The Aeneid of Virgil

"Allen Mandelbaum has produced a living Aeneid, a version that is unmistakably poetry. He has a great feel for the essence of Virgil's line and has reproduced it as much as possible in vital, flowing English pentameters which read like the words of a poet born in our own age...This Aeneid may not be for all time (only Virgil's is), but it is for ours. And it will enable a wide new audience to realize that Virgil's epic is not the paean to humanitas that legions of tendentious critics would have us believe. Modern readers will now discover that Virgil is essentially depicting the brutal dehumanizing effects of war, even upon a man insignis pietate, in Mandelbaum's words, 'remarkable for goodness.' " -Erich Segal, The New York Times Book Review