The greatest epic in Western literature begins with a fleet on a dark sea. Aeneas, prince of Troy, carries his father on his back and his people in his ships, fleeing the smoking ruins of a fallen city. The goddess Juno hates him, having cursed his line for centuries; the winds obey her wrath. Yet Aeneas sails on, driven by a destiny he did not choose: to found a city that will one day rule the world. We follow him through shipwrecks and storms, through the caves of Polyphemus and the fatal gardens of Carthage, where he abandons a queen who loved him. We descend with him into the underworld to walk among the shades of the dead and glimpse the future that demands everything from him. This is the story of what it costs to build an empire: the loves surrendered, the wars waged, the self forgotten. Written by Virgil to give Rome a mythology equal to Greece's, the Aeneid asks whether civilization is worth the blood that waters it.
