Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek

This chapter traces the two-thousand-year-old tradition of translating Virgil into ancient Greek. It examines verse translations composed in late antiquity (Oratio Constantini) and in the Renaissance (Scaliger and Heinsius) as well as translations from the period of the modern Greek Enlightenment (Voulgaris) down to nineteenth-century modern Greece (Philitas and Ioannou). Paschalis investigates the elements of continuity and change in relation to translation techniques, adaptation to the genre’s conventional dialect, metrical and verbal equivalences between the translations and the original, the kinds of audience to which translations are addressed, and the role of ideology in determining the character of the translations.