Virgil, Aeneid 1

Aeneid 1 is a polyphonic masterpiece, dazzling in conception and splendid in execution. Echoes of Homer, Callimachus, Ennius, and Lucretius resound to celebrate the nascent Augustan regime in the wake of the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra. This is the first full-scale edition of the book, and the first scholarly commentary in half a century. A newly edited text considers several conjectures, while the commentary offers a novel reappraisal of problems both familiar and less readily apparent. This edition will be of use to all levels of readership, with particular focus on the poet’s syntactical, lexical, and metrical peculiarities, his debts to republican prose, Roman comedy, and Greek lyric poetry, and his historical context.