Aeneas’s divine mother, Venus, appears in splendour to remind him that the sight of Helen hiding in the burning city should not distract him from saving his family.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here. See the illustrated blog post here.
Aeneas in his underworld journey has come to the dread penitentiary of Tartarus. He cannot cross the cursed threshold but the Sibyl, his companion and guide through Hades, explains what he is hearing and seeing. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Today’s new poem is an encounter between Aeneas and the Harpies, half-women, half savage birds. Things do not go well, and the Harpies give Aeneas an unwelcome prophecy.
The River Tiber has stilled his flow so that Aeneas with two ships can row upstream to meet a potential ally, King Evander of the Arcadians – whose city, Pallanteum, now stands where Rome will be in time to come. Evander gives a guided tour and welcomes Aeneas into his home, where previous visitors have included Hercules himself. The illustration is from a 5th century manuscript of Virgil in the Vatican.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Today’s new Latin poem is from Virgil’s Aeneid. It sets the scene for Aeneas, as an honoured guest at the court of Dido, Queen of Carthage, to describe the fall of Troy. He is a Trojan prince, and the story he tells will be first-hand, vivid and full of drama, and a rarer subject in ancient literature than you might suppose – Homer’s Iliad ends before Troy falls. As Book 2 begins, Aeneas’s superhuman dignity and charisma are meant to remind us of his descendant, the Emperor Augustus.