This translation is a quick and unscrupulous job. I am not being modest: a modest man would never have started, and a scrupulous one never finished. I have, nevertheless, been not entirely without principles. I have been trying to translate the poem, rather than transliterate its words. In doing so, I have transposed lines, cut some proper names and allusions where I thought they would excessively slow down reader interest, substituted the general for the specific or the specific for the general, and in short taken all kinds of liberties, such as no pure scholar could possibly approve. But I doubt if there is any such thing as an absolutely pure scholar, anyhow. A loose iambic pentameter has seemed to me the most convenient medium, though in some passages, where the tempo runs faster, you might not recognize it; and I have, by no means faithfully following Virgil, occasionally used his device of the half-line. I have preferred solecisms to archaisms: thus I have never used the second person singular pronoun. I know I have committed anachronisms, but, then, I know Virgil did too, and I have, in my opinion heroically, resisted one or two obvious temptations in this regard. What I have tried to be faithful to is the meaning of the poem as I understand it, to make it sound to you, wherever I can, the way it feels to me. Working on it, I have been impressed, more than ever through the thirty-odd years I have read it, by its richness and variety: to mention only one point, the famous Virgilian melancholy, the tone of _Sunt lacrimae rerum_, is, I begin to notice, a recurring, not a sustained, theme. There is much more rugged and rough, harsh and bitter, music in Virgil than you might suspect if you have only read _about_ him. A recent essay by Mark Van Doren has given me considerable heart in offering this new translation: there is a kind of scholastic snobbishness, he points out, in the insistence that no man knows anything who has not read the classics in the original. It is better, no doubt, to read Virgil in his own Latin, but still--I hope some people may have some pleasure of him, some idea of how good he was, through this English arrangement. ROLFE HUMPHRIES New York City, January, 1951 CONTENTS BOOK I The Landing near Carthage 3 BOOK II The Fall of Troy 31 BOOK III The Wanderings of Aeneas 61 BOOK IV Aeneas and Dido 87 BOOK V The Funeral Games for Anchises 113 BOOK VI The Lower World 143 BOOK VII Italy: the Outbreak of War 177 BOOK VIII Aeneas at the Site of Rome 207 BOOK IX