Aeneid Book 2, lines 1-13

Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story

by Virgil

As Book 2 begins, Queen Dido of Carthage has asked Aeneas to tell the story of his wanderings and the fall of Troy. Aeneas dominates the scene: The company cannot take their eyes off him in his elevated place of honour, spellbound by his presence and the dignified emotion with which he speaks. The poem’s audience were no doubt meant to think of Aeneas’s descendant, the Emperor Augustus. The Myrmidons were the followers of Achilles, and Ulixes is Homer’s Odysseus, the trickster-king who thought of the Trojan Horse.

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Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant.
inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto:
“infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem,
Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum
eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima vidi
et quorum pars magna fui. quis talia fando
Myrmidonum Dolopumve aut duri miles Ulixi
temperet a lacrimis? et iam nox umida caelo
praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos.
sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros
et breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem,
quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuqe refugit,
incipiam.”

All fell silent and kept their gaze intently on him.
From his high couch Father Aeneas began to speak:
Inexpressible, O Queen, is the pain you bid me revive,
how Trojan wealth and its lamented kingdom
were annihilated by Greeks, terrible events I witnessed
and was great part of. Who, telling of such things,
even a Myrmidon, Dolopian, or one of cruel Ulysses’s men,
would not weep? Already, night and dew fall swiftly
from the heavens, and setting stars call us to sleep.
Yet if you would so love to know our disasters
and briefly hear the final agony of Troy,
though my mind, shuddering to recall,shies away in pain,
I shall attempt it.”

`

More Poems by Virgil

  1. Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
  2. Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
  3. Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
  4. In King Latinus’s hall
  5. Love is the same for all
  6. The death of Priam
  7. Aeneas tours the site of Rome
  8. The journey to Hades begins
  9. The Aeneid begins
  10. How Aeneas will know the site of his city
  11. The natural history of bees
  12. Turnus the wolf
  13. The Harpy’s prophecy
  14. Charon, the ferryman
  15. Aeneas’s ships are transformed
  16. Laocoon and the snakes
  17. Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
  18. Palinurus the helmsman is lost
  19. Mercury’s journey to Carthage
  20. Virgil’s perils on the sea
  21. Virgil begins the Georgics
  22. The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
  23. Storm at sea!
  24. Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
  25. The farmer’s happy lot
  26. Turnus is lured away from battle
  27. Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
  28. The Syrian hostess
  29. Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
  30. Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
  31. Dido falls in love
  32. Signs of bad weather
  33. King Mezentius meets his match
  34. Turnus at bay
  35. Rumour
  36. Aeneas joins the fray
  37. Dido’s release
  38. New allies for Aeneas
  39. The death of Dido.
  40. The death of Euryalus and Nisus
  41. More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
  42. Aeneas’s oath
  43. King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
  44. The Trojans reach Carthage
  45. The portals of sleep
  46. Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
  47. Aristaeus’s bees
  48. Catastrophe for Rome?
  49. Sea-nymphs
  50. Juno throws open the gates of war
  51. Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
  52. A Fury rouses Turnus to war
  53. Juno is reconciled
  54. Omens for Princess Lavinia
  55. The death of Pallas
  56. Aeneas arrives in Italy
  57. Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
  58. The infant Camilla
  59. Mourning for Pallas
  60. The farmer’s starry calendar
  61. Rites for the allies’ dead
  62. Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
  63. Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
  64. Jupiter’s prophecy
  65. Aeneas is wounded
  66. Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
  67. The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
  68. Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
  69. Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
  70. Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
  71. Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
  72. Vulcan’s forge
  73. The Trojan Horse enters the city
    74. View Latin Poems