16 Facts About The Aeneid

1.

The Aeneid is widely regarded as Virgil's masterpiece and one of the greatest works of Latin literature.

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2.

The Aeneid's goes to her son, Aeneas' half-brother Cupid, and tells him to imitate Ascanius .

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3.

The Aeneid begins the tale shortly after the war described in the Iliad.

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4.

The Aeneid witnessed the murder of Priam by Achilles' son Pyrrhus.

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5.

The Aeneid's is still lamenting the loss of her valiant husband and beloved child.

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6.

The Aeneid meets the shade of Dido, who remains unreconcilable.

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7.

The Aeneid was written in a time of major political and social change in Rome, with the fall of the Republic and the Final War of the Roman Republic having torn through society and many Romans' faith in the "Greatness of Rome" severely faltering.

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8.

The Aeneid was seen as reflecting this aim, by depicting the heroic Aeneas as a man devoted and loyal to his country and its prominence, rather than his own personal gains.

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9.

Some legends state that Virgil, fearing that he would die before he had properly revised the poem, gave instructions to friends that the Aeneid should be burned upon his death, owing to its unfinished state and because he had come to dislike one of the sequences in Book VIII, in which Venus and Vulcan made love, for its nonconformity to Roman moral virtues.

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10.

The Aeneid comes to an abrupt ending, and scholars have speculated that Virgil died before he could finish the poem.

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11.

The Aeneid was to be ruler of Italy, Potential empire, armorer of war;To father men from Teucer's noble bloodAnd bring the whole world under law's dominion.

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12.

The Aeneid is a cornerstone of the Western canon, and early became one of the essential elements of a Latin education, usually required to be memorized.

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13.

In Latin-Christian culture, the Aeneid was one of the canonical texts, subjected to commentary as a philological and educational study, with the most complete commentary having been written by the 4th-century grammarian Maurus Servius Honoratus.

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14.

One of the first operas based on the story of the Aeneid was the English composer Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas .

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15.

Story of the Aeneid was made into the grand opera Les Troyens by the French composer Hector Berlioz.

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16.

Ursula Le Guin's 2008 novel Lavinia is a free prose retelling of the last six books of the Aeneid narrated by and centered on Aeneas' Latin wife Lavinia, a minor character in the epic poem.

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