Vergil - Aeneid - Book Five

Vergil – Aeneid – Book Five (1959) by J. L. Whiteley – Macmillan – Good Condition – Ex-School Copy

After storms, shipwrecks, doomed romance and a great deal of wandering around the Mediterranean, even a Trojan hero occasionally needs something approaching a sports day.

Vergil – Aeneid – Book Five, edited by J. L. Whiteley, presents the fifth book of Virgil’s great Roman epic, in which Aeneas and his followers pause their prolonged journey towards Italy to commemorate the anniversary of his father Anchises’s death. Naturally, because this is an ancient epic, the memorial proceedings involve athletic contests, divine interference, emotional speeches and the ever-present possibility that somebody’s fleet may catch fire.

Book Five is one of the more distinctive episodes in the Aeneid. Aeneas returns to Sicily and organises funeral games in his father’s honour, with competitions including ship racing, running, boxing and archery. Essentially, it is the Roman heroic equivalent of a school sports day, except the participants are armed veterans, the gods occasionally interfere, and losing can have rather more serious consequences than missing out on a house point.

Virgil uses the episode to combine action, ceremony and character while allowing his exhausted Trojans a temporary respite from the larger business of founding the civilisation that will eventually become Rome. There are prizes, rivalries, impressive feats of strength and several reminders that even when everyone is technically taking a break, destiny remains irritatingly unwilling to leave them alone.

Meanwhile, the Trojan women, thoroughly fed up with years of wandering and encouraged by divine mischief, decide that perhaps the best way to end the voyage is simply to set fire to the ships. It is a bold logistical proposal. Aeneas, unsurprisingly, is not enthusiastic.

This 1959 Macmillan edition, edited by J. L. Whiteley, belongs to the long and noble tradition of school Classics texts intended to guide pupils through Latin literature with notes, explanations and just enough assistance to stop Virgil’s syntax from becoming an entirely personal vendetta.

And this particular copy is an ex-school book from Old Palace School in Croydon, meaning it has already enjoyed a respectable educational career before arriving at Crappy Old Books. It may once have sat on a classroom shelf awaiting a pupil who had forgotten there was Latin homework, or been carried home in a schoolbag alongside exercise books, sandwiches and a growing sense of dread about tomorrow’s translation.

That provenance gives the book character. There is something pleasing about a classical text that has genuinely been used for what it was intended: generations of pupils wrestling with Roman epic poetry while wondering why Aeneas could not simply have taken a more direct route.

The book is in Good condition, with the sort of age and previous use one would reasonably expect from a school edition published in 1959. It has therefore survived considerably longer than several fleets in classical literature and, unlike the Trojan ships, appears not to have been deliberately set on fire.

There is no ISBN, because this edition comes from a period when books could apparently be published, studied and survive for decades without requiring a barcode, online metadata or an algorithm to recommend them to anybody.

Ideal for students of Latin, collectors of vintage school texts, lovers of Virgil, former Classics pupils seeking nostalgia, and anyone intrigued by the idea that one of the foundational works of Western literature contains an extended section devoted to competitive rowing and a disastrous attempt at fleet management.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where ancient epics get another voyage, ex-school books are released back into society, and all ships are inspected for signs of divine arson before dispatch.

Keep browsing: See more Ancient Classics books Other books by JL Whiteley