W. R. Johnson

One of the best books ever written on one of humanity’s greatest epics, W. R. Johnson’s classic study of Vergil’s Aeneid challenges centuries of received wisdom. Johnson rejects the political and historical reading of the epic as a record of the glorious prehistory of Rome and instead foregrounds Vergil’s enigmatic style and questioning of the heroic myths. With an approach to the text that is both grounded in scholarship and intensely personal, and in a style both rhetorically elegant and passionate, Johnson offers readings of specific passages that are nuanced and suggestive as he focuses on the “somber and nourishing fictions” in Vergil’s poem. A timeless work of scholarship, Darkness Visible will enthrall classicists as well as students and scholars of the history of criticism—specifically the way in which politics influence modern readings of the classics—and of poetry and literature.

A Study of Vergil's "Aeneid"

Darkness Visible

Readings in Propertius and His Genre

A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome

Stanley Lombardo

Ovid

The Essential Metamorphoses, Stanley Lombardo's abridgment of his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, preserves the epic frame of the poem as a whole while offering the best-known tales in a rendering remarkable for its clarity, wit, and vigor. While making no pretense of offering an experience comparable to that of reading the whole of Ovid’s self-styled history from the world's first origins down to my own time, this practical and judicious selection of myths at the heart of Roman mythology and literature yet manages to relate many of the most fascinating episodes in that world-historical march toward the Age of Augustus--and is accompanied by an Introduction that deftly sets them in their cosmological, theological, and Augustan contexts.

The Essential Metamorphoses

W. R. Johnson confronts the inherent (and much commented upon) melancholy of Vergil's poem, and gives us an interpretation as brilliant and as it is original. He questions accepted readings that emphasize Vergil's faith in empire. Instead, he points to Vergil's multiple allegories, his lyrical and enigmatic style, and the ways in which Vergil teaches us about darkness. Using close readings and comparisons to Homer, Johnson reveals how wise and moving theAeneid can be. No poet,” he writes, not Dante himself, has imagined the disintegration of justice and truth with such precision and power, and for this reason no poet, not Homer himself, has shown how precious and how fragile are the formation and equilibrium of man's integrity of spirit.”

Elissa Daye

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