First published between 1858 and 1871, John Conington's lucid exposition of the complete works of Virgil continues to set the standard for commentary on the Virgilian corpus. After decades out of print, this three-volume edition is once again available to readers, allowing Conington's subtle investigations of language, context, and intellectual background to find a fresh audience. Volume 2 (1863) features the first six books of the Aeneid. Introductory essays and detailed, informative notes situate the work within the larger field of Greek and Latin epic poetry. Still a major scholarly contribution over a century and a half after its initial publication, Conington's Works of Virgil is fine testament to one of Victorian England's most talented readers of classical Latin, a philologist whose gifts, as his colleague Henry Nettleship noted, 'were of a single and representative order ... unlikely to be replaced'.
