The Aeneid: Vintage Classics

" Fitzgerald's is so decisively the best modern Aeneid that it is unthinkable that anyone will want to use any other version for a long time to come." --"New York Review of Books"
" From the beginning to the end of this English poem...the reader will find the same sure control of English rhythms, the same deft phrasing, and an energy which urges the eye onward." --"The New Republic"
" A rendering that is both marvelously readable and scrupulously faithful.... Fitzgerald has managed, by a sensitive use of faintly archaic vocabulary and a keen ear for sound and rhythm, to suggest the solemnity and the movement of Virgil's poetry as no previous translator has done (including Dryden).... This is a sustained achievement of beauty and power." --"Boston Globe"

Virgil (70 B.C-19 B.C) is regarded as the greatest Roman poet, known for his epic, "The Aeneid"(written about 29 B.C. unfinished). Virgil was born on October 15, 70 B.C., in a small village near Mantua in Northern Italy. He attended school at Cremona and Milan, and then went to Rome, where he studied mathematics, medicine and rhetoric, and completed his studies in Naples. Between 42 and 37 B.C. Virgil composed pastoral poems known as "Ecologues," and spent years on the "Georgics."At the urging of Augustus Caesar, Virgil began to write "The Aeneid," a poem of the glory of Rome under Caesars rule. Virgil devoted the remaining time of his life, from 30 to 19 B.C., to the composition of "The Aeneid," the national epic of Rome and to glory of the Empire. The poet died in 19 B.C of a fever he contracted on his visit to Greece with the Emperor. It is said that the poet had instructed his executor Varius to destroy "The Aeneid," but Augustus ordered Varius to ignore this request, and the poem was published.

This book is the equal of its great Homeric predecessors, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in dramatic and narrative power, and it surpasses them in the intense sympathy which makes events such as the passion and destruction of Dido and the fall of Turnus among the most memorable in literature.

The AeneidAcknowledgements
Introduction

The Aeneid

One: The Trojans reach Carthage
Two: Aeneas' Narration—The Sack of Troy
Three: Aeneas' Narration continued-His Travels
Four: The Tragedy of Dido
Five: The Funeral Games
Six: The Visit to the Underworld
Seven: War in Latium
Eight: The Site of the Future Rome
Nine: Siege of the Trojan Camp
Ten: The Relief and Pitched Battle
Eleven: Councils of War: Pitched Battle Again
Twelve: Decision: the Death of Turnus

List of Variations from the Oxford Text
Glossary of Names
Select Bibliography
Maps
Genealogical Table of the Royal House of Troy and Greece