The Aeneid of Virgil.

VIRGIL,.

Item Number: 104563

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1906.

Finely bound example one of 650 numbered copies of Virgil’s masterpiece and widely considered the finest piece of Latin literature. Quarto, 2 volumes, bound in contemporary full black morocco, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, raised bands, gilt tooling to the front panels, inner dentelles, top edge gilt, with 17 full-page plates including the frontispieces which are supplied in a colored and uncolored state. Translated by Christopher Pearse Cranch. In near fine condition. An exceptional presentation.

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed. The hero Aeneas was already known to Greco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad. Virgil took the disconnected tales of Aeneas's wanderings, his vague association with the foundation of Rome and his description as a personage of no fixed characteristics other than a scrupulous pietas, and fashioned the Aeneid into a compelling founding myth or national epic that tied Rome to the legends of Troy, explained the Punic Wars, glorified traditional Roman virtues, and legitimized the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes, and gods of Rome and Troy.