The Aeneid of Virgil

The Aeneid is not merely the story of one man's journey from Troy to Italy. It is the founding myth of an empire, composed by Virgil at the behest of Augustus, and it asks what price must be paid for civilization to rise from ashes. Aeneas carries his father on his back and his son by the hand through shipwrecks, monsters, and the grief of a fallen city. He is not a simple hero. He is a man torn between the woman who loves him and the destiny that compels him onward. The poem pulses with an almost unbearable emotional intensity. Dido's love and abandonment, the descent into the Underworld where Aeneas glimpses his future descendants, the brutal war in Italy. All of this unfolds in Latin verse that burns. For two thousand years, readers have turned to these pages because The Aeneid does not simply narrate how Rome was founded. It interrogates what that founding cost. This is for readers who want to understand the deep current beneath Western literature, from Dante to the present day.