Virgil, Aeneid · Aeneis

Aeneas escapes burning Troy and, after years at sea, brings his people to Italy. Virgil (70–19 BC) wrote this epic of about ten thousand lines for Rome under Augustus, and it was read in schools for the next two thousand years.

❓ How the reader works

Pick a plan, then work through it a day at a time with ‹ ›, or pick a day from the list. Go to jumps to the day where a book starts.
Read the Latin aloud once, then translate it. The numbers are line numbers in each book, so 1.33 is Book 1, line 33; every fifth is in bold.
Tap any word for links to the dictionaries: the Perseus Word Study Tool (which lists the possible forms and opens Lewis and Short) and Logeion.
Write your translation in the box. It saves in this browser as you type (one box for each day). Print the day, or save all your translations as a text file.
Check your translation shows a public-domain English translation of the same lines. It is one translator’s choice of words, not the only right answer.
Done marks the day; the count at the top shows how many you have finished. A Life Planner session opens the reader at exactly its lines.

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Word help

Tap a word in the passage for dictionary links.

Things to watch for

The meter is the dactylic hexameter: six feet in a line, each a dactyl (long, short, short) or a spondee (long, long). The fifth foot is nearly always a dactyl.
Word order is free. An adjective can stand far from its noun; match them by their endings.
-que on the end of a word means “and” and joins it to the word before: arma virumque, “arms and the man.”
Poets often use -ēre for -ērunt in the perfect (tenuēre = tenuērunt, “they held”) and -um for -ōrum in some genitive plurals (deum = deōrum, “of the gods”).
This edition marks no long vowels. Lines in [square brackets] are ones the editor doubted Virgil wrote.

Grammar help

Latin for Beginners (D’Ooge)First-year grammar, with a guide for every lesson
Allen and Greenough’s Latin GrammarThe standard reference, with a part on verse (prosody), free at Dickinson College Commentaries

About the Aeneid

The Aeneid has twelve books. Books I–VI follow Aeneas from the fall of Troy, through his stay with Queen Dido at Carthage, to his visit to the underworld. Books VII–XII tell of his war in Italy against Turnus. Harvard’s catalogues of the 1800s asked new students for “the whole of Virgil,” later for Aeneid I–VI (the old Harvard list).

Read each passage aloud before you translate it. Then go phrase by phrase: find the verb, then its subject, then the rest. More about the poem: Grokipedia, Aeneid.