long hard labour’ on the Aeneid. The similar quantity of labour that Christopher Tanfield is likely to have expended in producing this valuable and full-bodied companion is wholly to be applauded.