Literature and history

come. Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 56, I Shall Release Hell.

This is the third of four programs on Virgil's Aniad, a Roman epic put into circulation

just after the author's death in 19 b.C. E. If you're just jumping in and want to hear the story from the beginning, it starts in

episode 54 and continues in episode 55.

In those previous two shows, we heard the beginning of Aeneas's story.

A minor figure in the Trojan War,

Aeneas managed to escape the city with his father and son as the Greeks burned it to the ground. He wandered far and wide for seven years,

landing finally in the North African kingdom of Carthage. There, Anius became involved with a powerful queen called Dido, although the gods demanded that he leave her and continue onward to Italy.

After a stay over in Sicily to hold a funeral games for his father, Anius and an inner core of Trojan refugees

pressed northward to the city of Kumei.

In Kumei, Anias convened with a female prophet called the Kumeian Sibyl, and he journeyed with her

into the underworld in order to meet with the ghost of his father.

Where we last left off, Anius and the Trojans are about to take the final hundred or so mild journey north up the Italian mainland,

from Kumei to a place called Laddiam, where Anias has been been faded to establish his new kingdom.

So let's jump back into the Aniad.

I'll be quoting from several different editions in this program,

but unless otherwise noted, I'm quoting from the Frederick All translation

published by Oxford University Press in 2007. The Aniad, Book 7. When Anias came up from the underworld, the Trojans made their way back to their ships and continued their voyage north.

It was a calm night with only the gentlest breezes.

The moon glimmered on the water and the ocean looked silver. The Trojans went by the

land of the witch Serse, and although ominous noises were faintly audible over the sound of the

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