It was 29 B.C., two years into the reign of the emperor Augustus, when the Roman poet Vergil began writing his great epic, the Aeneid. Unlike the Odyssey and the Iliad, Vergilʼs response to the ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. But I learned the joys of devotion, which I had failed to when I first experienced the Aeneidin Latin. It was on ...

In Virgil's poem The Aeneid, a blond maiden named Lavinia whose father is the king of Italy marries the Trojan hero Aeneas. Virgil doesn't give Lavinia any lines, and he scarcely mentions her for the ...

inside my home, who looked like you despite it all, I wouldn’t feel so lonely and betrayed. The triple meaning captures both the sympathy and the cruelty of Virgil’s portrait. Close focus on a single ...

Latin is no longer the "exquisite corpse," or cadavre exquis, of a decade or so ago. Just ask the informal UB Latin group GREX, devoted to learning and speaking the ancient language. More Info » Hear ...

Heaney’s account of Aeneas’s encounters with the dead across death’s river is even more powerful for its restraint. By Josephine Balmer Anglophone poetry has long been transfixed by the ancient epic.