From the December, 2007 issue of *Touchstone*

Book Review

World of Tears

Virgil: The Aeneid
translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox
Viking, 2006
(486 pages, $40.00, hardcover)

reviewed by Franklin Freeman

In Homer’s world, wrote C. S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost, quoted by both Bernard Knox in his introduction and Robert Fagles in his postscript, “you were unhappy, or you were happy, and that was all. Aeneas lives in a different world; he is compelled to see something more important than happiness.”

The something more is a vocation. As Lewis wrote, “To follow the vocation does not mean happiness: but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do . . .

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Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.

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