I consider the position of Aeneid translations in the career patterns of a spectrum of poets and scholars in a range of languages, with attention to those who tackle other high-prestige texts, such as the Homeric epics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I ask whether the Virgil translation was the chef d’œuvre or an apprenticeship, whether the sequence of translating had any impact on the translator’s other output, and what difference this makes to our reading of the Aeneid translations. After highlighting some of the issues via Harington, whose Ariosto translation influenced his Aeneid translation, I analyse the synergy between Dante and Virgil in Villena’s Castilian translations. Most of the chapter deals with Virgil translators who also translated Homer, including Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Lombardo and Fagles, with longer discussions of Ogilby, Dryden and Morris. I close with an examination of Day-Lewis who translated the Georgics first, then the Aeneid and finally the Eclogues.

The 1860s marked a change of attitude toward myth. Formerly dismissed as falsehood, it now became a way to meditate on origins and identity at a time when orthodox religious belief was coming into question and Britons began to think of their colonies as an Empire. Inspired by the linguist Max Müller’s [GK17]theories of Aryan heritage, and his own dislike of John Henry Newman’s Romanism, Charles Kingsley claimed that the British people’s race and culture were Teutonic. Similar ideas about the British character were allegorized in poetry. Focusing on poetic reenvisionings of classical, medieval, and Arthurian stories by Tennyson, Thomas Westwood, and William Morris, this chapter explores how these poems reflected, but also helped to create, a myth of Britishness.