VERGIL The Poet's Life

As the author admits in her foreword, it's difficult to write a biography of someone about whom we know little. For this audiobook, Sarah Ruden, a noted translator of Vergil, had to rely on a biography written a generation after the poet's death, the texts of the three poems clearly written by him, and a deep knowledge of life in the early Roman Empire. Suzanne Toren does an admirable job with Latin pronunciation and with retaining the sense that much of what we are told is based on highly educated guesses about Vergil's life. Her readings of the excerpts from the poems, in particular, are clear and convincing. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2023]