This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel, spending time with the translators and

classicists, Scott McGill and Susanna Wright at Rice University. Their new work is the

Aeneid by Virgil. From the first century BCE, there's an introduction by Professor Emily

Wilson. We turn to the plot.

We've been talking about the times, the politics, Rome, for a poet from the north. And now we

talk about what it is that Virgil achieved. And Scott, I begin with you, because this is Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey,

and Civil War Rome, and pleasing the emperor, Augustus, who used to be called Octavian,

and all of that together in one poem that's unfinished. What can we say about the plot of Aeneas?

Yes. Well, as you said, John, it's a rip-roaring story, to be sure.

Virgil doesn't tell it in totally chronological order, but I'll summarize it in chronological order very, very quickly.

The Trojan War, we're at the very end of the Trojan war. The Greeks are able to

breach Troy via the Trojan horse, which we find in book two of the Aeneid. They raise the city.

They utterly destroy it. They burn it. But there's a band of survivors, a band of refugees, led by

Aeneas, and they are able to find a ship, and they begin to make their way

westward. The idea is that they have a destined new homeland, and that destined new homeland is

Italy. They say that their ancestor Dardanists came from Italy, and they are making their way back home there.

The journey is very fraught. It's very, very difficult. There are a lot of

stops along the way. The goddess Juno is, is, is, uh, opposes the mission. It makes it very,

very difficult for them to arrive in Italy. At one point, they were blown off course by a, by a

divinely sent sea storm to Carthage where Aeneas encounters Dido, an incredibly famous, famous book in book four,

telling their love story. They ultimately make their way to Italy halfway through the poem

where they encounter a native population, some of which wants to welcome them to Italy.

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