The Æneid of Virgil, Translated into English Verse

The Aeneid is not merely the founding story of Rome. It is the founding story of Western literature itself, the template upon which every empire narrative, every exile's journey, every sacrifice for a distant future has been built. Edward Fairfax Taylor's 1881 verse translation captures the muscular, rolling Latin hexameters in English that still crackles with two thousand years of authority. We follow Aeneas, a man who has lost everything Troy, as he carries his father on his back and leads his son through the Mediterranean, hunted by a goddess's rage. He lands in Carthage and falls devastatingly in love with Queen Dido. He descends into the Underworld and speaks with the ghosts of the future Roman kings. He arrives in Italy and wages a war that breaks him. This is a poem about what civilization costs: the love you abandon, the peace you forego, the man you must stop being so that the nation can begin. It is brutal, tender, and absolutely unflinching about the price of destiny.