# The Aeneid of Virgil (Conington, 1917)/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
The Æneid
When Rome, torn and bleeding from a century of civil wars, turned to that wise judge of men, the second Cæsar, and acquiesced as, through carefully selected ministers, he gathered the reins of power into velvet-clad fingers of steel, she did wisely. Better one-man power than anarchy! It became the part of true patriotism for the citizen and of statesmanship for the politician to bring to the aid of the First Man of the state all the motives that could harmonize the chaotic elements, and start Republican Rome on the path of a new unity—the unity of the Empire.
For already "far away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating horses' hoofs and marching feet of men. They were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps heard on wool; there was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North, mustering and marshalling her peoples." In his great task Augustus, with the aid of Mæcenas, very cleverly drew to his help writers whose work has since charmed the world. We can almost pardon fate for destroying the Republic—it gave us Virgil and Horace.
Pleasant indeed had it been for Virgil to sing in emulation of his great teacher Lucretius! "As for me," he says, "first of all I would pray that the charming Muses, whose minister I am, for the great love that has smitten ​me, would receive me graciously, and teach me the courses of the stars in heaven, the various eclipses of the sun and the earth, what is the force by which the deep seas swell to the bursting of their barriers and settle down again on themselves—why the winter suns make such haste to dip in ocean, or what is the retarding cause which makes the nights move slowly." Pleasant, too, to spend his "chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase" in picturing "the liberty of broad domains, grottos and natural lakes, cool Tempe-like valleys, lawns and dens where wild beasts hide, a youth strong to labor and inured to scanty fare." "Let me delight in the country and the streams that freshen the valleys—let me love river and woodland with an unambitious love." "Then, too, there are the husbandman's sweet children ever hanging on his lips—his virtuous household keeps the tradition of purity." Ah, yes, to Virgil most attractive was the simple life of the lover of nature, and charmingly did he portray it in his Eclogues and Georgics!
But Augustus, recognizing the genius of Virgil, and realizing the supreme need of a reinvigorated patriotism, urgently demanded an epic that should portray Rome's beginnings and her significance to the world. Reluctantly then Virgil took up this task. Even at his death he considered it unfulfilled. Indeed it was his wish that the manuscript be destroyed. Almost immediately the Æneid became the object of the closest study, and ever since it has evoked the deepest admiration. Perhaps no other secular writing has so profoundly affected literature.
Virgil's Life
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), born in the rural district near Mantua, a farmer's son, was given by his loving father a careful education. Of his father Virgil says, "those whom I have ever loved and above all my father."
The regard of his hero Æneas for his father Anchises not merely illustrates the early Roman filial affection—it ​suggests Virgil's relation to his own parent. In north Italy Virgil studied at Mantua, Cremona, and Milan, and at seventeen took up his wider studies at Rome itself in the year 53 B.C. Catullus had died the year before, Lucretius was dead two years. At Rome Virgil had the best masters in Greek, rhetoric, and in philosophy, a study in which he especially delighted. In forming his own poetic style Virgil was profoundly influenced by Lucretius, whose great poem On Nature treated of the wondrous physical universe, and by the subtly sweet young Catullus,
{{c|"Tenderest of Roman poets."—Tennyson.
In such studies Virgil spent ten years. But in 41 B.C. he appears again in north Italy and this time in storm and stress. In the year of Philippi the triumvirs, settling their victorious legions, confiscated lands about Cremona, and Virgil, attempting to resist dispossession, came near to losing his life. Through fellow-students of the Roman days he secured an introduction to Octavius and was compensated—either recovering his own farm, or receiving in lieu of it an estate in Campania.
Virgil relates his experience in two of his ten Eclogues which were published in their present form in 38 B.C. These charming poems were especially loved by Milton and Wordsworth. Macaulay indeed considered them the best of Virgil's works. At Rome they met immediate success with the people and with Octavius and his wise minister Mæcenas, Horace's patron. In them Virgil tenderly sings love of friends, home, and country.
Then Virgil spent seven years on the four books of the Georgics, publishing them in 29 B.C., two years after Actium. The Georgics Merivale calls "the glorification of labor." In them Virgil hymns the farmer's life in beautiful Italy.
"Hail to thee, land of Saturn, mighty mother of noble fruits and noble men! For thee I essay the theme of the glory and the skill of olden days." ​Virgil was now acknowledged the greatest poet of Italy. In the year 26 B.C., one year after the title Augustus had been conferred on Octavius, we find the emperor writing Virgil the most urgent letters begging the poet to send him, then in Spain, some portion of the projected Æneid. It was, however, considerably later when Virgil read to Augustus the second, fourth, and sixth books, for the young Marcellus, the emperor's nephew, died in 23 B.C., and we are told that Octavia, his mother, fainted on hearing the poet read the immortal lines about her son in the sixth book:—
"Child of a nation's sorrow! Were there hope of thy breaking the tyranny of fate, thou shalt be Marcellus. Bring me handfuls of lilies, that I may strew the grave with their dazzling hues, and crown, if only with these gifts, my young descendant's shade, and perform the vain service of sorrow."
Virgil,
"who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes,"
had already spent some ten years on the Æneid, when in 19 B.C. he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the "famous cities" and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to
"Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render Virgil, a debt duly lent to thy charge, Whole and intact on the Attican borders Faithfully guarding the half of my soul."
Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of
"That delicious Bay Parthenope's Domain—Virgilian haunt; Illustrated with never dying verse And by the Poet's laurel-shaded tomb, Age after age to pilgrims from all lands Endeared."—Wordsworth.
Influence of the Æneid
As to the success of the Æneid, it was immediate with poets and people. Two years after Virgil's death Horace writes in his Secular Hymn:—
"If Rome be all thy work, if Trojan bands Upon the Etruscan shore have won renown, That chosen remnant, who at thy command Forsook their hearths, and homes, and native town; If all unscathed through Ilion's flames they sped  By sage Æneas led, And o'er the ocean waves in safety fled, Destined from him, though of his home bereft, A nobler dower to take, than all that they had left."
—Translated by Martin.
Some of the scholars, indeed, criticised it as having an undue simplicity, as coining new words and using old words, with new meanings, as borrowing too freely from Homer, as not written in chronological order, as containing anachronisms, etc. But within ten years it was as familiarly quoted by writers as we quote Shakespeare. It became the chief text-book in the Roman schools of grammar and rhetoric. The great writers of later days, like Pliny and Tacitus, show the profound influence of his style, which would seem to have gripped them as Goethe tells us Luther's translation of the Scriptures affected his style, and as the King James version has left its indelible traces on English literature.
When the race-mind tired of problems of government and law, and turned strongly to the problems of religion,—degenerating easily, to be sure, to superstition,—it ​was evidence of Virgil's grip on humanity that the poet of poets became the wizard of wizards. Even under the Antonines, the Sors Vergiliana (Virgilian prophecy) was practised. The Æneid was opened at random, and the first verse that struck the eye was considered a prophecy of good or bad portent. "The mediæval world looked upon him as a poet of prophetic insight who contained within himself all the potentialities of wisdom. He was called the Poet, as if no other existed; the Roman, as if the ideal of the commonwealth were embodied in him; the perfect in style, with whom no other writer could be compared; the Philosopher, who grasped the ideas of all things; the Wise One, whose comprehension seemed to other mortals unlimited. His writings became the Bible of a race. The mysteries of Roman priestcraft, the processes of divination, the science of the stars, were all found in his works."
True indeed are the words of Professor MacMechan: "Beginning the Æneid is like setting out upon a broad and beaten highway along which countless feet have passed in the course of nineteen centuries. It is a spiritual highway, winding through every age and every clime;" and these of Professor Woodberry: "The Æneid shows that characteristic of greatness in literature which lies in its being a watershed of time; it looks back to antiquity in all that clothes it with the past of imagination, character and event, and forward to Christian times in all that clothes it with emotion, sentiment, and finality to the heart."
As we approach modern literature, the great Italian Dante consciously takes Virgil as his "master and author." "O glory and light of other poets! May the long zeal avail me, and the great love, that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author." On English literature the influence of the Æneid has been so potent that our space will hardly suffice to convey the barest hint of its direct and indirect lines. Celtic story developed from it a voyage of Brutus who founds a new ​Troy, or London. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century sets forth this tale in his history. It was believed down to the seventeenth century and is reported by Milton. Elizabethan literature has frequent references to it. Chaucer in his House of Fame outlines the Æneid, emphasizing the Dido episode, which interested also Nash, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Spenser teems with allusions and indeed translations, so—
"Anchyses sonne, begott of Venus fayre," Said he, "out of the flames for safegard fled And with a remnant did to sea repayre; Where he, through fatall errour, long was led Full many yeares, and weetlesse wandered From shore to shore emongst the Lybick sandes Ere rest he fownd."—F. Q., III., ix., 41.
and—
"Like a great water-flood, that, tombling low From the high mountaines, threates to overflow With suddein fury all the fertile playne, And the sad husbandmans long hope doth throw Adown the streame, and all his vowes make vayne, Nor bounds nor banks his headlong ruine may sustayne."  —F. Q., II., xi., 18; cf. Æn. II., 304 ff.
Bacon calls Virgil "the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known." "Milton," writes Dryden, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original." But beside this indirect influence, and that through the Italian school, Virgil's direct influence on Milton is attested by many an allusion. Dryden, Cowper, with his "sweet Maro's matchless strain," Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, with his "sweet, tender Virgil," freely acknowledge the debt they owe our poet. Dryden and Morris translated the Æneid into verse.
Tennyson, "the most Virgilian of modern poets," gives the following tribute, written at the request of the Mantuans
"Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre, Landscape lover, lord of language more than he that sang the Works and Days, All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase, Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd, All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word, Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers, Poet of the poet-satyr whom the laughing shepherds bound with flowers, Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be, Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea, Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind, Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind, Light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this phantom shore, Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more, Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Cæsar's dome— Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound forever of Imperial Rome— Now the Rome of slaves hath perished, and the Rome of freemen holds her place, I, from out the Northern Island, sundered once from all the human race, I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man."
It is a lover of Horace (and who is not a lover of Horace?), the brilliant Andrew Lang, who points out (in ​his Letters to Dead Authors) a vital difference that has made Virgil's the higher influence: "Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch 'the Sibyl doth to singing man allow,' and might visit, as one not wholly without hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To him was it permitted to see and sing 'mothers and men, and the bodies outworn of mighty heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young men borne to the funeral fire before their parents' eyes.' The endless caravan swept past him—'many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall in autumn woods when the first frost begins; many as birds that flock landward from the great sea when now the chill year drives them o'er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands.' Such things was it given to the sacred poet to behold, and the happy seats and sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger light clothes all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with their own new sun and stars before unknown. Ah, not frustra pius was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song. In him, we fancy, there was a happier mood than your melancholy patience."
The Epic Itself
The purpose of the epic is to indicate the divinely ordained origin and history of Rome as a conquering, civilizing, and organizing government, destined to replace both anarchy and tyrannical despotism by liberty under law. As the real world-historic reason for Rome's existence is so commonly overlooked, let us recall Mommsen's words in the introduction to his Provinces of the Roman Empire": "It fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing. . . . If an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with the greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the present ​day, whether civilization and national prosperity generally have since that time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would prove in favor of the present." Virgil states the function of Rome clearly in the famous passage of the sixth book wherein Greek and Roman are compared:—
"Forget not, O Roman, thy fate—to rule in thy might o'er the nations: This is to be thine art—peace to the world to give."
So the hero Æneas, himself of divine birth, is preserved by divine intervention when Troy falls, and mid dire perils for seven years' voyagings, and all the bitter warring in Italy, "to bring the gods unto Latium," "to found a city," to teach Italy religion and a virile civilization. "Whence Rome mighty in her defences," "a task of so great magnitude it was to build the Roman nation." Twice,—once in fields Elysian from the lips of sainted Anchises, and again, portrayed on the shield that Vulcan made for Æneas, is rehearsed the long line of legendary and historical Roman heroes down to Augustus himself. "On this side is Augustus Cæsar, leading the Italians to conflict, with the senate and the people, the home-gods and their mighty brethren, standing aloft on the stern." "But Cæsar . . . was consecrating to the gods of Italy a votive tribute to deathless gratitude, three hundred mighty fanes the whole city through." "Such sights Æneas scans with wonder on Vulcan's shield . . . as he heaves on his shoulder the fame and the fate of grandsons yet to be" (end of eighth book). Incidentally ground is given, in compensating fate, for Rome's conquest of Greek lands—she is but loyal to her Trojan ancestry!—and for the duel to the death with Semitic Carthage—whose queen once was the stately Dido, left by King Æneas at Jove's command! Incidentally, too, Virgil draws from Trojan origins governmental forms, religious rites, yes, even games.
While this great task of glorifying patriotism and har-​
he cannot lose two qualities that make him the most modern of ancient poets—his love of nature and his pathos. As examples—of the former, it suffices to cite the charming harbor scene succeeding storm and wreck, in the first book; and, of the latter, the death-scene of the immortal twain, Nisus and Euryalus (in Book nine).
"Down falls Euryalus in death; over his beauteous limbs gushes the blood, and his powerless neck sinks on his shoulders; as when a purple flower, severed by the plough, pines in death, or poppies with faint necks droop the head, when rain has chanced to weigh them down. But Nisus rushes full on the foe . . . and dying robs his foe of life. Then he flung himself on his breathless friend, pierced through and through, and there at length slept away in peaceful death.
"Happy pair! if this my song has ought of potency, no lapse of days shall efface your names from the memory of time, so long as the house of Æneas shall dwell on the Capitol's moveless rock, and a Roman father shall be the world's lord."
The Story
The story on which Virgil builds is, briefly, the fall of Troy, the voyaging of Trojan refugees under Æneas, and the successful wars of Æneas with Italian barbarians.
According to the ancient legend the Greeks had warred ten years under Troy's walls, because the Trojan prince, Paris, having awarded the prize of beauty to Venus as against Juno and Minerva, and, having been promised as reward by Venus Helen the beautiful wife of the Greek Menelaus, had eloped with that fatal beauty to Troy, and his father King Priam had refused to make restitution.
The story then, as related by Æneas to Queen Dido in her palace at Carthage, takes up (in the second book of the Æneid) the downfall and destruction of Troy, with the escape of Æneas, his father and son, together with a band ​of Trojans. Then (in the third book) are depicted their voyagings, unsuccessful attempts to found cities, and arrival in Sicily. Here father Anchises dies. From Sicily they sail in the endeavor to reach Latium in Italy.
It is at this point that the epic begins. So after his invocation and introduction (in Book one), Virgil makes unrelenting Juno, through the storm-king Æolus, let loose upon the Trojan fleet a fierce tempest, which drives the remnant of the fleet far away to the Carthaginian coast. Æneas, directed by his disguised mother Venus, comes to the court of Dido by whom he is kindly received, banqueted; and at her request narrates (in Books two and three) his harsh experiences.
Book four continues the Dido episode. The queen madly loves Æneas—this through the influence of Venus, who else had feared Carthaginian hostility to her dear Trojans. Juno thinks to thwart the fates and Jove's will that Æneas should create the Roman race; and she plans to hold Æneas as spouse of the Carthaginian queen. Jove intervenes, sending Mercury with explicit commands to Æneas to seek Italy. He sails, and Dido slays herself.
In Book five they reach Sicily again, and it being the anniversary of Anchises' death, Æneas celebrates it with athletic contests. During these Juno again attempts to thwart the fates, sending a messenger to incite the Trojan women to set the fleet on fire. But this attempt is only successful in so far as it leads Æneas to leave the weaklings under the kindly sway of their kinsman, the Sicilian chief, Acestes. The rest sail for Italy, losing the faithful pilot, Palinurus.
Book six details the visit Æneas, under the guidance of the Sibyl, to the abode of the dead. There he meets again his father Anchises, who passes in review, as souls about to be reborn into the upper world, their heroic descendants.
So far, with the exception of Book two, which recorded the fall and sack of Troy, a theme omitted by Homer, Virgil has recorded the Odyssey or wanderings of his hero ​Æneas. Now in the succeeding six books is given the Iliad or wars of Æneas in Italy. As he lands, King Latinus is divinely led to promise Æneas his daughter Lavinia. But she has been betrothed to Turnus. Under Juno's prompting then begins this tremendous duel between Æneas and Turnus. And here we note a curious likeness between Milton and Virgil. As our sympathies are aroused in the Paradise Lost for Lucifer, so Turnus, "the reckless one," looms up a figure of heroic size, doomed by the fates to die that Rome may live. Sources As Virgil's sources for his story and indeed for no small portion of his language may be mentioned preeminently:— Homer's Odyssey and Iliad; Euripides, "with his droppings of warm tears"; the Greek epic poets, called the cyclic poets, as dealing with the cycle of story revolving around Troy; the Greek freedman and teacher, Livius Andronicus, who translated roughly the Odyssey; Nævius, who wrote on the First Punic War, tracing Carthaginian hostility back to the Æneas visit; and especially Ennius, "father of Latin literature," who in a great epic traced the history of Rome from Æneas down. Of Virgil's borrowings it were enough perhaps to say that, like our Shakespeare, he ennobled what he borrowed, wove it into the texture of his song—stamped it Virgilian. The Translation Concerning the translation itself, we should perhaps set over against Emerson's famous saying, "I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue," that other remark of a great scholar, that "the thing for the student of language to learn is that translation is ​impossible." Exquisitely done as is this version by Professor Conington, noble student of Virgil as he was, some faint notion of what is lost in the process might be gained by comparing a prose version of, say, Longfellow's "Evangeline" with his hexameters themselves:—
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic— Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
At the very least, "the noblest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," Virgil's "ocean-roll of rhythm," is lost. That indeed is not revived for us in Conington's own poetical version, not in Dryden's, nor in Morris's. Of Virgil also that is true which T. B. Aldrich, charming poet that he was, wrote me anent his own early translations, "But who could hope to decant the wine of Horace?"
Yet it may be not without interest to compare some verse renderings of the initial lines:—
I (woll now) sing (if that I can,) The armes and also the man, That first came through his destinie, Fugitive fro Troy the countrie Into Itaile, with full much pine, Unto the stronds of Lavine.—Chaucer, House of Fame.
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore, Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destined town; His banished gods restored to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come And the long glories of majestic Rome.—Dryden.
I sing of arms, I sing of him, who from the Trojan land, Thrust forth by Fate, to Italy and that Lavinian strand First came: all tost about was he on earth and on the deep By heavenly might for Juno's wrath, that had no mind to sleep: And plenteous war he underwent ere he his town might frame, And set his gods in Latian earth, whence is the Latin name. And father-folk of Alba-town, and walls of mighty Rome.  —Morris.
Arms and the man I sing, who first, By Fate of Ilian realm amerced, To fair Italia onward bore, And landed on Lavinium's shore:— Long tossing earth and ocean o'er, By violence of heaven, to sate Fell Juno's unrelenting hate; Much labored too in battle-field, Striving his city's walls to build,  And give his gods a home: Thence come the hardy Latin brood, The ancient sires of Alba's blood,  And lofty-rampired Rome.  —Conington.
I sing of arms, and of the man who first Came from the coasts of Troy to Italy And the Lavinian shores, exiled by fate, Much was he tossed about upon the lands And in the ocean by supernal powers, Because of cruel Juno's sleepless wrath. Many things also suffered he in war, Until he built a city, and his gods Brought into Latium; whence the Latin race, The Alban sires and walls of lofty Rome.  —Cranch
I sing of war, I sing the man who erst, From off the shore of Troy fate-hunted, came To the Lavinian coast in Italy, Hard pressed on land and sea, the gods malign, Fierce Juno's hate unslaked. Much too in war
He bore while he a city built, and set His gods in Latium. Thence the Latin race, Our Alban sires, the walls of haughty Rome.  —Long.
Arms and the man I sing who first, from Troy Expelled by Fate's decree, to Italy And the Lavinian shores, a wanderer came. Sore travail he endured by land and sea From adverse gods, and unrelenting rage Of haughty Juno: harassed, too, by war, His destined city while he strove to build And raise new altars for his exiled gods. The Latian race, the Alban fathers hence Their birth derived—hence Rome's proud fabric sprung.  —Rickards.
(In hexameters.)
Arms and the hero I sing, who of old from the borders of Troja Came to Italia, banished by fate to Lavinia's destined Sea coasts: Much was he tossed on the lands and the deep by enlisted Might of supernals, through Juno's remembered resentment: Much, too, he suffered in warfare, while he was founding a city, And into Latium bearing his gods: whence issued the Latin Race, and the Alban fathers, and walls of imperial Roma.  —Crane.
Sing I the arms and the man, who first from the shores of the Trojan, Driven by Fate, into Italy came, to Lavinium's borders Much was he vexed by the power of the gods, on the land and the ocean, Through the implacable wrath of the vengeful and pitiless Juno; Much, too, he suffered in war, until he could found him a city, And into Latium carry his gods; whence the race of the Latins, Alba's illustrious fathers, and Rome's imperial bulwarks.  —Howland.
B.C. 98. Birth of Lucretius. 87. Birth of Catullus. 70. Virgil is born. 69. Birth of Mæcenas; Cicero is ædile. 66. Cicero is prætor. 65. Horace is born. 63. Birth of Octavius (afterward Gaius Julius Cæsar  Octavianus Augustus). Cicero's consulship and  Orations against Catiline. 60. First Triumvirate (Cæsar, Pompey, and Crassus). 58. Cicero banished. Cæsar begins conquest of Gaul. 57. Cicero recalled from exile. 55. Virgil assumes the toga virilis. Death of Lucretius,  Cæsar in Britain. 54. Virgil studies in Milan. Death of Catullus. Cicero  edits Lucretius' On Nature, and (perhaps) Catullus'  Odes, and begins his essay On the State. 53. Virgil goes to Rome: Horace is also taken there.  Cicero is augur. Parthians defeat Romans at  Carrhæ. 52. Cicero's Oration for Milo. 51. Cicero proconsul in Cilicia. 49. Civil War. Cæsar marches on Rome, bestowing  Roman citizenship on Italians north of the Po.  Pompey leaves Italy. 48. Battle of Pharsalia. Assassination of Pompey. 46. Battle of Thapsus. Suicide of Cato at Utica. 45. Horace goes to Athens. 44. Cæsar assassinated: Octavius, adopted in his will,  assumes his name. Cicero's Philippics. 43. Birth of Ovid. Second Triumvirate (Octavianus,  Antony, and Lepidus). Assassination of Cicero.  Civil war with Brutus and Cassius. Horace a  tribune in Brutus' army.
42. Battles of Philippi. Death of Brutus and Cassius. 41. Confiscations by the triumvirs. Virgil introduced to  Mæcenas and Octavianus. Horace returns to Rome. 40. Virgil restored to his estate. 39. Horace introduced to Mæcenas by Virgil and Varius. 37. Virgil publishes Eclogues. Phraates king of Parthia. 36. Antony invades Parthia. 35. Horace publishes First Book of Satires. 33. Phraates attacks Armenia and Media. 31. Battle of Actium. Overthrow of Antony. Octavianus  visits the East. 30. Horace publishes Second Book of Satires and his  Epodes. 29. Octavianus returns from the East and celebrates  threefold triumph. Temple of Janus closed in  sign of peace. Virgil publishes Georgics. 27. Octavianus receives the title of Augustus. 26. Augustus in Spain corresponds with Virgil. 24. Horace (probably) publishes first Three Books of Odes. 23. Death of Marcellus. Virgil reads portions of the  Æneid to Augustus. 20. Expedition of Augustus to the East. Parthians restore  standards taken at Carrhæ. 19. Virgil journeys to Greece. Returns with Augustus.  Dies at Brundisium. Augustus directs Virgil's  friend Varius and Tucca to edit the Æneid. 18. Horace publishes First Book of Epistles. 17. The Secular Festival. Horace writes the Secular  Hymn. 13. Horace publishes Fourth Book of Odes.  8. Death of Mæcenas and Horace.
Verse Translations Recommended
Dryden; Conington (Crowell, New York); William Morris (Roberts Brothers, Boston); Cranch; Long (Lockwood Brooks & Co., Boston); Crane (Baker & Taylor Co., New York); Howland (D. Appleton & ​Co., New York), Rickards (Books I.-VI., Blackwood & Sons, London); Rhoades (Longmans); Billson (Edward Arnold, London).
Books for Reference
Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, Sellar (Oxford, Clarendon Press); Virgil, Nettleship (Appletons), and in his Lectures and Essays (Oxford); Classical Essays, F. W. H. Myers (Macmillan); Studies in Virgil, Glover (Edward Arnold, London); Country of Horace and Virgil, Boissier (Putnam); Master Virgil, Tunison (Robert Clark & Co., Cincinnati); Vergil in the Middle Ages, Comparetti (Sonnenschein, London); Legends of Virgil, Leland (Macmillan); Histories of Roman Literature by Teuffel (George Bell & Sons, London), Browne (Bentley, London), Cruttwell (Scribners, N.Y.), Simcox (Harpers, N.Y.). Æneas as a Character Study, Miller (Latine, Vol. IV., p. 18).
Subjects for Investigation
(Miller, in Latine for January, 1886.)
(1) Virgilian Proverbs. (2) A Word Study. (3) Fatalism in Virgil. (4) Virgil's Pictures of Roman Customs. (5) Pen Pictures. (6) Astronomy in Virgil. (7) Virgil's Debt to Homer. (8) Milton's Debt to Virgil. (9) Virgil's Gods and Religious Rites. (10) Omens and Oracles. (11) Virgil's Influence upon Literature in General. (12) Figures in Virgil. (13) Virgilian Herbarium. (14) Detailed Account of the Wandering of Æneas. (15) The Geography of Virgil. (16) Virgil as a Poet of Nature. (17) Virgil's Life as gleaned from his Works. [(18) The Manuscript Texts of Virgil.] (19) Virgilian Translators and Commentators. (20) Some Noted Passages—why? (21) The Platonism of the Sixth Book. (22) Dryden's ​Dictum Discussed, (23) Dante—The Later Virgil. [(24) The Prosody of Virgil.] (25) Dido—A Psychological Study. (26) Æneas—A Character Study. [(27) Testimonium Veterum de Vergilio.] (28) Virgil and Theocritus. (29) Virgil's Creations. (30) Epithets of Æneas. (31) The Virgilian Birds. (32) Was Virgil Acquainted with the Hebrew Scriptures? (33) Visions and Dreams—Supernatural Means of Spirit Communication. (34) Night Scenes in Virgil. (35) Different Names for Trojans and Greeks and their Significance. (36) The Story of the Æneid.