The Aeneid

Virgil's epic poem begins with Aeneas fleeing the ruins of Troy with his father Anchises and his young son Ascanius, with a plan to make a home in Italy. Because of a prophecy foretelling that the descendants of Aeneas will one day destroy Carthage, Juno's favorite city, Juno orders the god of the winds to unleash a terrible storm. The ships are thrown off course and arrive at an African port. As Aeneas makes his way towards his new home he encounters Dido, Carthage's queen, and falls deeply in love. Although Charles W. Elliot stated that "the modern appreciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey has tended to carry with it a depreciation of the Aeneid," this epic poem continues to inspire artists, writers, and musicians centuries after its first telling. John Dryden's translation captures the musicality of the original Latin verses while avoiding the stumbling of an English translation forced into dactylic hexameter. Perfect for readers who love sweeping classical epics and timeless tales of heroism, this masterwork of ancient literature delivers adventure, romance, and divine intervention on a grand scale. Virgil's immortal story of love, duty, and destiny continues to captivate readers with its powerful themes and unforgettable characters that have influenced Western literature for over two millennia. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)