The drawback to this frequently effective style is that some lines lose their weight because they need the emphasis that only extra words can provide. Consider the last line of the poem's opening section, an emotive and programmatic line, the last before we join the action of the plot. Cecil Day-Lewis has it as "So massive a task it was to found the Roman race." Robert Fitzgerald adds an adjective with "so hard and huge/ A task it was to found the Roman people." These translations are faithful to the structure of the Latin sentence; Sarah Ruden's "It cost so much to found the Roman nation" is not; and nor is it faithful to the tone of an important line. Another example comes in Book 2 when Aeneas is tearfully recounting the story of the Trojan horse: "We poor fools, whose very last day it was, festooned/ The shrines of the gods with holiday foliage all over the city" (Day-Lewis), is again closer to both the syntax and the tone than Ruden's abrupt "We wretches on our last day garlanded/ The temples of the gods all through the city."

The register of the language is a very important question for translators hoping to render "a modern Aeneid" (there have been several in the 21st century already). Ruden's style is certainly disposed towards keeping with the general trend of "toning down the magniloquence" (as in "It cost so much ..."), but she manages to steer pretty clear of a related trend, the use of modern colloquialisms. This phenomenon, which can so thoroughly ruin a line, seems to tempt translators most in passages of direct speech, but can appear anywhere. The Aeneid should be sober, but it shouldn't ever be mundane.

The tone of Ruden's Book 6, the visit to Hades, is subtly undermined by a sprinkling of inappropriate words: the Sibyl, Aeneas's guide through Hades, accuses him of "gawking" and tells him not to "dawdle"; the moon is "stingy", phantom monsters are "flimsy forms"; Aeneas crosses the Styx to arrive on the "muck" of the other bank. None of these are terrible on their own, but cumulatively they create an air of frivolity that detracts from the melancholy of the underworld.