The Greeks battle their way to the threshold of the royal palace of Troy: Aenas fights desperately alongside its defenders.
Hear Virgil’s Latin in the original and follow in Engllish here; see the illustrated blog post here.
In the evening, the monstrous Cyclops comes home to the cave where Odysseus and his men are waiting. They hide, while he tends his flock and closes the door of the cave behind him with a rock so enormous that twenty teams of oxen could not shift it.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
The drawing of the Cyclops’s arrival, courtesy of the British Museum, is by the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. Illustration by courtesy of the British Museum under licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
The Cyclops comes to regret accepting Odysseus’s offer of incredibly powerful Ismaric wine as the Ithacans begin to fight back with a brutal stratagem.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
Image courtesy of the British Museum under licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
On a pyre she has built to burn all that Aeneas has left her, Dido dies by her own hand on his sword. It is one of the great moments of the Aeneid, and augurs enmity and war for the future between Dido’s and Aeneas’s descendants. Hear the climax of the story here.
The Etruscan Lausus has died at Aeneas’s hands rescuing his wounded father, Mezentius, who rides back into the fray on his horse, Rhaebus, to join his son in death.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Phaethon’s ride in the chariot of his father, the Sun, has brought catastrophe as he sets the world ablaze. Now Jupiter intervenes to fell him with a thunderbolt before the damage goes from bad to worse.
The illustration by Giovanni Bernardi shows his fall, his sisters, who are turned to poplar trees on his burial mound, and his friend Cycnus, who will be transformed in to a swan.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.