The Aeneid
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History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
Virgil as Propagandist
The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) lived and died during the period of transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire. It was a time when Romans saw the potential in expanding their territory to gain access to material resources and to enslave other peoples for manpower. The success of the burgeoning Roman Empire relied in part on a sort of branding, and this is where Virgil’s work had its greatest significance. The Aeneid is an epic poem, telling the legendary story of the genesis of the Roman Republic several hundred years before the birth of the empire. It was the perfect tool to provide the empire with administrative cohesion, so that personnel in increasingly far-flung regions would still have the stamp of Roman identity. Had the Roman government not maintained its hold on the expanding empire by promoting and perpetuating the Roman brand, the empire would surely have fragmented far sooner than it eventually did, some 350 years on, in BC 330.
Just as the Christians would soon have Adam as their progenitor, so Virgil gave the Romans their progenitor in the shape of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled from Troy, in present-day Turkey, to Italy. The character Aeneas was already known to the Romans from the story of the The Iliad, written by the ancient Greek poet Homer. In The Iliad, Aeneas is the heroic son of prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). Following the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, Aeneas finds himself with no fixed abode, which is the catalyst for his wanderings. Virgil took the thread of this minor subplot within The Iliad and expanded upon it to create the legend of Aeneas becoming the ancestor of all Romans.
During Virgil’s upbringing, many myths and legends mentioning Aeneas circulated among the story-tellers and scholars of Rome. A century before Virgil, Cato the Elder had written an account of the origins of the Romans, titled Origines, which began the process of providing Rome with its historical branding. So, Virgil was nurtured in a social environment with a keen appetite for tales of Roman pedigree. It made perfect sense to transform the hero Aeneas into the man from whom all Romans could claim descent. Of course, there may also have been some truth to the legend, as it may be that a number of displaced Trojans did indeed find their way to the Italian peninsula.
Aeneas as the Father of the Romans
In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas and a few others who have survived the Trojan War are commanded by their gods to escape the region and set up home elsewhere. This begins their six-year voyage around the Mediterranean, looking for a suitable place to colonise.
The pre-eminent status of the Roman Empire really began with its victory over Carthage, in Tunisia, during the Punic Wars (264–146 BCE). Virgil tied this into the tale by the inclusion of an affair between Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, which began lovingly but ended acrimoniously, so that Carthage would subsequently become the traditional enemy of Rome in the centuries to come.
During Aeneas’ adventures, he carries with him statues of his house gods Lares and Penates, which symbolise his search for somewhere to settle his people, with the intention that the statues will ultimately be placed at the chosen location. The city Aeneas founded was Lavinium, situated about 50 kilometres south of Rome, on the western coast of Italy. Before he could establish Lavinium, he had to do battle with the Rutuli people, under the leadership of Turnus. Thus, Livinium became the epicentre of the embryonic Roman tribe, which would subsequently found Rome as the capital of the Roman Republic. When Aeneas eventually dies, he is deified to become the god Jupiter Indiges (Indigenous Jupiter), otherwise known as the Pater Indiges, which translates as Father of the Romans. The foundation myth of Rome itself surrounds the story of Romulus and Remus, who are fifteenth-generation descendants of Aeneas.
The Power of Poetry
The Aeneid comprises just short of 10,000 lines in a metre known as dactylic hexameter, which copied Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It essentially means that each line is broken into six rhythmic components. The Aeneid is divided into twelve books – six relate the story of Aeneas’ travels, and the other six relate his efforts to colonise the Italian coast against considerable local resistance.
The reason why The Aeneid is classified as a poem and not prose is that poetry was considered the higher form of literature by the Romans, hence the term ‘prosaic’ taken from prose, which is often used to mean ‘commonplace’. Poetry was viewed as a high-art form, because it took great skill to shoehorn language in such a way that it obeyed the rules of the chosen metre. Virgil took this discipline very seriously and even used his line structures in an onomatopoeic way to imitate the actions he was describing, such as the galloping of horses. This was important, because poems were performed to an audience, rather than simply recited, so a well-written poem allowed for vocal and physical gesture as part of the show. This brought the story to life in the minds of the audience, so that they were more readily engaged by the events being described.
When Virgil died, in 19 BCE, he was still in the process of editing his masterpiece and wanted the manuscript to be destroyed. However, Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, ordered that the manuscript should be published and that it should be as true to Virgil’s final edit as possible. As a result, literary scholars consider a few of the lines to be work in progress, because they do not obey the dactylic hexameter. It seems that Virgil worked by first drafting his poetry in rough form, just to flesh out the story, and then painstakingly honed his words until they dropped into his chosen poetic template.
Virgil apparently took around ten years to complete The Aeneid. Although Virgil was not content with its form upon his death, Emperor Augustus saw enormous propaganda value in the work. It became part of the branding package that enabled the Romans to expand their empire and to continue governing it over such a vast expanse of territory. The Aeneid reminded Romans, both distant and near, to be proud of their heritage and to maintain their allegiance to the emperor, because they, like he, were descended from greatness.
The same legend told in prose would not have had the same impact as Virgil’s poetic work, because it needed to be both entertaining and informative. Saving Virgil’s work and sharing it widely meant that public performances could be held across the empire, where communities came together to share the experience. That way there could be no excuse for new generations, who might have never been anywhere near Rome, to think of themselves as anything but Roman. It was a cultural meme that served to keep everyone in the same meme pool – young and old, male and female, rich and poor. The message was that one didn’t need to live or have been raised in Rome to be Roman. All that mattered was that allegiance to Rome was perpetuated via exposure to education about the Roman legend. It was a cultural franchise that continued to work extremely well for a few hundred years after the lives of Virgil and Augustus.
Contents
Title Page
History of Collins
Life & Times
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V
Book VI
Book VII
Book VIII
Book IX
Book X
Book XI
Book XII
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
Copyright
About the Publisher
BOOK I
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, 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 destin’d town;
His banish’d gods restor’d 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.
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav’n began
To persecute so brave, so just a man;
Involv’d his anxious life in endless cares,
Expos’d to wants, and hurried into wars!
Can heav’nly minds such high resentment show,
Or exercise their spite in human woe?
Against the Tiber’s mouth, but far away,
An ancient town was seated on the sea;
A Tyrian colony; the people made
Stout for the war, and studious of their trade:
Carthage the name; belov’d by Juno more
Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore.
Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav’n were kind,
The seat of awful empire she design’d.
Yet she had heard an ancient rumor fly,
(Long cited by the people of the sky,)
That times to come should see the Trojan race
Her Carthage ruin, and her tow’rs deface;
Nor thus confin’d, the yoke of sov’reign sway
Should on the necks of all the nations lay.
She ponder’d this, and fear’d it was in fate;
Nor could forget the war she wag’d of late
For conqu’ring Greece against the Trojan state.
Besides, long causes working in her mind,
And secret seeds of envy, lay behind;
Deep graven in her heart the doom remain’d
Of partial Paris, and her form disdain’d;
The grace bestow’d on ravish’d Ganymed,
Electra’s glories, and her injur’d bed.
Each was a cause alone; and all combin’d
To kindle vengeance in her haughty mind.
For this, far distant from the Latian coast
She drove the remnants of the Trojan host;
And sev’n long years th’ unhappy wand’ring train
Were toss’d by storms, and scatter’d thro’ the main.
Such time, such toil, requir’d the Roman name,
Such length of labor for so vast a frame.
Now scarce the Trojan fleet, with sails and oars,
Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores,
Ent’ring with cheerful shouts the wat’ry reign,
And plowing frothy furrows in the main;
When, lab’ring still with endless discontent,
The Queen of Heav’n did thus her fury vent:
“Then am I vanquish’d? must I yield?” said she,
“And must the Trojans reign in Italy?
So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force;
Nor can my pow’r divert their happy course.
Could angry Pallas, with revengeful spleen,
The Grecian navy burn, and drown the men?
She, for the fault of one offending foe,
The bolts of Jove himself presum’d to throw:
With whirlwinds from beneath she toss’d the ship,
And bare expos’d the bosom of the deep;
Then, as an eagle gripes the trembling game,
The wretch, yet hissing with her father’s flame,
She strongly seiz’d, and with a burning wound
Transfix’d, and naked, on a rock she bound.
But I, who walk in awful state above,
The majesty of heav’n, the sister wife of Jove,
For length of years my fruitless force employ
Against the thin remains of ruin’d Troy!
What nations now to Juno’s pow’r will pray,
Or off’rings on my slighted altars lay?”
Thus rag’d the goddess; and, with fury fraught.
The restless regions of the storms she sought,
Where, in a spacious cave of living stone,
The tyrant Aeolus, from his airy throne,
With pow’r imperial curbs the struggling winds,
And sounding tempests in dark prisons binds.
This way and that th’ impatient captives tend,
And, pressing for release, the mountains rend.
High in his hall th’ undaunted monarch stands,
And shakes his scepter, and their rage commands;
Which did he not, their unresisted sway
Would sweep the world before them in their way;
Earth, air, and seas thro’ empty space would roll,
And heav’n would fly before the driving soul.
In fear of this, the Father of the Gods
Confin’d their fury to those dark abodes,
And lock’d ’em safe within, oppress’d with mountain loads;
Impos’d a king, with arbitrary sway,
To loose their fetters, or their force allay.
To whom the suppliant queen her pray’rs address’d,
And thus the tenor of her suit express’d:
“O Aeolus! for to thee the King of Heav’n
The pow’r of tempests and of winds has giv’n;
Thy force alone their fury can restrain,
And smooth the waves, or swell the troubled main-
A race of wand’ring slaves, abhorr’d by me,
With prosp’rous passage cut the Tuscan sea;
To fruitful Italy their course they steer,
And for their vanquish’d gods design new temples there.
Raise all thy winds; with night involve the skies;
Sink or disperse my fatal enemies.
Twice sev’n, the charming daughters of the main,
Around my person wait, and bear my train:
Succeed my wish, and second my design;
The fairest, Deiopeia, shall be thine,
And make thee father of a happy line.”
To this the god: “’Tis yours, O queen, to will
The work which duty binds me to fulfil.
These airy kingdoms, and this wide command,
Are all the presents of your bounteous hand:
Yours is my sov’reign’s grace; and, as your guest,
I sit with gods at their celestial feast;
Raise tempests at your pleasure, or subdue;
Dispose of empire, which I hold from you.”
He said, and hurl’d against the mountain side
His quiv’ring spear, and all the god applied.
The raging winds rush thro’ the hollow wound,
And dance aloft in air, and skim along the ground;
Then, settling on the sea, the surges sweep,
Raise liquid mountains, and disclose the deep.
South, East, and West with mix’d confusion roar,
And roll the foaming billows to the shore.
The cables crack; the sailors’ fearful cries
Ascend; and sable night involves the skies;
And heav’n itself is ravish’d from their eyes.
Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue;
Then flashing fires the transient light renew;
The face of things a frightful image bears,
And present death in various forms appears.
Struck with unusual fright, the Trojan chief,
With lifted hands and eyes, invokes relief;
And, “Thrice and four times happy those,” he cried,
“That under Ilian walls before their parents died!
Tydides, bravest of the Grecian train!
Why could not I by that strong arm be slain,
And lie by noble Hector on the plain,
Or great Sarpedon, in those bloody fields
Where Simois rolls the bodies and the shields
Of heroes, whose dismember’d hands yet bear
The dart aloft, and clench the pointed spear!”
Thus while the pious prince his fate bewails,
Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails,
And rent the sheets; the raging billows rise,
And mount the tossing vessels to the skies:
Nor can the shiv’ring oars sustain the blow;
The galley gives her side, and turns her prow;
While those astern, descending down the steep,
Thro’ gaping waves behold the boiling deep.
Three ships were hurried by the southern blast,
And on the secret shelves with fury cast.
Those hidden rocks th’ Ausonian sailors knew:
They call’d them Altars, when they rose in view,
And show’d their spacious backs above the flood.
Three more fierce Eurus, in his angry mood,
Dash’d on the shallows of the moving sand,
And in mid ocean left them moor’d aland.
Orontes’ bark, that bore the Lycian crew,
(A horrid sight!) ev’n in the hero’s view,
From stem to stern by waves was overborne:
The trembling pilot, from his rudder torn,
Was headlong hurl’d; thrice round the ship was toss’d,
Then bulg’d at once, and in the deep was lost;
And here and there above the waves were seen
Arms, pictures, precious goods, and floating men.
The stoutest vessel to the storm gave way,
And suck’d thro’ loosen’d planks the rushing sea.
Ilioneus was her chief: Alethes old,
Achates faithful, Abas young and bold,
Endur’d not less; their ships, with gaping seams,
Admit the deluge of the briny streams.
Meantime imperial Neptune heard the sound
Of raging billows breaking on the ground.
Displeas’d, and fearing for his wat’ry reign,
He rear’d his awful head above the main,
Serene in majesty; then roll’d his eyes
Around the space of earth, and seas, and skies.
He saw the Trojan fleet dispers’d, distress’d,
By stormy winds and wintry heav’n oppress’d.
Full well the god his sister’s envy knew,
And what her aims and what her arts pursue.
He summon’d Eurus and the western blast,
And first an angry glance on both he cast;
Then thus rebuk’d: “Audacious winds! from whence
This bold attempt, this rebel insolence?
Is it for you to ravage seas and land,
Unauthoriz’d by my supreme command?
To raise such mountains on the troubled main?
Whom I—but first ’t is fit the billows to restrain;
And then you shall be taught obedience to my reign.
Hence! to your lord my royal mandate bear—
The realms of ocean and the fields of air
Are mine, not his. By fatal lot to me
The liquid empire fell, and trident of the sea.
His pow’r to hollow caverns is confin’d:
There let him reign, the jailer of the wind,
With hoarse commands his breathing subjects call,
And boast and bluster in his empty hall.”
He spoke; and, while he spoke, he smooth’d the sea,
Dispell’d the darkness, and restor’d the day.
Cymothoe, Triton, and the sea-green train
Of beauteous nymphs, the daughters of the main,
Clear from the rocks the vessels with their hands:
The god himself with ready trident stands,
And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands;
Then heaves them off the shoals. Where’er he guides
His finny coursers and in triumph rides,
The waves unruffle and the sea subsides.
As, when in tumults rise th’ ignoble crowd,
Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud;
And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly,
And all the rustic arms that fury can supply:
If then some grave and pious man appear,
They hush their noise, and lend a list’ning ear;
He soothes with sober words their angry mood,
And quenches their innate desire of blood:
So, when the Father of the Flood appears,
And o’er the seas his sov’reign trident rears,
Their fury falls: he skims the liquid plains,
High on his chariot, and, with loosen’d reins,
Majestic moves along, and awful peace maintains.
The weary Trojans ply their shatter’d oars
To nearest land, and make the Libyan shores.
Within a long recess there lies a bay:
An island shades it from the rolling sea,
And forms a port secure for ships to ride;
Broke by the jutting land, on either side,
In double streams the briny waters glide.
Betwixt two rows of rocks a sylvan scene
Appears above, and groves for ever green:
A grot is form’d beneath, with mossy seats,
To rest the Nereids, and exclude the heats.
Down thro’ the crannies of the living walls
The crystal streams descend in murm’ring falls:
No haulsers need to bind the vessels here,
Nor bearded anchors; for no storms they fear.
Sev’n ships within this happy harbor meet,
The thin remainders of the scatter’d fleet.
The Trojans, worn with toils, and spent with woes,
Leap on the welcome land, and seek their wish’d repose.
First, good Achates, with repeated strokes