Vergil - Aeneid - XII

Vergil – Aeneid – XII (1960) by W. S. Maguinness – Methuen & Co – Good Condition – Ex-School Copy

By Book XII of the Aeneid, everybody has had quite enough.

Aeneas has wandered across the Mediterranean, survived storms, lost friends, abandoned Carthage under circumstances unlikely to earn him a Christmas card from Dido, descended into the Underworld and finally reached Italy — only to discover that founding Rome’s future is apparently going to require one last enormous argument with a man called Turnus.

Vergil – Aeneid – XII, edited by W. S. Maguinness, presents the final book of Virgil’s monumental Latin epic, where diplomacy has largely exhausted itself and events proceed towards the inevitable personal showdown between Aeneas and Turnus.

The proposed solution initially appears wonderfully sensible: instead of allowing entire armies to continue killing one another, Aeneas and Turnus will fight in single combat and settle the matter themselves.

Naturally, this sensible arrangement lasts about five minutes.

Divine interference, broken agreements and renewed fighting plunge everyone back into battle, because ancient epic has never been particularly interested in administrative efficiency. Juno continues to involve herself in mortal affairs, warriors continue to die heroically, and Aeneas becomes increasingly determined to finish what destiny has apparently put on his personal to-do list.

At the centre of the book lies the confrontation between Aeneas and Turnus, one of the most famous and morally complicated endings in classical literature. Turnus is defeated and pleads for mercy. For a moment Aeneas hesitates.

Then he notices the belt of the dead Pallas on Turnus.

The hesitation ends.

Virgil concludes the entire Aeneid not with triumphant celebrations, speeches about Rome’s glorious future or everybody standing around congratulating Aeneas, but with an act of violent vengeance. Turnus dies, his life fleeing to the shadows below, and the poem simply stops.

No epilogue.

No “and then Rome was founded”.

No cheerful summary of what happened next.

Just death, destiny and the unsettling suggestion that even a supposedly divinely ordained future may be built on anger, grief and bloodshed.

Cheery stuff for the classroom.

This 1960 Methuen & Co edition, edited by W. S. Maguinness, belongs to the formidable old tradition of school Classics publishing, when pupils were expected to tackle serious chunks of Virgil in Latin with notes, vocabulary assistance and the implicit assumption that deciphering epic poetry was an entirely normal way to spend adolescence.

This particular copy is an ex-school book from Old Palace School in Croydon, so it comes with some genuine educational history of its own. It may once have occupied a classroom shelf, library cupboard or satchel while pupils wrestled with Virgilian word order, ablative absolutes and the slightly alarming discovery that a sentence can apparently continue for several lines before revealing what the verb is doing.

As an ex-school copy, it may show the expected signs of institutional ownership and previous use, but it remains in Good condition. Indeed, after more than sixty years of school life, storage and general human interference, it has arguably survived rather better than most of the characters in Book XII.

There is no ISBN, because this edition dates from a period when books were not required to introduce themselves with a long identifying number before anybody was prepared to acknowledge their existence.

Ideal for students of Latin, collectors of vintage Classics editions, admirers of Virgil, former pupils looking to rediscover exactly why they once feared unseen translation, or anyone wanting to own the final instalment of a poem that spends eleven books building towards Rome and then ends with one furious Trojan killing one unfortunate Italian.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where ancient grudges are tolerated, ex-school books are rehabilitated, and unlike Aeneas we generally try not to resolve customer disputes with single combat.

Keep browsing: See more Ancient Classics books Other books by WS Maguinness