Aeneid I – Introduction

The Aeneid, Book One: Latin Text, with an Introduction
and Latin Prose Version and English Summaries,
Prepared by Sean Gabb

First edition published in April 2020

Read whole text here for free, or buy in hard copy here on Amazon.

Introduction

This book contains the complete text of Aeneid I, together with a rendering into Latin prose and a running summary of the whole in English. Its main intended audience is students preparing for examination at school or university throughout the world. A larger and less easily defined audience is anyone, in any time or place, who wants to read Vergil, but whose Latin is not ready for the challenge.

I return to my indended audience, and will focus on A-Level, as this is the examination with which I am most familiar. The present specification makes two demands. First, it requires candidates to translate and answer questions on a previously unseen passage from Livy or some other of the Roman historians. Second, it sets questions on passages previously announced from the Latin classics; and there is always a book from The Aeneid among these. The unseen is radically simplified. If it keeps some wording from the original, the main enjoyment for a teacher is to see how well or badly the examiners have performed their work of simplification. The set texts are unadapted, and candidates are expected to write fluently on their meaning and effect and on various attendant circumstances.

One of the less creditable secrets of A-Level Latin—and, I think, of IB—is that perhaps only a small minority of candidates ever reads the set texts in any meaningful sense. The low demands made by the unseen paper, combined with a crowded timetable, do not let most students learn enough Latin to engage with the main classics as literature. Instead, they study literal translations. They memorise these along with the originals. The hope is that they will remember enough of both in the examination to match up the extract given in the paper with the literal translation. Mostly, they will never be able to explain why any particular line or sentence of the text means what the translation says it does.

I will not denounce this practice. I am guilty of it myself. What else are teachers supposed to do, when even four hours a week of classroom contact are not enough? Students may have three other demanding subjects. Their previous GCSE in Latin will not have given them enough to read the simplest classics. Give me a small group of students right at the beginning of their course, and I will teach them to read the set texts. Give me a larger group in the second year of the course, and I have no choice but to play safe and to do what I must to help the students get the grades they need for university entrance, and that their parents expect of the school, and that the school itself needs to keep its place in the various public and private league tables.

The purpose of this book is to give a middle way between reading Vergil one line or sentence at a time in Latin, and memorising him with an English translation. Inevitably, A-Level and IB students know a fair amount of Latin. They know the main grammar and syntax. They know a lot of vocabulary. Their difficulty is that the Latin classics are written in a dialect somewhat removed from the spoken language. This dialect is hard to understand because that is how, in terms of beauty and flexibility, it had to be made if were to stand comparison with Greek. Vergil, in particular, is hard because the rules of hexameter verse were not developed with Latin in mind. These rules can be made to work for Latin only so far as they place limits on the choice of words, and on the grammar that must be used, and on the position of words. Even when all the words have been checked in a dictionary, a line of Vergil can still sometimes look, on first view, like a bad hand at Scrabble. Give students three hundred of these, and it is no surprise if they reach for the nearest translation and set about exercising their memory.

The answer is to rewrite Book I of The Aeneid as Latin prose. Words are reordered in a sequence more obvious to English eyes. Many are replaced by more natural alternatives. Pronouns and verbs and prepositions are supplied that could not be fitted into the metrical structure of the original. To show where the resulting text expands on the original, all additions are placed in italics. I have formatted the whole as if it were a novel.

The benefit of doing this is that the result is still Latin. It is not elegant Latin. The purpose is not to show off, but to supply the plainest rendering possible. The result is Latin that most school and university students of Latin will be able to read without too much looking in a dictionary—and not too much headscratching thereafter. The purpose, then, is to render Vergil into a Latin no more difficult than an A-Level unseen. Unlike any English version, it is obviously related to the original, and is a fair key to understanding the original. It also gives students a piece of Latin that they can read at length, and that will be good practice for the unseen translation.

I have been doing something like this informally for several years. Show me a student with fair Latin who cannot understand any particular sentence, and my first resort will be to reorder the words, replacing colons and semicolons with full stops. That usually works. If it fails, I will start substituting words. Only as a last resort will I suggest a meaning.

The Eduqas Board has a similar policy with its GCSE set texts. These are printed in the Sources Booklet in three versions. In the first, words are numbered, to show how they should be reordered for English eyes. In the second, there is an interlinear translation. The third has both numbers and translation.

Given how little time GCSE students have for any one subject, I find the Eduqas approach so useful that it is now my preferred board, even though I work for the OCR Board. I think the present approach is more useful still, so far as all the work of reordering is done for students, and there is no translation to tempt them away from engaging with some kind of Latin.

I could bask in the glow of unshared approbation. I will confess, however, that my prose version is not original. I have relied heavily on the version of Ruaeus, or Charles de La Rue, who was a French Jesuit of the seventeenth century. This was published in 1675 for the use of the French Dauphin, and was a popular supplement to school editions of Vergil until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was justly popular. Indeed, John Dryden is said to have relied as often on Ruaeus as on Vergil for his translation of The Aeneid into heroic couplets. Copies of Ruaeus as a marginal gloss on the original can be found on Google Books and the Internet Archive, though the generally poor quality of scanning often makes the small font of these glosses as hard to read as one of the more weathered ancient inscriptions.

I will not promise that my version is free of typing mistakes. But I have taken Ruaeus and simplified him still further. He was writing for an audience familiar with the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church—with the Missal and with the Vulgate Bible of St Jerome. My own audience is more familiar with the specified vocabularies of the Eduqas and OCR Boards. I have therefore replaced what may be difficult words. Mostly, I have used words from the specified vocabularies. Here and there, I have used words that have close derivations in English. Or I have followed, Vergil’s own wording, though with some reordering. One word—scaturigines—I have replaced with the more generic aquas.

Words added are given in italics. Where it may help with scanning the original text, some vowels are given a dieresis. Because it will help intermediate students to distinguish between what might otherwise be confusing forms, I have marked the final vowel of first declension singular ablatives with a macron.

With the exception of achora, which is more obvious to an English reader than the ancora of the original text, I have standardised spellings. I have also abandoned the baroque punctuation of the seventeenth century in favour of short sentences, and added speech marks. And I have broken the text into reasonably short paragraphs as if it were a modern novel.

I have not given an English translation. As said, part of my intention is to give students a version of Aeneid I that can be read in Latin. If more is needed, I expect that students will have translations made by their teachers, or will have one of the published translations. However, I do supply a running summary in English that should let students navigate both texts without having too much of the work done for them.

I have also not supplied any notes on the text. There is no shortage of explanatory material on the Internet. And matching up a facing text on two pages has already tested MS Word and my knowledge of it to breaking point.

This is an experiment. I have not tried it yet on my students. I am sending early copies to anyone who may be interested. I look forward to any feedback that may be offered. I shall be glad to know of the numerous typing mistakes that I am sure lurk on every page. I shall receive criticisms of the Latin with good grace. If the feedback is generally positive, I will start work on the other books of The Aeneid. I will then move to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For the moment, anyone who feels that this edition is useful may care to look at my edition of Aeneid XI, which I have produced in the same way. He may also care to look at my edition of Aeneid VI. This uses a largely unadapted version of Ruaeus, though it is not given on facing pages.

Sean Gabb
Centre for Ancient Studies
Deal
April 2020

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