Aeneid

The Aeneid is the great epic of empire - Virgil's masterful reinterpretation of Homer, designed for a new age of Roman domination. John Dryden, the poet laureate of the later 17th century, translated this epic for his own generation, and in doing so produced one of the most elegant, muscular and aphoristic translations ever written. A new introduction sheds light on the cultural and political context of Dryden's translation and comes to grips with the two-thousand year old controversy surrounding the hero, Aeneas' departure from the underworld in Aeneid 6.

Unusually for a work of this kind, the text is presented in a reader-friendly format,with generous space for personal annotations and references.


Robert Shorrock teaches Classics at Eton College, Windsor. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1999 and is the author of The Challenge of Epic: Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus (Leiden, 2001). He has published a number of articles on epic poetry and the Classical Tradition, and is co-editor of the journal Greece & Rome.