Today’s poem is taken from Schiller’s free German translation of Book 4 of the Aeneid, in which he describes how the Goddess Juno finally takes pity on Dido as she lingers in her death agony after stabbing herself with Aeneas’s sword and sends the rainbow-Goddess Iris to free her spirit from her body. Hear the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
The great German poet Friedrich von Schiller wrote a thrilling free version of the Books of Virgil’s Aeneid which deal with the fall of Troy and the Story of Dido and Aeneas. This extract from the second – Book 4 – is Dido’s reproof to Aeneas when she discovers he has been planning to leave her. Listen to the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
The illustration shows another famously and justly angry mythical woman – Medea – painted by Evelyn de Morgan.
See and hear passages from Schiller’s fine German version of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, follow in English and compare with Virgil’s Latin original.
This selection is composed of extracts in narrative order from each of the twelve Books of Virgil’s great epic devoted to the glory and divine origins of Rome and Aeneas’s Continue Reading
We announce the completion of the Pantheon Poets Aeneid – 61 extracts read in Latin with English translation, telling the story of Aeneas from the fall of Troy to the establishment in Italy of a new settlement which will one day become Rome and a dynasty which will culminate in the Caesars and the Emperor Augustus. See it here.
Pantheon Poets’ latest project is an intensive journey through Book 6 of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas visits the underworld. He was not the first: Odysseus had paid a visit in Homer’s epic, and Greek myth was full of gods, demigods and heroes who attempted to visit the land of the dead and return. Nor perhaps does Book 6 have the immediacy of Book 2, the most compelling account in real time that we have in ancient epic of the fall of Troy, or the tragic effect of the failed love affair between Aeneas and Dido in Book 4. It is, however, probably the work on which the exceptional standing of Virgil in the post-ancient world most strongly rests.
The Virgil of Book 6 especially came, as the possessor of a vast creative imagination, to be seen as transcending mundane humanity: someone whose ability to conceive a world so outside human experience, beyond the general run of myth and story, marked them as possessing occult knowledge and power.
This side of him most definitively entered European culture when Dante chose him as his guide through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the Divine Comedy, written in 13th century Italy. But it existed already before Dante: there are many references in ancient writers to the use of Virgil’s works as a prophetic medium. Choose a random passage, and it would provide you with an oracle through which to consider the question that was preoccupying you. This practice, known as the sortes Virgilianae, survived long into the modern world, famously, for example, being followed by King Charles the First in 17th century Oxford.
If Virgil’s status as a magician has receded, Book 6’s enduring influence on the European literary imagination has been more durable. Dante, re-imagining the Hadean journey in a Christian age, Milton in his blindness imagining Satan on the throne of Hell, Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s progress, Thomas Gray in the mid-1700s personifying the enemies of human happiness (in his ode on a distant prospect of Eton College), as Virgil did in Book 6, were all stepping in his footsteps. So too were writers as diverse as Tolkien, taking hobbits under the mountain for riddles with Gollum or to dodge Balrogs in the Mines of Moria, and Jules Verne with his travellers to the centre of the Earth.
Enjoy. You can link to the first extract and make the acquaintance of Aeneas’s guide, the Cumaean Sybil (illustrated above), here.
A mighty epic ends as Aeneas plunges his sword into the wounded Turnus’s heart. Hear the final extract from the poem in Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.