If you want to live well, says Horace, then avoid extremes, accept the worst if it comes, but hope for the best. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
In the throne room of Carthage, Queen Dido gives audience to an embassy from Aeneas’s Trojans, unaware that he himself is present and about to be revealed.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Image: Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba, Fox Film Corporation 1921.
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.