The Aeneid

Aeneas escapes the sack of Troy carrying his father and the household gods, is blown across the Mediterranean, abandons Dido at Carthage because he is told to, and fights a war in Italy to found the city that becomes Rome. Virgil built it as a national epic for Augustus, and it has been the backbone of Western school Latin ever since. Its claim on a curriculum meant to form citizens is straightforward: it is the poem in which duty repeatedly costs the hero something he wanted, and in which founding a state is presented as a burden rather than a reward.

Context: Virgil (70-19 BC) worked on the poem for the last decade of his life and left it unfinished; Augustus had it published against the poet’s reported wish that it be burned. The linked edition is Robert Fagles’s verse translation.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Virgil — the author.
• Rome — the city the whole poem exists to found.
• War — the subject.