Aeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world--as literature as well. Virgil's Aeneid is as eternal as Rome itself, a sweeping epic of arms and heroism--the searching portrait of a man caught between love and duty, human feeling and the force of fate--that has influenced writers for over 2,000 years. Filled with drama, passion, and the universal pathos that only a masterpiece can express. The Aeneid is a book for all the time and all people.

Extract One: Book 5, from line 362 (MP3 format, 8:17, 15 MB) Extract Two: Book 6, from line 268 (MP3 format, 4:41, 8.5 MB) "Arms and the man I sing." So begins one of the greatest works of literature in any language. Written more than two thousand years ago, The Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas' seven-year journey from the ruins of Troy to Italy, where he becomes the founding ancestor of Rome. Virgil's supreme achievement is not only to reveal Rome's imperial future, but to invest it with both passion and suffering for all those caught up in the fates of others. Frederick Ahl's new translation captures the excitement, poetic energy, and intellectual force of the original in a way that has never been done before. Ahl has used a version of Virgil's ancient hexameter, a swift-moving six-beat line varying between twelve and seventeen syllables, to reproduce the original poetry in a thrillingly accurate and engaging style. This is an Aeneid that the first-time reader can grasp and enjoy, and whose rendition of Virgil's subtleties of thought and language will enthrall those already familiar with the epic. Unlike most translators, Ahl has chosen to retain Virgil's word-play, the puns and anagrams and other instances of the poet's ebullient wit. "To shear away Virgil's luxuriance," Ahl writes, "is not to separate the painting from a (superfluous) gilded frame, but to lacerate the canvas. Like Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians, Virgil grasped that humor and earnestness are not mutually exclusive in art any more than they are in life. One should read the Aeneid not in solemn homage, but for enjoyment." Enhanced by Elaine Fantham's Introduction, Ahl's comprehensive notes, and an invaluable indexed glossary, this lively new translation brings readers closer to the original and the myriad enjoyments to be found there.

Presented by Sir John Harrington to King James in 1604 as an attempt to win the new sovereign's favor and patronage, this invaluable manuscript, long thought to be lost, is here published for the first time. It consists of 162 neatly hand-written pages, including an epistle to the king, and Cauchi includes parallel English and Latin texts, marginal explanatory notes, a full introduction and commentary that set the work in the context of Harington's life and literary career, and a complete index.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BCE-19 BCE), later called Virgilius, and known in English as Virgil or Vergil, was a classical Roman poet. He was the author of epics in three modes: the Bucolics or The Eclogues (37 Be, The Georgics (29 Be and the substantially completed The Aeneid (19 Be, the last being an epic poem in the heroic mode, which comprised twelve books and became the Roman Empire's national epic. Biographical reconstruction supposes that Virgil was part of the circle of Maecenas, Octavian's capable agent d'affaires who sought to counter sympathy for Mark Antony among the leading families by rallying Roman literary figures to Octavian's side. It also appears that Virgil gained many connections with other leading literary figures of the time, including Horace and Varius Rufus. As the Roman Empire collapsed, literate men acknowledged that the Christianized Virgil was a master poet. The Aeneid remained the central Latin literary text of the Middle Ages. It also held religious importance as it describes the founding of the Holy City. Surviving medieval collections of manuscripts containing Virgil's works include the Vergilius Augusteus, the Vergilius Vaticanus and the Vergilius Romanus.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics, or Eclogues. The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry. Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, Virgil's Eclogues also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the poems in the time in which they were created.