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Aeneid II

The two prescribed passages from Virgil’s account of the fall of Troy — the wooden horse and Laocoön’s warning, then the serpents and the horse brought inside the walls. Read line by line: the Latin with its vowel quantities marked, a translation you reveal as you go, and the stylistic notes attached to the words they describe.
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Lines 1–56 · The wooden horse and Laocoön’s warning5 sections
Section 1 — Lines 1–13 — Aeneas begins his storySilence falls over Dido’s hall. Aeneas protests that the queen is asking him to reopen an unspeakable grief — and begins anyway.ReadSection 2 — Lines 14–24 — The horse is builtBeaten back by war and by fate, the Greek leaders build a horse the size of a mountain, hide picked men in its belly, and take the fleet out of sight behind Tenedos.ReadSection 3 — Lines 25–39 — The Trojans pour out; the horse debatedBelieving the Greeks gone, the Trojans throw open the gates and wander the abandoned camp. The horse divides them: Thymoetes urges it inside the walls, Capys and others want it destroyed.ReadSection 4 — Lines 40–49 — Laocoön’s warningLaocoön comes running down from the citadel to ask what madness this is — the Greeks are never more dangerous than when they are giving something away.ReadSection 5 — Lines 50–56 — The spear in the horse’s flankHe hurls his spear into the belly of the horse; it sticks quivering and the hollow caverns groan. Had the gods and the Trojans’ own minds been otherwise, Troy would be standing still.Read
Lines 195–253 · The serpents, and the horse brought in5 sections
Section 6 — Lines 195–207 — The lie believed; the serpents comeSinon’s trick works where ten years and a thousand ships had failed. Laocoön, chosen by lot as priest of Neptune, is sacrificing a bull when two serpents come over the calm sea from Tenedos.ReadSection 7 — Lines 208–219 — Laocoön and his sons seizedThey make for Laocoön, take his two small sons first, then the father himself as he comes to help — twice round his waist, twice round his neck, their heads towering above him.ReadSection 8 — Lines 220–233 — The death of LaocoönHe strains at the coils, bellowing like a wounded bull that has shaken off the axe. The serpents escape to the citadel of the goddess, and the Trojans decide the priest had it coming.ReadSection 9 — Lines 234–245 — The horse brought inThe walls are breached and the city laid open. Boys and unmarried girls sing round the horse as it is hauled in, four times sticking on the threshold — and four times the armour clashing inside.ReadSection 10 — Lines 246–253 — Cassandra; night fallsCassandra opens her mouth to the future and is not believed. The Trojans garland the shrines on what is to be their last day; night comes up out of the ocean, and the city sleeps.Read
Virgil and the Aeneid

Publius Vergilius Maro (70 to 19 BC) wrote the Aeneid in the last ten years of his life, under the emperor Augustus. It is an epic poem in twelve books about Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escapes the fall of Troy and, guided by fate and the gods, sails west to Italy, where his descendants will found Rome. Augustus claimed descent from Aeneas’ son, so the poem also celebrates Rome and its new ruler.

In Book 1 a storm drives Aeneas and his ships onto the coast of Africa, near the new city of Carthage. Its queen, Dido, welcomes them and holds a banquet in their honour. At the end of the banquet she asks Aeneas to tell his story from the beginning. Books 2 and 3 are his answer, told in his own voice.

Book 2: the fall of Troy

The Greeks have besieged Troy for ten years. In Book 2 Aeneas tells how the city finally fell, not in battle but by a trick: the wooden horse.

The first passage (lines 1–56). The Greeks build the horse, hide their best warriors inside it and pretend to sail home. The Trojans pour out to look at it and argue about what to do. The priest Laocoön warns them not to trust it and hurls a spear into its side.

Between the passages (lines 57–194). Shepherds drag in a young Greek, Sinon, who tells a clever, tearful story: he says the Greeks wanted to sacrifice him, and that the horse is an offering to Minerva which will bring Troy good fortune if it is taken into the city. The Trojans believe him.

The second passage (lines 195–253). Two huge serpents come across the sea from Tenedos and kill Laocoön and his sons. The Trojans take this as punishment for his attack on the horse, break open their walls and drag it in. Cassandra warns them, but no one believes her, and the city celebrates as night falls.

Reading Virgil’s verse

The Aeneid is written in dactylic hexameter: six beats to a line, each a dactyl (long, short, short) or a spondee (long, long). The Latin here is printed with the long and short vowels marked, and the curved mark under a word’s last letter shows an elision, where that vowel runs into the next word and is not pronounced. Fast dactyls suit speed and excitement; slow spondees suit weight, effort or sadness.

  • Word position: important words placed first or last in the line, or carried over to the start of the next line (enjambment).
  • Word order: words that belong together pulled apart, or wrapped around others, for effect.
  • Sound: alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia, especially in the serpent passage.
  • Imagery: the horse as a mountain and a pregnant belly, the bull simile, fire and night.
  • Speech: Laocoön’s urgent questions and exclamations.
Questions on the set text
  1. Aeneas is telling this story to Dido. How does that affect the way he tells it?
  2. How does Virgil make the Trojans’ mistake seem understandable, even though the reader knows it is fatal?
  3. Is Laocoön a hero, a victim, or both?
  4. What part do the gods play in the fall of Troy, according to these passages?
  5. Choose the moment you find most vivid in the two passages and explain how Virgil achieves the effect.