Vergil The poet's life

In keeping with Yale's "Ancient Lives" series, Ruden's engaging biography of Vergil, the first "celebrity" author of Rome, explores the "fully human dimensions" of its subject and addresses tensions that continue to speak to readers today. A classicist and masterful translator, Ruden reconstructs and reimagines Vergil's life based on previous sources, including Suetonius, and the poet's literary works. The book is informed by Ruden's verse rendering of The Aeneid (CH, Oct'08, 46-0731; rev. and exp., 2021), which this reviewer considers the best translation of the Aeneid available in English for its accuracy and prosody. Ruden approaches Vergil as a fellow artist, identifying with his creative challenges and his painstaking choice of words and meter. She considers Vergil's reclusiveness, sensitive nature, and sexuality, along with the erotic privileges afforded by his class and position, and she offers fresh insight into Vergil's highly fraught relationship with Octavian (later Augustus) and with the power dynamics of literary patronage. Ruden's understanding of the pressures Vergil faced informs her reading of the curious circumstances of Vergil's death and her critical interpretation of his epic's abrupt and disturbing ending. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Philip Edward Phillips, Middle Tennessee State University

Ruden (The Face of Water), who has translated Virgil's The Aeneid among other ancient Greek and Roman works, delivers a studious if unsatisfying biography of the poet. According to the ancient Roman historian Suetonius, Virgil was born to a wealthy father in rural Mantua, Italy, in 70 BCE, but Ruden concedes that the circumstances of his childhood remain largely unknown. She pieces together much of his youth by inference, speculating that his mother likely followed the typical practice of employing enslaved women to "nurse, bathe, and play with... infants and toddlers," while admitting that "we do not know anything about personality or activities as an individual." This sort of conjecture is endemic throughout, as when Ruden suggests that Virgil might have bungled the single case he argued in his brief legal career and feigned chronic illness to get the "privacy and free time" needed to write, and that his death in Brundisium, ostensibly from heatstroke, may have been due to foul play incited by Emperor Augustus, who might have been displeased that Italy's most revered poet had decided to decamp to Greece. Ruden does her best to weave a coherent account out of the sparse evidence and her speculation is largely reasonable, but the gaps in the historical record remain conspicuous. This valiant effort doesn't quite overcome a surfeit of uncertainty. (Aug.)