Our Collaboration

This Aeneid began as a senior thesis project when Wright was an undergraduate and McGill her advisor. (We are confident that this is the only translation of the poem with such an origin story.) We first began working together when Wright was a freshman in college, on a separate project that exposed us both for the first time to the challenges and delights of verse translation. When later working on a collection of verse translations from Latin epic for Wright’s senior thesis, our enthusiasm for collaborating only grew, and we got so carried away that we decided to translate the rest of Aeneid 2. That was it: Virgil had taken hold, and we knew that we had to try our hand at the rest of the poem.

Initially, we each assigned ourselves individual books, which we then sent to the other for comments and revisions. After a few years of pushing our word processors’ tracked changes features to the limit, we discovered that we needed instead to go through the translation together—every line, beat by beat, in real time. Sometimes this took place in person, and other times by video call, as we explored multiple solutions to the literary logic puzzle of translating Virgil in verse. Over time, our two voices became one. Every line is the fruit of this commitment to collaboration, and every word a decision that we reached together.

Scott McGill is Deedee McMurtry Professor in Humanities at Rice University. He attended Salve Regina College in Newport, RI, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. McGill is the author of five books and the editor of four volumes. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center. McGill lives in Houston with his wife Sarah and is the proud and happy father of three boys. He loves to read Latin and Greek and often finds himself wandering on the outskirts of the canon, in and around the last decades of the Roman Empire. When not reading, he enjoys all manner of exercise, especially tennis.

Susannah Wright is an assistant professor of classical studies and Roman history at Rice University. She grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and studied at Rice University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University, where she received her Ph.D. in 2024. The Aeneid is her first book. Wright has been fascinated with ancient literature since her early years, which included such memorable experiences as dressing up as Athena—hooting owl and all—for a childhood project and attending Junior Classical League competitions in Texas and beyond. She lives in Houston, where she spends much of her time surrounded by piles of books and drinking copious quantities of tea under the watchful eye of her distinguished cat Percival.