aeneid

• Aeneas, according to Virgil, married Lavinia and founded the Roman race, which left to other nations such things as art and science, and was destined to bring under their empire the peoples of earth, to impose the rule of submissive nonresistance, to spare the humbled and to crush the proud.
• The Aeneid, the greatest of Latin poems, is the chief authority for the story of Aeneas.
• Aeneas' descendants would be the Romans, to whom the Fates had decreed a boundless and endless empire.
• The stupendous storm was the result of Juno's interference with Neptune's sea.
• Juno's plan to divert Aeneas from Italy and induce him to settle down with Dido was thwarted by Venus.
• Venus' plan was to have Dido fall in love with Aeneas, but not to interfere with his sailing away to Italy whenever that seemed best.
• The Aeneid was written when Augustus had taken over the bankrupt Roman world after the chaos that followed Caesar's assassination.
• Virgil and all his generation were fired with enthusiasm for the new order, and the Aeneid was written to exalt the Empire, to provide a great national hero and a founder for "the race destined to hold the world beneath its rule."
• Virgil's patriotic purpose is probably responsible for the change from the human Aeneas of the first books to the unhuman prodigy of the last.
• The poet was finally carried away into the purely fantastic by his determination to create a hero for Rome that would make all other heroes seem insignificant.
• A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.
• The Latin names of the gods are, of course, used; and the Latin forms in the case of any personage who has a Latin as well as a Greek name.
• Ulysses, for instance, is Latin for Odysseus.
• Aeneas, the son of Venus, was among the most famous of the heroes who fought the Trojan War.
• Evander told Aeneas about the Golden Age, when men forsook their rude and lawless ways and lived in peace and justice under the rule of Saturn.
• Evander showed Aeneas the sights: the great Tarpeian rock; near it a hill sacred to Jove, now rough with brambles, where some day the golden, glittering Capitol would rise; a meadow filled with lowing cattle, which would be the gathering place of the world, the Roman Forum.
• Turnus, the leader of the Rutulians, was a brave and skilled warrior, and his allies included Mezentius, an excellent soldier, but so cruel that his subjects, the great Etruscan people, had rebelled against him and he had fled to Turnus.
• Camilla was mistress of all the ways of warfare, unexcelled with the javelin and the two-edged ax as well as with the bow.
• Aeneas started with a chosen few and for the first time a boat filled with armed men floated on the Tiber.
• A third ally of Turnus was a woman, the maiden Camilla, who had been reared by her father in a remote wilderness, and as a baby, with a sling or a bow in her tiny hand, had learned to bring down the swift-flying crane or the wild swan, herself hardly less swift of foot than they of wing.
• Father Tiber, the god of the great river they were encamped near, visited Aeneas in a dream and bade him go swiftly upstream to Evander's home, where he would get the help he needed.
• Camilla disdained marriage and loved the chase and the battle and her freedom.
• Tyrants ruled the land until fate brought Evander, an exile from Greece, to his new home in Arcady.
• When they reached Evander's home a warm welcome was given them by the King and his young son, Pallas.
• There was a custom in the city that when war was determined upon, the two folding-gates of the temple of the god Janus, always kept closed in time of peace, should be unbarred by the King while trumpets blared and warriors shouted.
• Aeneas could not count on any help from his future father-in-law, King Latinus, if Lavinia was to be won.
• A formidable army, Latins and Rutulians together, were now opposed to the little band of Trojans.
• Juno herself swept down from heaven, smote with her own hand the bars and flung wide the doors of the temple of Janus when the citizens hesitated as to what to do.
• King Latinus's people were already in arms and the Rutulian Army had encamped before his gates, prompting him to shut himself up in his palace and let matters go as they would.
• On the Trojan side, Aeneas was second only to Hector.
• When the Greeks captured Troy, Aeneas was able with his mother's help to escape from the city with his father and his little son, and to sail away to a new home.
• After long wanderings and many trials on land and sea, Aeneas reached Italy, where he defeated those who opposed his entering the country, married the daughter of a powerful king and founded a city.
• Aeneas was always held to be the real founder of Rome because Romulus and Remus, the actual founders, were born in the city his son built, in Alba Longa.
• When Aeneas set sail from Troy, many Trojans had joined him.
• All were eager to find somewhere to settle, but no one had any clear idea where that should be.
• In those waters was the perilous strait guarded by Scylla and Charybdis, which the Argonauts had succeeded in passing only because Thetis helped them and where Ulysses had lost six of his men.
• The Trojans escaped the peril of Polyphemus, but only to meet another as great: a storm such as there never was before or since, with waves so high that their crests licked the stars and gulfs between them so deep that the floor of the ocean was disclosed.
• The storm was backed by Juno, who hated all Trojans and felt an especial hatred for Aeneas, as she knew that Rome, which was to be founded by men of Trojan blood, was destined by the Fates to conquer Carthage someday.
• Helenus, the son of King Priam, knew exactly where the strait was and gave Aeneas careful directions how to avoid Scylla and Charybdis.
• The Trojans, led by Aeneas, took leave of their kind hosts and successfully rounded the eastern tip of Italy.