Since I have mentioned Anna Cox Brinton, this is a good place to praise her still unsurpassed edition of Aeneid XIII of 1930, to which - published in the year of my birth - I gladly declare myself greatly indebted. It consists of a highly knowledgeable introduction, the text with the English rhyming verse translation of Thomas Twyne (1583) en face, the Scots translation by Gavin Douglas (1513), a bibliography of Maffeo Vegio's works numbering no fewer than fifty-four items, and a commentary along with a list of parallel passages, quotations, adaptations, allusions and reminiscences of Vergil and Ovid, from whom derive the burning of Ardea and its rising again as a phoenix and the apotheosis of Aeneas in Aeneid XIII. There is, it is true, a more recnt edition by Bernd Schneider (1985), whose justification rests on Brinton's having based hers on the editio princeps of 1471, while he examines and incorporates the preceding manuscript tradition which is, following the popularity of the work, uncommonly rich and various. It does, however, have the disadvantage for an American public that its ancillary material including the accompanying modern translation is in German. There has not been an English translation done in well over a century.
To return to Maffeo Vegio: when in 1421 a codex came to light containing the complete text of Cicero's De oratore along with the previously altogether unknown Brutus, the fourteen-year-old celebrated the occasion with an epigram; at fifteen he began the writing of a whole set of elegies and epigrams. Although later he attained some fame for his treatise De liberorum educatione at claris moribus (1444) and a few years later for his two sisters in the convent the De perseverantia religionis ((1448), in which occurs near the beginning the reference to Vergil 'quem alterum in terris Deum esse arbitrabar', hence by its imperfect tense something recalled from the past, it is primarily on Aeneid XIII, modestly entitled Libri XII Aeneidos supplementum (dated VI. idus octobris 1428), accordingly the work of a young man of twenty-one, that his literary reputation is founded. This Aeneid XIII runs to 630 hexametres, shorter by 75 than Book IV, for all its memorable character and its virtual autonomy in generating a tradition of its own, the shortest of the Aeneid.
