After more than twenty-five years of reading, teaching and writing about the Aeneid, I am conscious of a considerable and not easily definable pile-up of debt. It is not easy to distinguish the help and advice I have received in respect of previous and forthcoming publications on Virgil from those specifically sought in relation to the present book; but I am gratefully aware that Professor E. J. Kenney, Dr N. Horsfall and the late R. D. Williams have helped me, in many ways and over many years, to understand Virgil better. I must also thank Dr Peter Stern for his careful scrutiny both of an early draft of this book and of the finished manuscript. As for the secondary literature on the Aeneid, which is of course enormous, I have been fortunate to receive, for the purpose of review, many recent books on Virgil, for which I am grateful to the editors of the Classical Review, The Times Higher Educational Supplement and The Modern Language Review.

One might be daunted by all this, were it not that ‘the last word’ can never be written about a great text concerned with the meaning of history and the life and suffering of humanity, and I have tried in this book, while drawing freely on the researches of my predecessors, to develop some approaches to the poem which I attempted in an earlier publication, Virgil's Iliad, and which in some respects differ from the traditional procedures of classical exegesis.