The Aeneid

Book 1

Landfall at Carthage

My song is of war and a man: a refugee by fate,
the first from Troy to Italy s Lavinian shores,
battered much on land and sea by blows from gods
obliging brutal Juno s unforgetting rage;
he suffered much in war as well, all to plant
his town and gods in Latium. From here would rise
the Latin race, the Alban lords, and Rome s high walls.

Remember for me, Muse. Tell me the reasons. What pain,
what insult to her power, moved the queen of gods
to drive a man famous for piety through misery
on misery? Can such anger grip gods minds?

An ancient city built by colonists from Tyre
faced Italy and Tiber s mouth across the sea:
wealthy Carthage, fierce and fond of waging war.
They say that Juno loved her best; even Samos
came in second. Here the goddess kept her weapons
and her chariot; this land would rule the world
if fate allowed. This was her aim and hope.
But she d heard that men of Trojan blood
would topple Carthage and her heights one day.
They d be a people proud in war, an empire
fatal for her Libya. This was what the Fates had
spun, this was Juno s fear. She remembered
how she d fought at Troy to help her cherished Greeks.

Still other reasons for her rage and bile
remained deep-rooted in her heart: Paris scornful
verdict on her beauty, the honors paid by Jove
to kidnapped Ganymede, her hatred for that race.
Enflamed by this, she barred from Latium
the sea-tossed Trojans, the few left by the Greeks
and cruel Achilles. They roamed for many years,
over many oceans, forced on by the Fates.
To found the Roman race required such great effort.

Sicily had slipped from sight. The Trojans gladly
sailed for open sea, their bronze prows churning foam.
But Juno, nursing her eternal wound, thought
to herself: Am I to leave off from my plan
and fail to turn the Trojan king from Italy?
It seems that Fate forbids it. Then how could Pallas
burn the Argive

Shadi Bartsch is a Guggenheim Laureate, the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor in Classics at the University of Chicago, winner of a Charles J. Goodwin Award, and the inaugural director of The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She has been a professor of classics for nearly three decades, has published twelve books (monographs and edited volumes), and translated three of Seneca s tragedies: Thyestes, Medea, and Phaedra.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70 19 b.c.), known as Vergil, was born near Mantua at the end of the Roman Republic. He was the most famous poet of his age and his Aeneid gave the Romans a great national epic equal to the Greeks , celebrating their city s origins and the creation of their empire. Vergil is also credited with The Eclogues and The Georgics.

A remarkable achievement . . . Bartsch manages to keep pace with Virgil s verse, capturing the dense, lapidate language of the Latin, and the energy of the narrative, without unduly flattening its meaning. . . . This translation reads like Virgil. The Times Literary Supplement

Blending solid scholarship with poetic sensibility, classicist [Shadi] Bartsch delivers a new version of the foundational poem of Imperial Rome. . . . [This translation] gives some sense of the Latin and the tautness of its lines; most other English versions are fully 30 percent or more longer than the original, but not hers. . . . Through seductions, treacheries, murders, deicides, and other episodes, Bartsch her scholarly notes as vigorous as her verse produces an excellent companion for students of the poem and of Roman history. A robust, readable, reliable translation of a hallmark of world literature. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A tight, readable translation with a welcome feminist outlook and savvy engagement with the poem s political and imperial themes and imperialist legacy. Its natural iambic voice, clear language, and faithfulness to the tight, fast-moving pace of Vergil s original make it a refreshing way for modern audiences to access the Aeneid s power. Ada Palmer, award-winning author of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the Terra Ignota series

The best version of the Aeneid in modern English: concise, readable, and beautiful, but also as accurate and faithful to Vergil s Latin as possible. And the Vergil s Latin that she aims to stick close to reflects modern scholars realization that Vergil s Latin is often difficult and strange; here it helps that she is one of the most accomplished Latinists to translate the poem, knows all the latest research, and is willing to wrestle with the most difficult passages. But this is not a translation just for scholars: Bartsch writes clear, vivid, concise lines