One of the best books ever written on one of humanity’s greatest epics, W. R. Johnson’s classic study of Vergil’s Aeneid challenges centuries of received wisdom. Johnson rejects the political and historical reading of the epic as a record of the glorious prehistory of Rome and instead foregrounds Vergil’s enigmatic style and questioning of the heroic myths.

With an approach to the text that is both grounded in scholarship and intensely personal, and in a style both rhetorically elegant and passionate, Johnson offers readings of specific passages that are nuanced and suggestive as he focuses on the “somber and nourishing fictions” in Vergil’s poem. A timeless work of scholarship, Darkness Visible will enthrall classicists as well as students and scholars of the history of criticism—specifically the way in which politics influence modern readings of the classics—and of poetry and literature.

W. R. Johnson is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of, among others, Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1.

— William M. Porter, Arion

— Denis Feeney, Princeton University

— Mark Payne, University of Chicago

— K. W. Gransden, University of Warwick, Classical Review

— A. Dalzell, Trinity College, Phoenix, a journal of the Classical Association of Canada

— Oliver Lyne, Times Literary Supplement

— Charles Martindale, Times Literary Supplement