The Aeneid of Virgil

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Title: The Aeneid of Virgil
Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor
Author: Virgil
Editor: Ernest Rhys
Illustrator: Maine J. P.
Translator: Edward Fairfax Taylor
Release Date: May 28, 2006 [EBook #18466]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AENEID
OF VIRGIL ***
Produced by Ron Swanson
EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS
CLASSICAL
THE AENEID OF VIRGIL
THE SAGES OF OLD LIVE AGAIN IN US.

GLANVILL
The AENEID OF VIRGIL
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY
E. FAIRFAX
TAYLOR
LONDON: PUBLISHED by J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
AND IN
NEW YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.
_First issue of this Edition 1907._
_Reprinted 1910._
INTRODUCTION
Virgil--Publius Vergilius Maro--was born at Andes near Mantua, in the
year 70 B.C. His life was uneventful, though he lived in stirring times,
and he passed by far the greater part of it in reading his books and
writing his poems, undisturbed by the fierce civil strife which
continued to rage throughout the Roman Empire, until Octavian, who
afterwards became the Emperor Augustus, defeated Antony at the
battle of Actium. Though his father was a man of humble origin, Virgil
received an excellent education, first at Cremona and Milan, and
afterwards at Rome. He was intimate with all the distinguished men of
his time, and a personal friend of the Emperor. After the publication of
his second work, the _Georgics_, he was recognized as being the
greatest poet of his age, and the most striking figure in the brilliant
circle of literary men, which was centred at the Court. He died at
Brindisi in the spring of 19 B.C. whilst returning from a journey to
Greece, leaving his greatest work, the _Aeneid_, written but unrevised.
It was published by his executors, and immediately took its place as the
great national Epic of the Roman people. Virgil seems to have been a
man of simple, pure, and loveable character, and the references to him
in the works of Horace clearly show the affection with which he was
regarded by his friends.
Like every cultivated Roman of that age, Virgil was a close student of
the literature and philosophy of the Greeks, and his poems bear
eloquent testimony to the profound impression made upon him by his

reading of the Greek poets. His first important work, the _Eclogues_,
was directly inspired by the pastoral poems of Theocritus, from whom
he borrowed not only much of his imagery but even whole lines; in the
_Georgics_ he took as his model the _Works and Days_ of Hesiod, and
though in the former case it must be confessed that he suffers from the
weakness inherent in all imitative poetry, in the latter he far surpasses
the slow and simple verses of the Boeotian. But here we must guard
ourselves against a misapprehension. We moderns look askance at the
writer who borrows without acknowledgment the thoughts and phrases
of his forerunners, but the Roman critics of the Augustan Age looked at
the matter from a different point of view. They regarded the Greeks as
having set the standard of the highest possible achievement in literature,
and believed that it should be the aim of every writer to be faithful, not
only to the spirit, but even to the letter of their great exemplars. Hence
it was only natural that when Virgil essayed the task of writing the
national Epic of his country, he should be studious to embody in his
work all that was best in Greek Epic poetry.
It is difficult in criticizing Virgil to avoid comparing him to some
extent with Homer. But though Virgil copied Homer freely, any
comparison between them is apt to be misleading. A primitive epic,
like the _Iliad_ or the _Nibelungenlied_, produced by an imaginative
people at an early stage in its development, telling its stories simply for
the sake of story telling, cannot be judged by the same canons of
criticism as a literary epic like the _Aeneid_ or _Paradise Lost_, which
is the work of a great poet in an age of advanced culture, and sets forth
a great idea in a narrative form. The Greek writer to whom Virgil owes
most perhaps, is Apollonius of Rhodes, from whose _Argonautica_ he
borrowed the love interest of the _Aeneid_. And though the Roman is a
far greater poet, in this instance the advantage is by no means on his
side, for, as