Folio Society Published Works Number 2249
Virgil - Aeneid Limited Edition
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Virgil - Aeneid Limited Edition (Published in by The Folio Society in 2010. Bound in full Nigerian goatskin. Blocked in gold and black with a design by Jeff Clements inspired by Trojan sails and Roman arches. Set in Centaur. Printed endpapers showing a map of the voyage of Aeneas and his companions. 512 pages. 16 colour plates. Frontispiece. 9.75" x 6.75". Each copy numbered by hand on a special limitation page. One of a Limited Edition of 1750 of which this is number 796. Gilded top edges. Ribbon marker. From the smouldering ruins of Troy, one prince escapes the victorious Greeks: Aeneas. Before they reach a safe haven, Aeneas and his Trojans will have 'drunk deep/of each and every disaster land and sea can offer'. The goddess Juno is their implacable enemy, and harries the Trojans by sea and on land. In Carthage, Aeneas faces a painful conflict between duty and love for Queen Dido. In Italy, the Trojans must endure a further war with indigenous tribes before Aeneas can fulfil his destiny: to found the new kingdom of Rome. The Aeneid was written at the end of the 1st century BC, in the wake of the civil wars that had convulsed Rome and effectively ended the Roman Republic. Augustus Caesar was on the imperial throne and with his reign, a period of stability had begun. In writing the story of Rome's foundation, Virgil gave these recent wars a heroic new context. He provided the Empire with a national epic to rival the Odyssey and the Iliad, and gave Romans a sense of destiny fulfilled, and the promise of hope for the future. Robert Fagles was a renowned classicist and one of only a handful of people to have translated all three great classical epics. His translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, both published in Folio Society editions, have been critically acclaimed and widely read. Two years before his death in 2008, he published this much-praised translation of the Aeneid. It blends the natural directness of Virgil's language with the lyrical intensity of his metaphors. Fagles wrote, 'I have sought a compromise between Virgil's spacious hexameter, his "ocean-roll of rhythm", and a tighter line more native to English verse.' )
