Glande sues laeti redeunt: the pigs come home regaled with acorns … in Virgil’s rural paradise, even the livestock live off the fat of the land. The swineherd knocking down mast from the trees for his animals is from a famous late-mediaeval Book of Hours, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in John Dryden’s charming but not very faithful 17th century translation here.
The efforts of Juno, queen of the Gods, to sow dissension between Aeneas and his Italian hosts are in full swing, with the help of the Fury, Allecto. Disguised at first as an old woman, Allecto now reveals herself to Turnus in her full and terrifying reality.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Saturnalia on 17 December was the Roman’s midwinter party festival. It had a definite topsy-turvy element, with masters waiting on their slaves, as shown in the illustration, and a generally indulgent attitude towards high jinks.
Today’s poem was written for a different occasion: it is an extract from one of Virgil’s pastoral poems, or Eclogues, written in 40 BCE and looking forward to a birth which will herald the start of a new golden age. It is appropriate to the run-up to Christmas because, though few if any would agree today, a strong current of opinion among early Christians and in the middle ages interpreted it as a prophesy of the birth of Christ. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Jupiter has saved Aeneas’s fleet from burning and his father Anchises appears with an invitation to visit him in the Elysian fields. The illustration, by William Blake Richmond, shows Anchises in his younger days when he first met Aeneas’s mother, the Goddess Venus. Hear the poem here.
Acting as a priest, the Trojan Helenus, now by a favourable reverse of fortunes the ruler of Achilles’s former kingdom, makes a curious prophecy that centres on a white sow with thirty piglets. Perhaps he had covered his head to officiate at the sacrifice, as was the later Roman custom. The Roman shown here is the Emperor Augustus, dressed as the Pontifex Maximus (High Priest). Hear the poem in Latin with an English translation here.
See the new Latin poetry selection here, with pieces from Boethius, Horace and Virgil.
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.
