Customer Reviews

Darkness Visible: Study of Virgil's "Aeneid"

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The most wonderful, insightful book on the Aeneid since Hardie's "Cosmos and Imperium". Johnson confronts the inherent (and much commented upon) melancholy of the poem, and gives us an interpretation as brilliant and as it is original. Classicists from Berkeley always seem a little mad, but Johnson only ever takes the reader as far as it is sensible to go, stopping short of anything too barmy... but just barmy enough to challenge our prejudices and conception of the poet/poem.

Another terrific book that has gone out of print!

On the surface, Virgil's Aeneid is a fairly unproblematic (and not too interesting) story of the founding of the Roman people by Aeneas after he and his comrades flee the fall of Troy. Johnson really helped me to see that the story is actually much more complex, and much "darker," than it seems.