In the Library
The Aeneid
Virgil, 1697
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by John Dryden (1697)
- Original
- Original la
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 107k words
£1.99
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I sing of arms and the man.
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About the book
In a temple in Carthage, Aeneas finds the fall of Troy painted on the walls, his own dead among the figures, and weeps before strangers. Virgil gives the moment the line every Latin student carries: sunt lacrimae rerum, there are tears at the heart of things. That grief is the poem's engine. Aeneas is the founder of Rome and the most unwilling hero the ancient world made, dragged by pietas, that untranslatable fusion of duty, piety, and love, away from all he wants toward a future he will not live to see. He carries his old father from the flames and loses his wife in the smoke. He loves Dido, leaves her at the gods' command, and the leaving kills her. Descending among the dead in Book Six, he watches his father summon the unborn souls of Rome, emperors marched past a man who will never reach the city they build. No epic before it had grasped this: empire and a broken heart can be the same thing, and Rome is bought with all its founder must surrender.