Aeneid in Latin

I know that you, the readership, know little about me, but among some things you should know is that I have studied Latin for a few years now. And while I am outside of the classroom setting, when I was still learning the language, I had read almost the entirety of the Aeneid.

When it come to plot please see my upcoming review on the popular translation by Robert Fagles, but for this review I will be focusing on Vergil's very deliberate style of writing when creating his most known work.

As an epic poem, it is written in Dactylic Hexameter, or something that you probably have no clue what it is. Essentially, there are six measures of meter for each line of poetry, based on the syllable count and the usage of ellisions or the combining of syllables (which in Latin happen between a, e, i, m, o and u to a, e, h, i [when followed by a syllable break or consonant], o, and u) the lines must be of the same metrical length, of 8-12 syllables for the first four divisions made up of dactyls a long syllable followed by two shorts or spondees madeupof two long syllables, with the fifth division being a dactyl and the sixth and final division being a trochee or an open ended section which leads to the next line. Vergil does a good job at doing this, considering Dactylic Hexameter is Greek and is not extremely easy to do in Latin, but there are 58 total lines where Vergil breaks from this, which considering the length of the poem is not many. (Some historians theorize that this is because Vergil never finished this epic).

This, however, is not the only thing whichis very deliberately in the Aeneid and it all comes down to the nature of poetry in the language of Latin itself. In normal everyday conversations and readings, Latin has a very strict word order of subject noun, followed by adjective, followed by object noun and its adjective; and then the verb, unless it is an imperative or the words to be (sum, esse, fui, futurus), to be able (possum, posse, potui, -) and their associated forms. On the other hand, poetry in Latin, has no order, and while it has given many a translator a headache, it allows a highly flexible blank canvas to allow the poet to do whatever he wants to do. As a result, word orders can be arranged to present pictures with words that are lost in English translations. Commonly the usage of chiasmus, an A-B-B-A word pattern, and synchysis, an A-B-A-B word pattern, are commonly seen in selections involving the sea which many scholars have come to associate with waves. Additionally in the passage on Laocoon, when the snakes come to devour his children a chiasmus is also used where the words modifying snakes are around the words modifying children.

In short, if you can read and comprehend Latin, then look through the Aeneid. If not, then the most true translation to the original text in English is the one by A.S Kline. You can find it here, though the grammatical constructs above are not identifiable due to the rigidity of English sentence structure.