Turnus has caught the Trojans unawares while Aeneas, his enemy and rival, is away, but is furious that they stay on the defensive, rather than giving battle. See the illustrated blog post here, and hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Aeneas’s enemy and rival, King Turnus, rages like a desperate wolf as he looks for a way into the Trojans’ camp. Hear Virgil’s story in Latin and follow in English here.
In the last poem of his first book of Odes, Horace celebrates with a drink in the shade of a closely tangled vine, served by a single slave. Both wear myrtle crowns for the occasion, chosen for their simplicity, as Horace stresses. The garland that the beautiful Antinous wears in this bust from the British Museum is of ivy, sacred to Bacchus/Dionysus.
Hear Horace’s poem in his original Latin and follow in English here.
In North Africa, fearing that fourteen of his ships may be lost, Aeneas is exploring the country. His mother Venus, disguised as a Phoenician girl, has told him the story of Queen Dido and now delivers good news about his missing ships and men by interpreting a sighting of swans as an oracle.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Exploring the powerful sexual drive that acts on both people and animals, Virgil in his Georgics uses mares as his example of the creatures most sensitive of all to its compulsion. The illustration (a stallion not a mare, but from this angle it might be either) is the famous racehorse Whistlejacket, painted by George Stubbs. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in John Dryden’s seventeenth-century English here.
In the fourth Book of the Georgics, Virgil’s poem on farming and the countryside, he describes the life of bees. Hear his Latin and follow in English here.
Pausing in his countryside poem, the Georgics, Virgil looks ahead to the composition of a poem on a loftier theme – the glorification of the Emperor Augustus through the Aeneid. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.