Virgil's Experience: Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places

by Richard Jenkyns

This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity, combined with the study of attitudes towards nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century B.C. as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

726 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 1998

About the author

Richard Jenkyns is emeritus Professor of the Classical Tradition and the Public Orator at the University of Oxford. His books include Virgil's Experience and Victorians and Ancient Greece, acclaimed as "masterly" by History Today.

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book on Virgil I've ever read, and that's a lot. Much more inclusive than the title suggests.