Review: A new twist on a classic text

“I will be the first, should my life continue, to lead the Muses back with me to my homeland from the Aonian summit.” So boasts Virgil in his “Georgics,” claiming his prize as the poet who will adopt, adapt and surpass the achievements of his Greek predecessors—a claim to fame that has inspired generations of authors to stake their literary turf: primus ego, “I before all.” But such authorial status is hard for anyone to claim, much less for a translator of the “Aeneid,” the masterpiece that Virgil heralds in the line above—a poem published in 19 B.C.E. and continuously reread and rewritten since then—a true instant classic. What more can be said?

In their compelling new translation of the “Aeneid,” Scott McGill and Susannah Wright offer a dynamic, poignant and thought-provoking take on this classic poem. They address the question of novelty head-on in their translators’ note, citing no less than 11 other contemporary translations. According to the authors, the distinctive features of their version are its metrical awareness, the style of its diction and, perhaps most important, its collaborative origin. This work is the product of six years of sustained conversation between McGill, Wright and Virgil.

The great gift of the “Aeneid” is its power to create meaning-making resonance between Rome’s past and future, and to bring the present urgency of the historical past to readers across time and space. It does so in a surprisingly sympathetic fashion, representing not only its protagonists—Aeneas and his Trojans—but their opponents with great nuance. 

As McGill and Wright remark: “Although on one level the Aeneid celebrates Roman power and its imperial mission, the greatness of the poem lies in its ability to counterbalance this with a prominent other voice that sympathizes with the victims of power and registers the costs of conquest to victor and vanquished alike.” As they convey Virgil’s delicate balance of epic achievement and human consequence, McGill and Wright aim “to bring [Aeneas’s] brand of melancholy heroism to vivid life…. Our hope is that not only Aeneas, but also the other characters, major and minor, feel real.”

Their self-awareness is visible and invigorating, recreating a distinctly Virgilian connection between textual and linguistic minutiae and the larger themes of empire, justice and humanity. In their note, the translators spend much time unpacking their thought processes about how to render Virgil’s hexameter verses and the perennial question of scale. Latin’s concise and flexible syntax almost inevitably expands when translated into English, so Book 1’s 756 Latin lines become, variously, 907 lines (McGill and Wright), 1,053 (Mandelbaum) and 908 (Fagles) in different translations. McGill and Wright adhere to a precise scale, adding a sixth line to every five of Virgil’s Latin. In terms of meter, they have chosen unrhymed iambic pentameter (more commonly known as blank verse) to capture Virgil’s rhythm and elevated tone.

This structural ethos informs one of my favorite aspects of this translation—namely, the authors’ consistent efforts to capture the wordplay built into Virgil’s Latin verse: sound effects such as alliteration and assonance; verbal patterning (for instance, chiasmus, an ABBA pattern, or interlocked order, ABAB); and polysyllabic or truncated lines. Virgil’s poetry is a master class in the meaningful integration of such stylistic features that are normally (and necessarily!) lost in translation into English, which—unlike Latin—offers minimal flexibility in word order. 

The authors’ labor here is truly Herculean, and the results well worth their effort. An example from Book 6 will show how effective this commitment to style is.

As Aeneas traverses the underworld, he comes upon his deceased father, Anchises, surveying his future descendants:

omnemque suorum 
forte recensebat numerum, carosque nepotes 
fataque fortunasque uirum moresque manusque. (6.681-2)
By chance, he was surveying his own people— 
his dead descendants and their destinies, 
their ways and works, the things they would achieve. (6.816-18)

With “dead descendants…destinies” and “ways and works,” McGill and Wright beautifully replicate Virgil’s alliteration of “f” and “m.” Likewise, they substitute asyndeton (a lack of conjunctions) for Virgil’s polysyndeton (overuse of conjunctions), recreating the abundance of the line through a comparable device. Walking, as they put it, “a tightrope between foreignizing and domesticating translation,” these translators largely succeed in representing Virgil’s verbal artistry in both arrangement and tone.

One of the most famous passages in the “Aeneid” well illustrates McGill and Wright’s distinctive focus on poetic style. In Book 8, Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus, gives him a wondrous set of arms forged by her husband, Vulcan, for his forthcoming battle against the Italians. The shield contains scenes not only of Rome’s past, but of its Augustan present—both, in a strange chronological leap, still in the distant future from Aeneas’s perspective. At the very center is the Battle of Actium—Augustus’s final showdown against the Roman general Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt.

The significance of this passage is hard to overstate. Facing the monumental task of rewriting Augustus’ victory in civil war as a story of triumph over barbarian enemies, the writers of this period—Virgil, Horace, Propertius—portray the battle as a cosmic showdown between East and West. Virgil’s iteration, presented on the shield, verbally and visually structures the opposition between these two ancient superpowers (bold type my addition):

hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar
cum patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis…
hinc ope barbarica uariisque Antonius armis,
uictor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro… (8.678-9, 685-6) 

These lines set at odds the two principal combatants: Caesar (the future Augustus) and his erstwhile brother-in-law, Mark Antony. Virgil’s strong spatial markers hinc…hinc (“on this side…on that”) indicate not only the antagonists’ positions on the field of war but also on the surface of the shield and, further, in the political landscape of Virgil and his audience. Art imitates life while at the same time recreating recent history as future prophecy within the timescape of the “Aeneid.” 

To say nothing of the scene’s political significance, the sheer number of this scene’s representational layers present an intimidating challenge to translation. McGill and Wright render these lines as follows: 

Augustus Caesar, leading the Italians, 
was sailing with the Senate and the people, 
their household gods and great divinities…
Antony faced them, fresh from victory
and bearing foreign wealth and varied arms
from the Red Sea and nations of the Dawn.

Eschewing spatial indicators, the translation instead emphasizes the prominence of the two leaders and the nationalities of their troops. By way of comparison, the 2021 translation by Shadi Bartsch offers this: 

Here Augustus Caesar led all Italy
to war: the Senate, people, gods of sky and hearth…
Antony was opposite, with Asian wealth
and hodgepodge troops, victor over Eastern hordes
and the Red Sea.

And the 2006 translation by Robert Fagles:

On one flank, Caesar Augustus leading Italy into battle,
the Senate and People too, the gods of hearth and home
and the great gods themselves…
And opposing them comes Antony leading on
the riches of the Orient, troops of every stripe—
victor over the nations of the Dawn and blood-red shores…

Set side by side, these versions show the depth of interpretation built into the act of translation. Like Fagles, McGill and Wright prioritize Virgil’s syntactical emphasis, placing names and titles at the beginning and end of lines. Bartsch’s version is compressed, focusing on the opposition of ethnicity and individuality. McGill and Wright perhaps come closest to the letter of the Latin, but it is up to the reader to assess what degree of moral judgment is built into terms like “barbarian,” “Eastern” and more, and whether, therefore, Bartsch or Fagles may be truer to Virgil’s intent. 

Even the phrase litore rubro takes on a very different nuance when translated (as in Fagles) as “blood-red shores” (its literal meaning) rather than “Red Sea” (its vernacular meaning). 

By allowing readers to make up their own minds, rather than have them shaped by a markedly pro- or anti-Augustan translation, McGill and Wright offer invaluable opportunities for reflection, close reading and productive discussion. 

Likewise, their commentary is thorough, instructive and particularly strong on the cultural intricacies of Virgil’s poem. Each book receives a brief summary, followed by (on average) two to four pages of line notes that explain names, etymologies, historical and mythological references, geography (places, but also phrases like “to the Ocean” in terms of ancient geographical theory), and key concepts (Golden Age, Gates of War, Penates). The authors helpfully gloss terminology alongside discussion of the text: At lines 1.181-7, for instance, they explain an epic simile before explaining the unique features of this particular example. This sort of explication gives the reader not just information about the “Aeneid,” but also the tools to read epic in general.

McGill and Wright’s ancillary materials are equally helpful. The commentary is preceded by a table of the gods, including Greek and Roman names along with their main epithets (Roman names are used by default) and a list of alternate terms for Trojans, Greeks, Italy and more; it is followed by genealogical tables and a glossary with a pronunciation guide. 

Emily Wilson’s introduction is a tour de force in its own right, situating Virgil’s masterpiece not only in its historical context and literary tradition, but also in its full resonances for modern readers. Tackling the question of the origins of the “Aeneid” as a product of imperial sponsorship, she traces Virgil’s lived experiences of civil war to the questions his epic explores, showing how Aeneas’s mythological distance “allows Virgil to explore the profound theme of how history is shaped by ordinary people, making choices whose consequences they do not and cannot understand.”

Wilson offers the reader a thorough discussion of Virgil’s use of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” showing how his intertextual style enables the construction of layers of meaning. Over and over again, Virgil uses these well-known stories to offer possible pathways down which his own poem and characters might travel. Most compellingly, Wilson expands on “perhaps the most provocative element of Virgil’s epic: the startling juxtaposition of poetic myth with the specifics of recent history and contemporary events” to extend this resonance to contemporary issues of immigration, the impact of rumor, environmental disasters, war, poverty, displacement and more. 

Coupled with McGill and Wright’s translation, Wilson’s introduction succeeds in showing us that “Virgil’s great poem makes us feel the tears of things, reopening the fiery wounds of history and igniting our hearts with the traces of forgotten flames.”

This article appears in October 2025.

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