THE ÆNEID.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE.
The Æneid, like the Iliad and Odyssey, is a Tale of Troy. The fascination of that remarkable cycle of legend had not weakened after the lapse of ten centuries. Virgil not only set himself deliberately to imitate Homer in his method of poetical treatment, but he goes to him for his subject. He even makes his own poem, in some sort, a sequel to the Iliad—at least as much so as the Odyssey is. As the subject of this latter poem is the wanderings and final establishment in his native country of the Greek hero Ulysses after victory, so Virgil gives us the story of the escape of a Trojan hero from the ruin of his city, and the perils by land and sea which he encountered, until his final settlement in the distant west, in the land which the gods had promised him. Æneas, like Ulysses, is described as a man of many woes and sufferings; and like him, though he has the justice and the deliberate counsels of heaven all on his side, the enmity of one angry deity is permitted
