Desired Futures: Sidney Godolphin and Edmund Waller

Chapter 1 outlines two key strands of Virgil’s mid-seventeenth century English reception: his reputation as a vates (poet-prophet) and the belief that his poetry contained ethical and political counsel that was directed to Augustus. It argues that his translators were drawn to Virgil’s use of prophecy and counsel as a means of imagining the alternate near-futures that the fragility of his own historical moment had made possible in light of the political uncertainties prompted by Rome’s civil war and its transition from Republic to Principate. Virgil’s poetry consequently provided a site for his translators to evaluate their own experience of civil war and express their hopes for the future, both personal and political. The translation of Aeneid 4 by Sidney Godolphin and Edmund Waller is used to identify the book’s overall concerns, especially with regard to the sometimes mobile nature of the translators’ loyalties across the period, and the signalling of their political affinities through paratextual materials as well as direct interventions in their translations and imitations of Virgil’s texts.