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Reviewed by:
  • Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6
  • W. W. De Grummond
H. Rushton Fairclough , ed. and trans. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6, rev. G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. x + 598 pp.

Volume 1 of the Fairclough translation of Virgil, containing the Eclogues, the Georgics, and books 1 through 6 of the Aeneid, first appeared in the Loeb Classical Library in 1916. This version has done admirable service in the English-speaking world ever since, though it was revised by Fairclough in 1932. The 1999 edition, revised by Goold, retains a familiar look, not only in its red cover and its traditional format--the Latin text on the left-hand page and the English translation facing it--but also in much of the specific language of the rendering. Fairclough rightly retains pride of place on the title page: as in earlier editions, we are given Virgil "with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough"; "revised by G. P. Goold" is now added. In short, this is still to be considered Fairclough's Virgil.

The revised version of 1932, Fairclough said, "seems now called for owing to the large amount of scholarly literature bearing upon our author which has appeared in the last fifteen years." In his preface to that first revision of the volume, the translator warned his readers that "as little change as possible has been made in the printed page, and therefore most of the additional matter now appears in the Appendix." The present edition removes the appendix, offers a new preface and a new introduction, and of course brings the whole up to date. Needless to say, a much larger body of scholarly discussion pertaining to Virgil has accrued in the sixty-odd years since 1932 than in the fifteen years before that date. Goold, who is the former editor of the Loeb Classical Library as well as the editor of this volume within it, has given as a part of his introduction an eight-page bibliography, which is intended to lead the reader to the essential editions, reference works, commentaries, studies, and criticism.

It has not been an aim of this series in the past to display a full apparatus criticus (which, according to Goold, "would prove a hindrance rather than a help to the Loeb reader"); even so, its brevity in the new edition is startling. The apparatus of Eclogue 6,for example, comprises six items in this edition, as opposed to thirteen in the previous one; for the last one hundred lines of Georgics, book 2, there are now ten entries instead of fifteen; for the first one hundred lines [End Page 287] of Aeneid, book 6, five as against twelve. The individual citations of variant readings, too, tend to be shorter, because, as Goold tells us, he has "limited [himself] to recording the readings of the primary capital manuscripts" (vii-viii). This does, of course, give a cleaner-looking page, but since the editor does not seem to have a very high expectation of "the Loeb reader," he might have feared that the intermingling of variant Latin readings with explanatory notes in English, both now sometimes on the left-hand page and sometimes on the right (in Eclogue 6, for instance), would "prove a hindrance" as well. In any event, he has "eliminated more than a thousand critical notes" (viii). This assuredly makes for a more streamlined presentation for the modern user; whether it will turn out to be more enlightening, or more "user friendly" in the larger perspective, seems doubtful. On the other hand, the current edition undeniably sports a new, handsome look, and although there is more text per page, the type is easier to read. The placing of line numbers at the left of the text rather than the right has made it possible to avoid almost all of the run-on lines of Latin which are found in the older edition.

Fairclough had allotted three pages to the life of Virgil and two pages to the manuscripts of the poems, but no literary introductions, even of the briefest kind, to the works themselves, either en bloc or separately. It appears...

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