In Aeneas in the Underworld and Other Essays, Stephen Barber invites readers to explore Latin literature, with insight, elegance, and a critical eye honed by decades of literary study. These essays explore familiar texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Horace’s Odes and Catullus’ poetry, with fresh questions and surprising answers. Could the fall of Troy have been prevented? Was Dido right to believe she was married to Aeneas? How do we read myths like Cupid and Psyche through a modern psychological lens?
Whether analyzing the fury of Cleopatra in Horace or the strange religious energy of Catullus’ Attis poem, Barber blends close textual reading with broader literary theory—drawing on humanist, New Critical, and mythological approaches. He is also remarkably frank about sexuality and sexual practices in the classical world.
All Latin is translated, and the essays remain accessible to general readers while offering depth for scholars. Combining literary criticism with mythic insight, these essays have found wide readership online and now appear for the first time in print.
For lovers of classical literature, this collection is both a thoughtful guide and a provocation, reminding us that the ancient world still speaks, if we learn how to listen.
Stephen Barber read English Literature at Cambridge and now works as an independent scholar. He has published Patterns of Glory: Studies in Charles Williams and edited Williams’s The Celian Moment and Other Essays. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife, the writer Mary Hoffman, and has three daughters and five grandchildren.