Ancient biography is an almost impossible undertaking. Its only recourse from meager, less-than-reliable sources is the author’s feel for their subject’s milieu, deeds, or texts. And it must resist anachronistic pressures while in the same breath proclaiming its relevance. On these bases, it is hard to imagine Sarah Ruden’s wise, insightful, and engaging Vergil: The Poet’s Life being bettered.
Ruden, the gifted translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, is alive to the challenge she has set herself: “The man was like Shakespeare in being hard to know in proportion to his greatness.” This is due partly to Vergil’s retiring habits—he was possessed of “conspicuous negatives for his time and class (no wife, no children, no settled home, extreme reserve)”—and partly to the long, equivocal shadow of imperial patronage.
