The Æneid of Virgil translated into English prose

Book I

Arms and the man I sing,[1] who at the first from Troy’s[2]
shores the exile of destiny, won his way to Italy and her
Latian[3] coast—a man much buffeted on land and on the
deep by violence from above, to sate the unforgetting wrath
of Juno[4] the cruel—much[5] scourged too in war, as he 5
struggled to build him a city, and find his gods a home in
Latium—himself the father of the Latian people, and the
chiefs of Alba’s[6] houses, and the walls of high towering
Rome.

Bring to my mind, O Muse,[7] the causes—for what 10
treason against her godhead, or what pain received, the
queen of heaven drove a man of piety so signal to turn
the wheel of so many calamities, to bear the brunt of so
many hardships! Can heavenly natures hate[8] so fiercely
and so long? 15

Of old there was a city, its people emigrants from
Tyre,[9] Carthage, over against Italy and Tiber’s mouths,
yet far removed—rich and mighty, and formed to all
roughness by war’s[10] iron trade—a spot where Juno, it
was said, loved to dwell more than in all the world beside, 20
Samos[11] holding but the second place. Here was her
armour, here her chariot—here to fix by her royal act
the empire of the nations, could Fate be brought to assent,
was even then her aim, her cherished scheme. But she
had heard that the blood of Troy was sowing the seed of a 25
race to overturn one day those Tyrian towers—from that
seed a nation, monarch of broad realms and glorious in
war, was to bring ruin on Libya[12]—such the turning of
Fate’s[13] wheel. With these fears Saturn’s[14] daughter, and
with a lively memory of that old war which at first she
had waged at Troy for her loved Argos’[15] sake—nor indeed
had the causes of that feud and the bitter pangs
they roused yet vanished from her mind—no, stored up 5
in her soul’s depths remains the judgment of Paris,[16] and
the wrong done to her slighted beauty, and the race abhorred
from the womb, and the state enjoyed by the
ravished Ganymede.[17] With this fuel added to the fire,
the Trojans, poor remnants of Danaan[18] havoc and 10
Achilles’[19] ruthless spear, she was tossing from sea to sea,
and keeping far away from Latium; and for many long
years they were wandering, with destiny still driving
them, the whole ocean round. So vast the effort it cost
to build up the Roman nation! 15