The Aeneid

Like Emily Wilson's celebrated translations of Homer, this new Aeneid-the first collaborative translation of the poem in English-is rendered in an unrhymed iambic pentameter that engages modern readers while also preserving the epic dignity and pathos of the original. Scott McGill and Susannah Wright's version also faithfully conveys the poem's delicate balance between its triumphant celebration of the Roman Empire and its sensitivity to the human costs, for victors and vanquished alike, of antiquity's most powerful and influential society. The result is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting, and affecting as the Latin original.

With a rich and informative introduction from Emily Wilson and the full complement of maps and other supporting material that have made Wilson's Homer translations the standard for our time, this gorgeous edition of Rome's founding epic will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers.

A phenomenal achievement! Scott McGill and Susannah Wright offer an innovative and propulsive 'foot-for-foot' blank verse translation that brilliantly reproduces Virgil's poetic effects and preserves the famed complexities of this monumental epic and the characters that inhabit it. Wilson's engaging introduction places the Aeneid in its historical and literary contexts while poignantly articulating the enduring questions it still compels us to ponder.--Stephanie McCarter, University of the South, translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses
This translation will be replacing my previous preferred version of the Aeneid. Susannah Wright and Scott McGill don't just capture the words of the original poetry but its rhetorical structures and even, in places, its sounds. It's particularly impressive that they manage to get so much over into English while sustaining a clarity and straightforwardness unparalleled among the recent renditions.--Aaron Poochigian, poet, classicist, and translator

Scott McGill is Deedee McMurtry Professor in Humanities at Rice University. He lives in Houston, Texas. Susannah Wright is an assistant professor of classical studies and Roman history at Rice University. She lives in Houston, Texas. Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern studies, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

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