Virgil - Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is an epic poem written by Virgil, a poet of the Roman Empire, in the 1^st Century B.C. The emperor Augustus ordered him to create a masterpiece with the purpose of glorifying the empire, attributing it a mythic origin. His whole epic poem is divided into twelve books and is considered a rewriting of the Homeric poems.

The part I read tells that Juno, the queen of gods, is mad at the Trojans and with Aeneas. She wants to prevent the Trojans to arrive in Italy, where they will find the Roman Empire. Juno told Eolo that if he helped her she would make one of her 14 nymphs marry him, Eolo decided to help Juno making them sink in the sea, but is not clear if he accepted the nymph. (here I leave the fragment of the poem of this scene)

“Your task, O queen, is to decide

what you wish: my duty is to fulfil your orders.

You brought about all this kingdom of mine, the sceptre,

Jove’s favour, you gave me a seat at the feasts of the gods,

and you made me lord of the storms and the tempests.”

Eolo shook the seas and destroyed the Aeneas’ fleet. Neptune, god of the seas and oceans, saw the catastrophic situation where Aeneas and the Trojans were involved and helped the, to arrive in Libya.

The epic poetry genre is presented in all of the poem I read, epic wars and battles, long travels, gods involved in acts of the man and all the things that make the poems more interesting, also the length of the poem is great for the genre and the focus in the culture, which in this case was of the Roman’s culture. In my opinion, Virgil did a really good work making this poem with that genre. Literature is not something where I’m good at nor at reading or making poetry, I found it difficult to understand all the part of the poem I read, I also read some summaries of this book to guess some of the situations in the poem I didn’t get when I read it.

Here i leave the links where i looked for the poem:

http://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Eneida:_Libro_I

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilAeneidI.htm

And here where i looked for summaries and explanations:

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eneida