The great classicist Robert Fagles passed away a couple of days ago. Fagles was one of a handful of people who have translated the Big Three of classical literature (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid); I have read pretty much every translation of the Aeneid that I have been able to lay my hands on, and for my money, Fagles' is the best of the lot. It is, somehow, the most human of them all -- it brings Aeneas to life as a human being in an extraordinarily powerful way, and it somehow makes me think that Fagles himself must have been a decent fellow. It makes for absolutely gripping reading -- if you haven't read it, you'd be doing yourself a favor to pick it up.