VIRGIL

AENEID IV

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES AND

VOCABULARY

BY

C. E. FREEMAN

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

PREFACE

THIS edition of the Fourth Book of the Aeneid is intended chiefly for those who have little knowledge of Virgil. The notes, therefore, are short and simple, and though they are sufficient, I hope, to explain everything that can fairly give difficulty, they contain no discussions of doubtful readings or interpretations. The Oxford text has been followed without any alteration.

The only commentary that I have consulted in writing the notes is that of Prof. Conington, but I may be under other obligations of which I am unconscious; with regard to the Introduction my debt to Prof. Sellar is as obvious as it is great.

My best thanks are due to Mr. M. T. Tatham for reading and criticizing the Introduction and Notes.

C. E. FREEMAN.

OXFORD, 1916.

INTRODUCTION

LIFE OF VIRGIL.

PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO was born at Andes, a village or district near Mantua, on the 15th of October, 70 B. C. The part of Italy that lies north of the Po did not receive full Roman citizenship till about twenty years later, and consequently, like Catullus and Livy and several others famous in literature, Virgil was not by birth a Roman citizen. His father, who was a small freeholder, farmed his land and kept bees and was able to give Virgil a good education, first at the neighbouring town of Cremona and afterwards at Milan. In 53 B. C., when he was seventeen, he went to Rome and studied rhetoric under a teacher named Epidicus. For the next ten years we hear nothing about him, but the troubles of the time may have compelled him to leave Rome and return to his home. He had been born when the horrors of the struggle between Marius and Sulla and of the rising of Spartacus were over, and his youth had been passed in more quiet times; but as soon as he was grown up to manhood, the civil war between Caesar and Pompeius broke out, and a little later the assassination of Caesar was followed by the war of the Triumvirs, Augustus, Antony, and Lepidus against the party of Brutus and Cassius.