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
The mental process by which Horace makes the link between the power of poetry and the story of the Danaids is a little mysterious, but the two are narrated in the first and second halves of this piece. All but one of the fifty daughters of Danaus, acting on his orders, murdered their husbands on their wedding night. We first find them in Hades, where their eternal punishment is to try to fill a huge jar with water, only for it to pour forever out through a hole in the bottom. The implied message to Lyde, the girl whom the speaker in the poem is pursuing, includes both a carrot and a stick: if she complies, she will be merciful and kind, like the one Danaid who did not commit the crime; if she is cruel, she will deserve some punishment for the hardness of her heart. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
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.