By Rose Williams

Description

This paperback book retells the story of The Aeneid in a light-hearted and understandable manner with humorous insights and asides. This volume makes Books I-XII of Vergil's Aeneid enjoyable and easy to follow and may be used in conjunction with the Latin text of Vergil's Aeneid in high school classrooms.

Teaching Tips:
Click here for a Vergil Teaching Tip (.pdf file - 54Kb)

Labors of Aeneas offers enhancement of a student's understanding of basic Roman cultural myths and attitudes by an unusual path. The vocabulary, varying from the colloquial to the sophisticated, draws students into giving special thought to the concepts expressed. The chronological interdependence of the events builds a picture of the mythological migration from the Heroic Age to the Classical one.

The exercises below, created by Magistra Jackson, guide students through a thorough study of the little book.

Special Features

This volume includes

• the story of The Aeneid, Books I-XII
• black and white illustrations
• notes
• a glossary of gods prominent in The Aeneid

Complete Corpus Vergilianum

Complete Corpus Vergilianum
Click here to view.(.pdf file - 511Kb)

Author Bio

Rose Williams is a veteran Latin instructor at the high school and university level. Rose Williams holds a BA from Baylor University and an MA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She did postgraduate work in Latin and the Humanities at the University of Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington. On a Rockefeller Grant she conducted research at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, England and at the University of Pisa, Italy. She is the author of numerous classics textbooks and teaching guides as well as humorous books of Latin phrases. She serves on various classics consultant boards and maintains a website, www.roserwilliams.com, devoted to Latin teaching materials.

Comments and Reviews

Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Latinteach] aeneas anyone?

Great stuff to use at pre-Aeneid:
The Labors of Aeneas: What A Pain It Was To Found the Roman Race
by Latinteach's own Rose Williams
available from Bolchazy-Carducci
ISBN 0-86516-556-4

—K.C. Kless
Latin / Social Studies teacher

Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:28 PM
Subject: Re: [Latinteach] aeneas anyone?

I teach middle school as well, and I've been using Rose Williams's Once Upon A Tiber, which is a hilarious walk through the high points of Roman history. The first two chapters deal with the Trojan war and Aeneas, without just retelling the entire Aeneid. Each chapter is short (two-three pages), light, and funny. I've been having my seventh graders read aloud from the book when we have five minutes or so to spare, and they all love it. Rose also has The Labors of Aeneas: What A Pain It Was To Found The Roman Race, which is a similarly-themed retelling of the Aeneid. The chapters are longer, but there are fewer of them, so it balances out. This book is much more closely keyed to Vergil's poem, and would be a good intro for a student who wants to know more before jumping into an English translation.

— Bill Jennings
Convent of the Sacred Heart Elementary School
San Francisco, CA

An Adaptation of the Aeneid, by Rose Williams

Knowing how to translate Latin is not enough to get you through the twelve book epic poem, The Aeneid, by Vergil — at least with any real understanding. Vergil was a master of the poetic medium in which he wrote. Obligated to glorify the current administration in dactyllic hexameters almost guaranteed that two millennia later readers would have trouble understanding all the undercurrents. Modern readers need a well-informed teacher, familiarity with the relevant mythology and iconography — if not the history of ancient Rome, or Rose William's The Labors of Aeneas. Subtitled What A Pain It Was To Found The Roman Race, the slim volume pokes fun at epic pomposity — "Vergil, like most self-respecting poets, never simply says that the sun came up. At this point he states that the sea reddened as Aurora the Dawn Goddess rose aloft in her saffron robes. In other words, the sun came up."

While giving an affectionate, clear, and careful explanation of events in each of the twelve books of The Aeneid. Thus, The Labors of Aeneas is very useful, but no more so than it is charming.

If one were trying to translate the Aeneid for modern readers the obvious first choices would be prose or verse, but neither method assures that modern readers will know what's happening. Frequently Vergil leaves out what seem like crucial details and he fails to make clear transitions, so reading along, you may wonder if you missed an important point. By treating the work as a serious piece to be adapted with loving humor and in fast-paced prose, Rose Williams can point out all these difficulties. For example, when Aeneas is planning to go to the Underworld for a tete a tete with his ghostly father Ascanius, he is warned that going down is easy compared with getting back out again; yet, as Williams says, "[Vergil] spends a sizeable part of the book getting Aeneas into Hades and then gets him out in three lines." Her treatment of the gods and especially Juno is most fitting for our era when it can't be assumed that readers even know the identity of the Roman gods and goddesses let alone understand their bizarre behavior:

"Anyone with merely mortal intelligence would have seen this long ago, but classical deities were unbelievably hard-headed."

In case there isn't enough detail in the text (and there is), Williams also provides a glossary of the gods and goddesses Aeneas deals with on his adventures.

Rose Williams points out that prior to composing his masterpiece, Vergil had been writing horticultural treatises, which had a decided impact on his style. She also mentions that the poet's experience with warfare may have colored his depictions of the battles in Italy:

"If Vergil, who himself knew some of the horrors of war, wanted to discourage the Romans from ever undertaking it again, the appalling battle scenes he wrote should have been an excellent deterrent. Unfortunately, they did not have that effect."

Full of wit and despite being written with her tongue firmly in her twenty-first century cheek, Rose Williams has produced an invaluable guide for modern readers — whether reading in Latin or in translation — to Vergil's story of Aeneas.

— N.S. Gill
http://ancienthistory.about.com

This is Virgil's famous propaganda piece, the Aeneid cheerfully made accessible to a modern reader who wouldn't glance at a formal translation. It is faithful to the story and might be used in conjunction with a high school Latin class. Beyond that, it was fun for this long-ago Latin student to peruse a cheeky retelling.

— Juliet Waldron
The Historical Novels Review
Issue 27, Feb 2004

Book Reveiws by bloggers on book-blog.com

Anyone looking to dip their toes in Aeneas' story, either as a prelude to reading the Aeneid itself or merely to acquaint themselves with this major chapter of Greco-Roman mythology, would do well to spend a few hours with Rose Williams' brief, breezy retelling of the Aeneas legend.

Readers who are unacquainted with the book's subject matter will find that the author does a good job injecting explanatory material into her account. Her book is, in short, a well-written introduction to the world Vergil describes. Readers should find it both instructive and entertaining.