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Virgil's "Aeneid": A Retelling in Prose by David Bruce
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 23, 2026
I recently read Fagles' version of the Aeneid, but often struggled with some of his modern verse. At those moments I switched over to David Bruce's prose version, which was a lifesaver.
From what I can tell from the author's notes, David Bruce is not a well-known translator, but an educator with a masters in English and Philosophy who in his retirement has enjoyed making the classics more accessible.
One of the main themes of the Aeneid is the clash between passion and duty. The thing I most appreciated about Bruce's version was that he used the Latin words "Furor" and "Pietas" whenever they came up in the story. In Fagles' version, he often included synonyms for them (probably to avoid being repetitious) so it wasn't as easy to detect their significant appearance in the narrative.
From what I can tell from the author's notes, David Bruce is not a well-known translator, but an educator with a masters in English and Philosophy who in his retirement has enjoyed making the classics more accessible.
One of the main themes of the Aeneid is the clash between passion and duty. The thing I most appreciated about Bruce's version was that he used the Latin words "Furor" and "Pietas" whenever they came up in the story. In Fagles' version, he often included synonyms for them (probably to avoid being repetitious) so it wasn't as easy to detect their significant appearance in the narrative.
April 5, 2025
For unknown reasons I've been reading ancient mythological stories lately. This is the weakest story of all of them. There isn't much here. Could have been a short story. It was stretched to 200 pages simply by repeating itself over and over.
To me, the interesting thing about the myths isn't the story. It's seeing how the people of the time viewed cause and effect - always by the gods having impact on the story. Viewed that way, this offered nothing new. The personalities of the gods, the heroism of the humans, the savagery of the war were already told in The Iliad. This book didn't seem to me to offer much that was new.
To me, the interesting thing about the myths isn't the story. It's seeing how the people of the time viewed cause and effect - always by the gods having impact on the story. Viewed that way, this offered nothing new. The personalities of the gods, the heroism of the humans, the savagery of the war were already told in The Iliad. This book didn't seem to me to offer much that was new.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews