With the Greeks in the city, Aeneas gathers a desperate band of defenders as the final battle for Troy begins to unfold.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Odysseus (seen here on a later visit to the underworld) and his companions are released from the wooden horse within the walls of Troy and the scene is set for the fall of the city. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
After Dido’s banquet in the royal palace of Carthage, Aeneas has agreed to her request to tell the story of the fall of Troy and the years of his wanderings with his Trojan comrades-in-arms. He has just embarked on the episode of the Trojan horse, and is recalling how King Priam, and the Trojans were ticked into bringing it into the city by Sinon, who claims to hate the Greeks and narrowly to have escaped death at their hands as a human sacrifice. In fact, he is a Greek agent, and a very skilful one.
The illustration is a first-century CE wall painting from Pompeii, showing the Trojans bringing the horse into their city.
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Like everyone else, Queen Dido of Carthage, giving a lavish banquet in honour of Aeneas and his band of exiled Trojans, is unaware that she is entertaining a god unawares. It is Cupid, Aeneas’s half-brother, whom their mother Venus has sent in disguise to make Dido fall in love. The idea is to make it hard for Juno, Queen of the Gods and Aeneas’s enemy, to turn the Carthaginian hosts against their Trojan guests, but Venus has miscalculated. The consequences of Dido’s passion will include tragedy and death for her, and the beginnings of an enmity between Rome and Carthage that will leave a deep mark on centuries to come. The illustration, photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, shows Cupid at and and a Maenad in a fresco from Pompeii.
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In a banqueting hall on Carthage, Cupid has been sent by his mother Venus to make Queen Dido fall in love with Aeneas, the heroic Trojan prince whose descendants will found Rome.
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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.
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Image: Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba, Fox Film Corporation 1921.
Aeneas is destined to begin a love affair which will have disastrous consequences with Dido, the Queen of the new Phoenician city of Carthage, which she is in the process of building on the North African coast. Now his mother the Goddess Venus, in human disguise, tells him why Dido was forced to leave her homeland.
The fresco of Venus arising from the waves is from Pompeii.
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Close to the beginning of the Aeneid, Virgil explains why his hero Aeneas, in spite of his virtues and qualities, faces the implacable enmity of Juno, the Queen of the Gods. It is clear from the start that Aeneas is destined to succeed in settling in Italy and laying the foundations for a people who will become the founders of Rome, but Juno is a powerful enemy, and Virgil makes it clear that great ordeals and years of wandering lie between him and success.
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On Horace’s Sabine farm, unmolested by her brutal urban boyfriend, Tyndaris sings of Penelope and Circe among the peace and joys of the countryside.
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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.