À l'école de Virgile II

Up until the late Renaissance, any edition of Virgil's Aeneid went hand in hand with Servius’ commentary. This is the first-ever French translation of the commentary’s second book. Showing, like Servius, how rich poetic formulas can be is the work of an educator, but it is also a hermeneutical gesture that reveals the polysemous breadth of myths and fictions. The Ancients who learned to read with Virgil found in myths an introduction to every science, and their interpretation practice was broad enough that it gave free rein to the imagination. What is unveiled by reading Servius is the poet at work, his way of giving meaning to things through words. Ancient and medieval glosses passed down since the fourth century under the name of Servius belong to the European cultural heritage for having trained so many readers in bringing together literacy, knowledge of the natural and human sciences, myth and poetry, rhetoric and society.