The divinely sanctioned plight of Rome's founding hero Aeneas, a Trojan's view of the fall of Troy, the divinely finagled love affair of Aeneas and Phoenician queen Dido, Dido's angry suicide when Aeneas leaves her, their re-meeting in the Underworld, the death of Aeneas' young charge Pallas at Latin Turnus' hands, the revenge killing of Turnus by Aeneas -- all these stories are found within these selections. This edition is designed for highschool Advanced Placement and college level courses: a newly updated and revised version of selected passages from Vergil's Aeneid, Books I-VI, by Clyde Pharr (whose user-friendly format revolutionized Latin textbooks), plus additional passages from books 10 and 12, not found in Pharr. Passages included are: 1.1-519; 2.1-56; 199-297, 469-566, 735-804; 4.1-448, 642-705; 6.1-211, 450-476, 847-901; 10.420-509; 12.791-842, 887-952.
Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid, an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aeneas.
I loved translating Cicero's 1st Catilinarian Oration, so I hoped I'd like the Aeneid, too. I didn't like it so much as love it. Vergil packs these lines with all sorts of figures of speech, and most lines are fairly metrically interesting as well. I also love all the possible interpretation of the text. Boyd (well, mostly Clyde Pharr, whom she borrows heavily from) makes the text very clear. For instance, she often changes a weird i-stem accusative ending to an e-stem ending, making it much more apparent that the word is accusative, whereas other versions of the Aeneid leave it as an i-stem. And she goes in-depth on notes, even though it's still necessary to read scholarly articles for other interpretations on certain key lines (for instance, Vergil's use of "parvulus Aeneas" in Book 4--she does point out that it's the only use of a diminutive in the Aeneid, but I think she should have brought in the potential parallel with Caesarion since keeping in mind Vergil's political motivations is so essential to interpreting the text). Overall, this is a great book, and having the appendices and vocab in the back is a great bonus. Even though I'm not in AP anymore, I'm still getting a lot of use out of this as I continue to study the Aeneid, and the grammatical notes are even helpful for translating other Latin writers, like Ovid.
This update to Pharr's classic edition of the Aeneid is a truly worthy successor. I use it to teach AP Latin (Vergil) and truly could not ask a better text.
The set up of this book is nice, with detailed notes and a very handy fold out vocabulary in the back. I just wish Boyd had done all twelve books this way. The selections do hit the major plot points, but some of my favorite details were left out.