Horace wishes his friend Virgil a good voyage to Athens and a safe return to Rome.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
As the Aeneid slowly approaches its climax, a new combatant enters the strife between Aeneas’s Trojans and the Latins, led by Turnus. She is Camilla, a powerful huntress and warrior beloved of Diana, the Goddess of the chase: sadly, she is foredoomed to die in the battle. Today’s extract tells of the strange circumstances under which her father dedicated her to the Goddess as a baby. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
On the fringes of Hades Aeneas and the Sibyl skirt the haunts of human cares, false dreams and phantom monsters before coming to the infernal river and Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Turnus follows a phantom Aeneas away from danger, while the real Aeneas, roused by the death of his friend Pallas, is seeking him on the battlefield.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the illustration by Franςois Boucher, Venus spirits Paris away in a mist to save him from Helen’s husband, King Menelaus.
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.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
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.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
See the illustrated blog post here.