That result, she and Bartsch agree, is a consequence of particular choices made in reading, not the substance of the epics themselves. “A lot of toxic masculinity has been shaped by imperfect understandings of epic poetry,” said Headley, whose “Beowulf” translation is due in August from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. One is a new skepticism regarding the relationship that has developed between the epic and prevailing ideas about male heroism. Those second looks have turned up several shared themes. The books, arriving in the politically turbulent landscape of 2020, suggest that it’s time to take a hard second look at these tales, which have for so long shaped the West’s understanding of the world. that predates the “Aeneid” by three centuries, to Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” published in England at the end of the 16th century. The new books explore subjects ranging from Apollonius Rhodius’s “Argonautica,” a Greek epic from 300 B.C.

In addition to providing the underpinnings for world literature, epic poetry has for much of history been used to define social values and shape nations’ political identities. Looked at closely, the “Aeneid” is really a story “about how you rewrite a character into history, turning him from someone who was criticized into someone who is praised.”īartsch’s translation is one of several new books, including Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of “Beowulf” and Catherine Nicholson’s “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’” to re-evaluate the lessons of epic poetry, a genre consisting of book-length narrative poems that tend, in the words of the poet and critic Edward Hirsch, to be “exalted in style, heroic in theme.” “He’s writing an epic that points to itself and says, ‘Hey look, I’m in the process of creating a national myth,’” she said. What readers have historically missed, according to Bartsch, the author of a new translation of the “Aeneid” (Random House) coming out in October, is that Virgil’s depiction was self-consciously political, designed to frame Rome’s expanding empire as just, virtuous and divinely mandated. In recasting him as a hero, Virgil changed our understanding of Rome’s history. Shadi Bartsch, a classics scholar at the University of Chicago, thinks that for the past 2,000 years, we’ve been reading it wrong.īefore Virgil wrote the “Aeneid,” Bartsch said, Aeneas was considered a traitor who helped the Greeks take Troy. Eliot once described it as “the classic of all Europe.” The “Aeneid,” Virgil’s epic about the founding of Rome by the Trojan refugee Aeneas, is so influential that T.S.

The aeneid translated