the aeneid · virgil

Virgil's Latin epic, written under Augustus in the 20s BC, follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas from the fall of Troy to the founding of a new people in Italy. It is a poem about duty and its cost: pietas, the burden of destiny, the loves and lives sacrificed to empire, and a Rome whose glory is shadowed from the first line by grief.

Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage Classics, 1990). Read in full over two sessions, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors.