On 17 November 1619, members of the Virginia Company gathered in London at a private residence to hold one of the Company's ‘great’ or ‘quarter’ courts. From 1612 onwards, four times annually, a number of the men involved in the Company would gather on the second last Wednesday of each law term to elect councillors and principal officers, make laws and ordinances, confirm grants and answer trade questions – in other words, to conduct all the Company's important business. At the quarter court held on 17 November 1619, roughly sixty members of the Company were present. The meeting itself was not a particularly eventful one, but from the perspective of a study of English translations of Virgil, it provides a curious prospect. For among those sixty members sitting in that room, there were three translators of single books of the Aeneid. Between 1584 and 1632, there were only three new English translations of the Aeneid published in print. Remarkably, all three of these were written by prominent members of the Virginia Company who were present on that day in 1619: Sir Thomas Wroth, Sir Dudley Digges and George Sandys. This was probably not the first time these three were sitting together in the same room for Virginia Company business (unfortunately records specifying who attended the meetings prior to 1619 do not exist), and it was certainly not the last.

The use of Virgil's Aeneid as a model for colonial practice in the literary publications surrounding the Virginia Company has been demonstrated in several studies. Such uses of Virgil's epic are not surprising. A poem about a translatio imperii westward into unknown territory could easily be adapted for thinking about contemporary colonial practice. Susan Ford Wiltshire has shown in a brief essay how Aeneas is the model of William Strachey's ‘True Reportory’. Howard Mumford Jones has overviewed a range of examples of early modern colonisers using classical precedents. Jones pointed out in particular that John Smith's account of his activities in Virginia is ‘like a prose Aeneid’. Within Smith's 1612 publication, A Map of Virginia with a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion, there is a brief history, ‘The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia’, recounting Smith's adventures in the New World.