Product Description
Vergilii Aeneidos Liber Quintus (“Book Five of Vergil’s Aeneid”) is a Latin student edition of selections from Book Five of Vergil’s Aeneid. Vergil is the most famous of the Roman poets and arguably one of the best poets to have written in any language. His largest work, the Aeneid, is an epic poem written in dactylic hexameter that tells of the hero Aeneas, the son of Venus and the mortal Anchises, and his flight from Troy to Italy with a group of Trojan refugees. This story held particular importance for the Romans of Vergil’s day, as they believed that the descendants of Aeneas and his companions had eventually founded the city of Rome.
By the beginning of Book Five, Aeneas and his Trojan companions have already fled Troy and have been traveling for 8 years in quest of a new homeland. Anchises, Aeneas’ father, passed away from old age a year previously and had been buried near the city Eryx in Sicily. Through an unusual turn of events, the Trojans end up back in Sicily a year later and decide to honor Anchises with a series of funeral games together with inhabitants of Eryx who had shown the Trojans hospitality. The selections of this edition include 475 of the original 871 verses in Book Five and focus on funeral games and the events that immediately follow them.