The Aeneid
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: what the poem is doing in each book, where Williams's plain verse helps and where it hides something, which Homer the book is answering, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Williams's Aeneid is in the public domain. The whole poem is on this page, book by book, with every harder word glossed where it stands; the same text sits in the Society's library, the Armarium, under aeneid-williams.
Listen free
George Allen's solo reading of John Dryden's Aeneid (1697) for LibriVox: twenty-four tracks, two a book, about thirteen hours. It is a different translation from this page, Dryden's rhymed couplets against Williams's blank verse, so the words will not match; but it is the best free complete reading of the poem by one voice, and Dryden's is the English Aeneid that Pope and Johnson knew. It plays here, keeps your place in every book, and works from the lock screen on a phone.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. George Allen reads Dryden, not Williams: follow the book, not the line. Each track is a 64 kbps MP3 of 12 to 19 MB: on a phone plan, start it on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
Fagles's Aeneid read by Simon Callow on Audible (unabridged)For the car the Society's nomination is Robert Fagles's verse read by Simon Callow (about thirteen hours, unabridged): not this page's translation, but the best performance of the poem on Audible, and Fagles's book is the one most members will own. Williams's text is free on Kindle from several hands; whether a Kindle copy pairs with a narration is Amazon's to say: on the Kindle book's page, look for Add Audible narration.
The Aeneid is Rome's answer to Homer, written seven centuries after him and in his shadow on purpose: six books of wandering like the Odyssey, six of war like the Iliad, and a hero who is neither Odysseus nor Achilles but a man carrying his father, his son and his gods out of a burning city toward a country he has never seen. Virgil wrote it for Augustus and died before he finished revising it, asking that it be burned. It is the poem Dante chose his guide out of, the poem the Middle Ages read as prophecy, and the poem every schoolboy in the West construed for fifteen hundred years. Its hero is called pius, dutiful, and the poem's whole argument is what duty costs: Dido, Pallas, Turnus, and most of what Aeneas wanted for himself.
This is the whole poem in Theodore C. Williams's blank verse of 1910, the translation the Perseus Digital Library carries and the one the Society's library holds. Williams was a Harvard man and a minister, and his line is plain, quick and faithful to Virgil's order of thought; it is not Dryden's couplets and it is not Fagles, but a first reader can keep going in it, and it keeps the poem's verse, which the Society's Homer, in Butler's prose, does not. The text has the thou-forms and the poet's contractions, explained once on the page, and a handful of scanning errors from Perseus's copy (a capital I for a lowercase l, a zero for an O) which are left as they stand, since the text is the library's and not ours.
Before each book is a short note on what happens; after it, the turn of the book in plain words, who is in it, the lines worth keeping, the harder words glossed, the Great Ideas it touches, the Scripture it leans on or stands against, books in the Armarium to read beside it (Homer above all), questions for the meeting, and (in the leader's edition) notes for whoever opens the discussion. At the foot of the page are the indexes for the whole poem, the Potent Quotables and the memory deck.
A note on the text
The text is Theodore C. Williams's blank-verse translation (Houghton Mifflin, 1910), from the Perseus Digital Library's TEI as canon-corpus builds it for the Armarium. The Armarium's units are Perseus's cards, each named for the first Latin line it covers (aeneid-williams:1.1), and this page keeps them, verse breaks shown as a slash in the quotables. Perseus's copy carries a few scanning errors (Iord for lord, 0 for O, kindgom); they are left as they stand and are not glossed. Nothing is cut. A link from the Society's page lands on the same card in the library.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.