sing to me of the man

Some days were Iliadic, he said — you felt you were in a war — and some were more like the Odyssey, when all you wanted to do was go home.

But “The Aeneid,” he said, had proved to be unexpectedly timely and relevant, describing it as “a tale of exhortation.”

“It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006. “The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

Robert Fagles, translator of the Illiad, the Odyssey, and the Aenid, who died last Wednesday, as reported by the New York Times.

The last time we talked about Fagles was when we talked about Penelope »