The Aeneid

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The Aeneid

Virgil

Literature

Aug 7, 2018

Virgil’s Aeneid encompasses the fall of Troy; Aeneas’s wanderings from Troy to Sicily to Carthage; his ill-fated liaison with Dido, Carthage’s queen; his journey to the underworld; and his final arrival in Italy, where fierce warfare with native tribes paves the way for the completion of the task he has been assigned by Jupiter: the founding of Rome. Virgil’s celebration of the great city and the grandeur of Aeneas’s civilizing mission is tempered by his sensitivity to the human price such greatness exacts. Written in the reign of the emperor Augustus during the last decade of the author’s life, the work, although nearly complete in twelve books, was unfinished at the time of Virgil’s death in 19 BC. It remains a whole and satisfying reading experience nonetheless. Although it sings of arms and the man—as its first words (Arma virumque cano) famously announce—and of acts of courage and heroism, Virgil’s epic is notable for its veneration of Aeneas’s Roman virtues: devotion to family, loyalty to homeland, piety, duty.

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Parkinii

Jun 19, 2019

Marvelous insight into Roman ideas of Greek antiquity and creating a cultural narrative

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Jane Huttner

Jul 20, 2020

Great insight into Trojan, Greek and Latin antiquity and the hardship of trying to found Rome

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