Macedon and Qin are introduced, providing separate summary histories of these two polities, examining the differing types and quality of evidence for the study of each, examines the geographic and cultural location of these polities relative to their cores of their cultural networks, and argues for the usefulness of the center-periphery axiom in the study of these entities. Lastly, the nature of the Macedonian and Qin identity is explored, suggesting that prior attempts to define them as Greek/Zhou or not Greek/Zhou miss the clearer dynamic that they are frontier cultures. Their significant divergences from Greek and Zhou norms are explained by the same factors that cause colonial and frontier societies throughout human history to “deviate” from norms of a core culture. I also point out the significant ways in which their identities seek to preserve earlier cultural modes.

The chapter explores the economics of translating Virgil, examining the role of patrons, printers, publishing houses and presses. I first explore the relationships of translators with their patrons, publishers and printers, in France, Italy and Britain during the first two centuries of the print era. I reveal the tension between the desire to satisfy the elite’s need for exclusive badges of culture and the impulse to extend the vernacularization of Virgil by producing accessible translations for less educated readers. I investigate the power relations involved in initiating or commissioning translations, with examples from Cinquecento Italy, and the funding of expensive folio editions in France and England. In Victorian England, translations published in low-priced series of books, including Everyman’s Library, flourish alongside ambitious luxury productions. The chapter concludes with a study of Virgil’s works in the Penguin Classics series in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This short epilogue restates and summarizes the findings of the work, and points to future avenues of study pertaining to Macedon and Qin

I consider the position of Aeneid translations in the career patterns of a spectrum of poets and scholars in a range of languages, with attention to those who tackle other high-prestige texts, such as the Homeric epics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I ask whether the Virgil translation was the chef d’œuvre or an apprenticeship, whether the sequence of translating had any impact on the translator’s other output, and what difference this makes to our reading of the Aeneid translations. After highlighting some of the issues via Harington, whose Ariosto translation influenced his Aeneid translation, I analyse the synergy between Dante and Virgil in Villena’s Castilian translations. Most of the chapter deals with Virgil translators who also translated Homer, including Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Lombardo and Fagles, with longer discussions of Ogilby, Dryden and Morris. I close with an examination of Day-Lewis who translated the Georgics first, then the Aeneid and finally the Eclogues.

The topic of competition starts with translators’ incorporation of others’ versions into their own texts, then moves on to translators’ prefaces where they situate themselves in relation to particular predecessors, such as Leopardi’s relationship with Caro’s sixteenth-century Eneide. I examine in depth the self-positioning and self-fashioning in the paratexts in the English tradition of Aeneid translations from Caxton down to Wordsworth. The second section deals with the phenomenon of ‘retranslation’, which has two manifestations: when translators lift elements from preceding translations and when they revisit their own earlier versions and modify them. Then I consider competition with Virgil himself, starting with the challenge to Paul Valéry to translate the Eclogues. The chapter concludes with brief consideration of parody and travesty of Virgil as special forms of retranslation, with examples from a seventeenth-century Dutch collaboration on the Eclogues, a seventeenth-century parody of Eclogue 1 by an Irishman and an eighteenth-century travesty of the Aeneid in German.

The chapter deals with fidelity of form: after briefly considering prose translations of Virgil, I analyse the wide range of choices of metre for the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. One of the largest issues facing any translator is whether or not to attempt to find an equivalent of Virgil’s dactylic hexameter. After discussion of prosody wars in French and English, I examine Italian Aeneids in depth and then metrical experimentation in English translations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The final portion of the chapter is devoted to the hexameter in the hands of translators into German, Slovenian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Finnish and Hungarian, with a glance at twenty-first-century hexameter translations in Italian and English. Throughout I explore the ideological significance attached to the chosen metre by analysing the familiar cultural paradigms invoked by each choice. There are two axes on which choice of metre can be located: past/present and home-grown/foreign.

The chapter deals with fidelity of content, specifically concepts and register. I first discuss the querelle (‘dispute’) between those who favoured word-for-word translations and those who believed in updating or beautifying the ancient text for their contemporary audience, as captured in the phrase ‘les belles infidèles’, an approach which involves the notion of ‘compensation’. I then ask how translators tackle key concepts in Virgil’s oeuvre, such as the untranslatable pietas of the Aeneid, along with specific challenges that arise from Virgil’s Latin texts, such as puns and the incomplete lines. I investigate how translators attempt to match the various registers of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, then I consider the lens provided by the theoretical spectrum of domestication and foreignization, with examples including Aeneid translations in Italian, English, Romanian, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian, concluding with Chew’s uncategorizable Georgics.

This chapter focuses on the role of the Argead dynasts of Macedon and the Qin rulers, who transitioned in title from Gong to Wang to Huang Di. Despite both of these figures being “sole rulers” which initially operate along very similar lines, the resulting final forms of those rulership modes – Philip and Alexander in Macedon, versus the First Emperor in Qin, are evidence of dramatically different dynamics at work on these rulership traditions. This chapter focuses on the differing roles of ruler legitimation, the limitations of power