ONLINE! The Aeneid

Read and discuss Vergil’s Aeneid in English translation. Vergil set out to write an epic for the Roman world, one deeply indebted to Homer, but with an entirely different feel to it. Instead of the winner of a war trying to return home, in the Aeneid we have a group of refugees from a destroyed city searching for a new home. As Charlotte Higgins has said, “It is a foundation myth of a great and proud empire, but doubts seep out of it like water from a sieve.” Vergil’s Aeneid is one of the few works of western literature which has enjoyed 2,000 years of steady popularity. Look at the bright and the dark notes in this Roman poem.