Vergil, Aeneid Book 1

What this is. The Aeneid is Rome's national epic, written by Publius Vergilius Maro ("Vergil") in the last decade of his life (29–19 BCE), under the patronage of the emperor Augustus. It tells how the Trojan prince Aeneas, fleeing the fall of Troy, wanders the Mediterranean for years before reaching Italy and founding the line that will lead to Rome. This reader covers all of Book 1's required AP passages: the proem (1.1–33, Reading 4.4) and the storm and Dido's entrance (1.88–107 & 496–512, Reading 4.5).

What happens here. Vergil announces his subject and asks the Muse why Juno persecuted so devoted a man (1.1–33) — then shows her anger in action: a storm she incites nearly drowns Aeneas's fleet, and in his despair he wishes he had died gloriously at Troy instead (1.88–107). The storm scatters his ships to the coast of Carthage, where Aeneas will shortly find Dido, the city's queen, striding into her half-built temple — compared, in one of the poem's great similes, to the goddess Diana leading her mountain nymphs (1.496–512). As the passage ends, Aeneas spots his own lost companions in the crowd around her.

How to read this. Latin poetry is written in dactylic hexameter: six metrical feet per line, each a dactyl (long–short–short) or spondee (long–long), with the fifth almost always a dactyl and the sixth always two syllables. Word order is far more flexible than in prose — expect hyperbaton (separated words that agree), interlocked ("synchysis") order, and sentences that run on (enjambment) from one line into the next. Each block below carries a new Scan button alongside the usual Chunks/Notes/Literal/Polished, showing the hand-verified metrical pattern for every line.