Table Of ContentSelections from Virgil A eneid VIII
i
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ii
Selections from Virgil
Aeneid VIII:
An Edition for
Intermediate Students
Lines 86–279, 558–84
With introduction, commentary notes and
vocabulary by Keith Maclennan
iii
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published in Great Britain 2016 as V irgil Aeneid VIII : A Selection
This edition fi rst published in the United States of America 2019
Copyright © Keith Maclennan, 2016, 2019
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iv
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Text 37
Commentary Notes 45
Vocabulary 81
v
vi
Preface
Th e text and notes found in this volume are designed to guide any
student who has mastered Latin at beginner’s level and wishes to read
Virgil’s work in the original.
Th e A eneid as a whole is worth reading for the brilliance, variety
and intensity of Virgil’s narrative, and important for its central place
in the literature of the Roman Empire and of modern Europe. In the
lines covered here Aeneas, the forefather of Rome, visits the site of the
city four hundred years before it is founded and hears a story of
Hercules and how he helped make the place habitable for Aeneas’
successors.
Th is edition contains a detailed introduction to the historical
and literary context of the Aeneid with a detailed explanation of the
metre and its use. Within notes to the text points of linguistic diffi culty
receive as much attention as those of interpretation. At the end of the
book is a full vocabulary list for all the words contained in these
sections.
In preparing this text I have been very much helped and
supported by Alice Wright and her team at Bloomsbury. Christopher
Tanfi eld, who is editing the text of A eneid X, read all my notes with
great care and improved them most substantially. He and I worked
together on the introduction to my great pleasure and benefi t. James
Morwood also read the notes and endeavoured to make sure that I
kept the target readers in view. I must also say a warm thank you to
the Fondation Hardt in Geneva for their hospitality over a period of
the summer while I was working on A eneid VIII .
Keith Maclennan
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viii
Introduction
Th e Aeneid
Th e Aeneid tells how Aeneas, of the royal house of Troy, escaped
from the destruction of his city bearing his crippled father on his
back and accompanied by his little son. He knew he was to seek
a new home in the west. He did not know where this was to be. In
the course of seven years travelling he followed many false trails,
of which the most damaging was his stay in Carthage in North Africa.
Driven there in a storm by the goddess Juno, he was sheltered by
Carthage’s queen, Dido, and allowed her to believe that he loved
her and would stay there. She killed herself when he was obliged to
leave. Before he reached his destination he was required to go to
Hades to visit his now dead father, Anchises. Th ere Anchises showed
him a vision of glory: his descendants, the Romans, engaged in their
mission of world conquest and pacifi cation, which would reach its
climax with the reign of Augustus. At last he reached the mouth of the
river Tiber and understood that here was the place for the city he
must found. He was also to unite his own people with the Latini, the
existing occupants of the country, and marry the daughter of their
king. But she was already committed to Turnus of the neighbouring
Rutuli. Juno encouraged the development of a war between Aeneas’
people and the Latini. Th ere was great destruction and loss of life,
including that of Pallas, the young son of a king who had become an
ally of Aeneas. Aeneas’ victory was not sealed until the last line of the
poem, in which he refused Turnus mercy and killed him in revenge
for Pallas.
Th e fourth- century commentator Servius stated confi dently, ‘Th is
is Virgil’s plan: to compose an imitation of Homer and to praise
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