Vergil, Aeneid Book 2

What this is. Book 2 of the Aeneid is Aeneas's own account, told at Dido's banquet, of Troy's final night. This reader covers Book 2's required AP passage (2.40–56 & 201–249, Reading 4.6): the Trojan priest Laocoön warning his people against the Greeks' wooden horse, and the terrifying sea-serpents that kill him and his sons soon after — an "omen" the Trojans read exactly backwards.

What happens here. Laocoön runs down from the citadel, begs the Trojans not to trust the horse, and hurls a spear into its flank — which visibly, audibly shudders (2.40–56). Later, as he sacrifices a bull to Neptune, twin serpents surge from the sea, kill his two sons, then crush Laocoön himself as he tries to save them; his death cry is compared to a wounded sacrificial bull's bellow (2.201–224). The serpents vanish beneath Minerva's statue, and the Trojans conclude — wrongly — that Laocoön was punished for attacking the horse. They breach their own walls to drag it inside, ignore the doomed prophetess Cassandra, and spend their city's last day decorating its shrines for a festival (2.225–249).

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 Scan button alongside the usual Chunks/Notes/Literal/Polished, showing the hand-verified metrical pattern for every line.