Vergil: The Poets Life - Sarah Ruden Audiobook

Written by Sarah Ruden
Read by Suzanne Toren
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Series: Ancient Lives
Publisher: Yale Press Audio
Release date: August 22, 2023
Duration: 07:09:12

A biography of Vergil, Rome’s greatest poet, by the acclaimed translator of the Aeneid

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend.

But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. The emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil’s dying wish that it be destroyed, commissioned Vergil’s most famous work, the Aeneid.

Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct his life.

Ruden does her best to weave a coherent account out of the sparse evidence and her speculation is largely reasonable, but the gaps in the historical record remain conspicuous. This valiant effort doesn’t quite overcome a surfeit of uncertainty.