Ancient Greek & Roman

Virgil

70–19 BC

Publius Vergilius Maro, known in English as Virgil, was born near Mantua in 70 BC and became the greatest poet of Augustan Rome. His Eclogues and the Georgics, a poem on farming and the countryside, made his name; his patron Maecenas brought him into the circle around the emperor Augustus.

The Aeneid, left unfinished at his death in 19 BC, tells how the Trojan prince Aeneas escapes the burning of Troy and carries his gods and his people to Italy, where his descendants will found Rome. In twelve books it answers Homer in Latin and became the model for the Western epic. This archive presents it in John Dryden’s 1697 verse translation, in heroic couplets. It also holds James Rhoades’s blank-verse translation of the Aeneid (1893–96).

Major Works (14)

The Aeneid — translated by John Conington (Macmillan school edition, 1910)
Eneados (Douglas) — translated by Gavin Douglas (completed 1513; printed 1553)
The Aeneid — translated by John Dryden (1697)
The Aeneid — translated by J. W. Mackail (1885)
The Aeneid — translated by William Morris (1876; third impression 1900)
The Aeneid — translated by James Rhoades (Longmans, Green, 1893–96; one-volume edition 1907)
The First Four Books of the Aeneid (Stanyhurst) — translated by Richard Stanyhurst (1582)
Certain Books of the Aeneid (Surrey) — translated by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (printed 1557)
The Aeneid — translated by E. Fairfax Taylor (Everyman's Library, 1907; reprinted 1910)
The Aeneid — translated by Theodore C. Williams (1908)
The Georgics — translated by John Dryden (1697)
The Georgics — translated by H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb, 1916)
The Georgics — translated by J. W. Mackail (1889; Longmans reprint 1910)
The Georgics — translated by James Rhoades (World's Classics, 1921)

Poems (66)

See Virgil in the full archive →