PREFACE. THE original edition of this work was based upon the best commentators, especially Conington and Nettleship, Wagner, Ribbeck, Kennedy, and Kappes, and the text was the result of a careful comparison of those editors. In re-editing it, I have still farther compared it with Heyne and Ladewig, and other standard authorities, with especial regard to the testimony of the best manuscripts, and Brambach's decisions as to the best orthography. The notes have been rewritten and enlarged with the view of meeting the actual wants of pupils in American schools; numerous references have been made to the Latin Grammars of Allen and Greenough (A.), and Harkness (H.), and explanations of such points in history and geography, mythology and antiquities, as seem to require it, have been freely inserted. A metrical index pointing out the chief difficulties in the scanning has also been added. Several changes have also been made in the vocabulary, especially in the marking of the quantities of vowels, and several misprints in the English edition have been corrected. HENRY CLARK JOHNSON. CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL, PHILADELPHIA, PA., INTRODUCTION. Publius Vergilius Maro was born, the son of a farmer, near Mantua, B.c. 70; and was educated first at Cremona and Milan, then at Naples under the Greek grammarian Parthenius. Although he was one of the few great Roman writers who did not go to Greece for education, his knowledge and appreciation of Greek literature were wide and deep. In B.C. 42 the confiscation of his farm, in order to give it to the veterans (whose services in the field were thus rewarded at the expense of their civilian neighbours), brought him to Rome. There he became acquainted with Maecenas, the patron also of Horace (to whom Vergil dedicated his Georgics, Horace his Odes), and with Augustus. His earliest poems were Eclogues, pastoral poems in imitation of the Sicilian Greek Theocritus; his most finished work was entitled the Georgics, a poetical treatise on farming, or, as it has been happily put, "the glorification of labour." He died B.C. 21. The following epitaph is said to have been composed by him: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc The Aeneid was meant to be, and it was, a national epic; it was to reveal, concentrated in one focus, the glorious past, on which Augustus wished the Romans, "the servile offspring of the free," to dwell. Vergil was a patriot to the core, and the loving enthusiasm with which he writes goes far to compensate that want of freshness, which has often been brought up against him, but which was really unavoidable in his generation. The chief characteristics of the Aeneid are grace, subtlety, and elaborate quaintness, which are combined with a command of language truly masterful, and kept from awkwardness and affectation only by the poet's exquisite taste, judgment, and skill. He borrowed freely (what Latin poet did not?), but the manner in which he borrowed made the theft his own; and every translation contains some touches which Vergil, and Vergil alone, could put ་ |