# Aeneid

- id: aeneid
- original title: Aeneis
- author: Virgil
- language: Latin
- composed: 29 BCE–19 BCE, Rome
- field: poetry

Rome's founding epic, never lost and never done: every age of English has felt obliged to make its own.

## The chain

- **1697** Latin -> English, translation [attested]
  John Dryden (translator), London
  The subscription Virgil that set the commercial template Pope would reuse for Homer. Douglas's complete Scots Eneados of 1513 deserves its asterisk as the first in any Anglic tongue.
  Evidence: John Dryden 1697
- **1910** Latin -> English, translation [attested]
  Theodore C. Williams (translator), Boston
  The Boston verse translation; the text carried in this library.
  Evidence: Theodore C. Williams 1910; Thothica 2026

## Worth knowing

The Aeneid is the atlas's control case: a book that survived continuously and still kept crossing. Gavin Douglas finished a complete Scots Eneados in 1513, the first in any Anglic tongue; Dryden's 1697 subscription Virgil ruled for a century; the Boston verse of Theodore Williams is the English this library carries.

## Sources

- John Dryden (1697). The Works of Virgil. London.
- Theodore C. Williams (1910). The Aeneid of Virgil. Boston.

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).