Wars and a man I sing -- an exile
driven on by Fate,
he was the first to flee the coast
of Troy,
destined to reach Lavinian shores
and Italian soil....
Virgil, The Aeneid (trans. Robert Fagles)
It is difficult enough for most completist book collectors to collect everything that has been published by a particularly prolific author (especially if that author published under multiple pseudonyms). How much more difficult is the completist collector's task when an author is both prolific and influential. Such authors (Shakespeare being the most obvious example) confront the completist collector not only with difficult decisions about how extensively to collect an author's own works, but also how extensively to collect what others have written about that author and his or her works.
Avoiding prolific authors altogether does not necessarily make the completist collector's task less difficult. Consider, for example, the case of the not particularly prolific author within whose smaller opus resides a single title that has had an outsized influence. To collect such an extraordinarily influential title in all its known editions and translations, not to mention everything that others have written about that title (and author), may well be to set one's self a task for several lifetimes.
A case in point is the ancient Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, anglicized as Virgil, who is famous today primarily for three titles. The first title, The Eclogues, and the second, The Georgics, present collecting challenges of their own. But it is Virgil's third title, The Aeneid, that most often drives completist collectors to distraction:
T. S. Eliot, no mean poet himself, considered The Aeneid to be the single most influential title in all of Western literature. Pick an influential later author and you will, more likely than not, be able to readily trace the influence of The Aeneid on that author's works. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton--all are in Virgil's debt.
So...where does one begin? With the editio princeps (Rome, 1469)? Another early edition? Good luck--all such editions are quite scarce and expensive! (In fact, it's likely impossible to collect all known editions of The Aeneid...unless certain institutional collections deaccession some of the earliest printed editions.)
Perhaps one should focus instead on some of the better-known translations: Douglas (1553); Surrey (1554); Dryden (1696); Pitt (1740); Cormon's polyglot publication of 1838; Fairclough (1916); or, more recently, Mandelbaum (1971), Fitzgerald (1981) and Fagles (2006). Here, too, you will need much patience and considerable sums for the earliest of these editions (of course, you can always settle for a nice reprint).
Probably before you get too far into the decision-making process you need to sit down with a really good bibliography. A number of these have been published. Some, such as Kallendorf's A Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil, 1470-1599, are narrowly focused. Others are much broader and, thankfully, sometimes found online.
With diligence and a modicum of luck, you may one day find yourself right up there with Junius Spencer Morgan as a collector of Virgil....
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