Learn Latin from the Romans A Complete Introductory Course Using Textbooks from the Roman Empire

Latin poetry is different from the type of writing we have so far seen. It uses a wider range of vocabulary and grammatical forms (including some borrowed from Greek) and an even freer word order than prose. Adjectives are often some distance from the nouns with which they agree, and the words of one clause may be interspersed with those of another clause. The extracts below come from the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid (first century bc); they have not been altered in any way. See whether you can translate them using the vocabulary below and being imaginative with the word order; if you get stuck, try looking at the version below each vocabulary, where the words have been re-arranged into an order more like that of prose.