The Aeneid

Composed between 29 and 19 BC and published after Virgil’s death, The Aeneid is the great founding epic of ancient Rome, a poem of exile, destiny and the human cost of empire. It follows Aeneas, a Trojan survivor of the fallen city, as he journeys across the Mediterranean towards Italy, pursued by hostile gods and haunted by the world he has lost. His encounters with Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the trials that await him in Italy bring together love, duty, grief and the inexorable demands of fate. Drawing on Homer while forging a distinctly Roman vision of heroism, Virgil transforms the legendary origins of a nation into a profoundly human story of displacement and renewal.

Both a celebration of Rome’s imperial destiny and a searching meditation on its sacrifices, The Aeneid possesses a moral complexity that has sustained centuries of interpretation. Its exquisite poetry, psychological subtlety and unforgettable episodes have shaped the Western literary tradition, from Dante and Milton to generations of modern writers. Left unfinished at Virgil’s death, the poem remains one of antiquity’s most influential and enduring works, at once a national epic and an elegy for the lives swept aside by history.

From the book

“Can such resentment hold the minds of gods?”

— Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum

On The Aeneid

“Perhaps the most famous work in Latin literature.”

— University of Michigan Press