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AENEID VI

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES AND

VOCABULARY

BY

C. E. FREEMAN

SOMETIME ASSISTANT MASTER AT WESTMINSTER

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

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PREFACE

THIS edition of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, like that of the Fourth which has already appeared in the Series, is intended mainly for those who have little knowledge of Virgil. My chief aim has been to explain anything in the text that can fairly give difficulty and to make clear what may be called the geography of the story. The Oxford text has been followed throughout except in line 811, where I have ventured to alter the position of a comma.

The

My greatest obligation is to the commentary of Prof. Conington. In a few of the notes I am indebted to Prof. Lindsay's The Latin Language, but I have not thought it necessary in an edition of this kind to make separate acknowledgements. part of the Introduction that relates to the Golden Bough is gathered from Sir James Frazer's volumes bearing that name. I must again thank Mr. M. T. Tatham for reading and criticizing the Notes and Introductions.

OXFORD, 1918.

C. E. FREEMAN.

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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.

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