Historical Background of Aeneid?

Question

Somebody help me solve these problem please....I'm searching for the Historical Background of Aeneid but I can't find it anywhere in the "net" These is our first project in English so In am really worried ...kindly give me the perfect or complete summary...thanks....

Answer 1

Got this from wikipedia...

The history of Aeneid

The poetry of the Aeneid is polished and complex; legend has it that Virgil wrote only three lines of the poem each day. Although the work is substantially complete, with the same length and scope as Homer's epics, which it imitates, it does appear to lack some finishing touches: a number of lines are only half-complete, and the ending is generally felt to be too abrupt to have been intentional. It is common, however, for epic poems to contain incomplete, disputed, or badly adulterated text, and because this poem was composed and preserved in writing rather than orally, the Aeneid is more complete than most classical epics. Furthermore, it is possible to debate whether Virgil intended to rewrite and add to such lines. Some of them would be difficult to complete, and in some instances, the brevity of a line increases its dramatic impact. However, these arguments may be anachronistic - half-finished lines might equally, to Roman readers, have been a clear indication of an unfinished poem and have added nothing whatsoever to the dramatic effect.

However, another legend states that Virgil, fearing that he would die before he had properly revised the poem, gave instructions to friends (including the current emperor, Augustus) that the Aeneid should be burned upon his death, owing to its unfinished state and because he had come to dislike one of the sequences in Book VIII, in which Venus and Vulcan have sexual intercourse. He supposedly intended to alter this sequence to conform better to Roman moral virtues. The friends did not comply with Virgil's wishes, and Augustus himself ordered that they be disregarded. After minor modifications, the Aeneid was published.

In the 15th century, there were two attempts to produce an addition to the Aeneid. One was made by Pier Candido Decembrio (which was never completed) and one was made by Maffeo Vegio, which was often included in 15th and 16th century printings of the Aeneid as the Supplementum, or a so-called "thirteenth book". The most recent addition, though not strictly a sequel, is Claudio Salvucci's epic poem The Laviniad (1994).

The first full and faithful rendering of the poem in an Anglic language is the Scots translation by Gavin Douglas—his Eneados, completed in 1513, which also included Maffeo Vegio's supplement. Even in the Twentieth century, Ezra Pound considered this still to be the best Aeneid translation, praising the "richness and fervour" of its language and its hallmark fidelity to the original[5][6]. The English translation by the 17th-century poet John Dryden is another important version that can be said to retain the power and flow of the original, although Dryden took numerous, significant liberties with the text. Most classic translations, including both Douglas and Dryden, employed a rhyme scheme, a very non-Roman convention that is not usually followed in modern versions.

Recent English verse translations include those by C Day Lewis (1963) which strove to render Virgil's original hexameter line, Allen Mandelbaum (honoured by a 1973 National Book Award), Library of Congress Poet Laureate Robert Fitzgerald (1981), Stanley Lombardo (2005), and Robert Fagles (2006).

Good Luck! Hope that helped

Answer 2

So you want something more specific than: "The hero Aeneas was already known to Greco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad; Virgil took the disconnected tales of Aeneas' wanderings, his vague association with the foundation of Rome and a personage of no fixed characteristics other than a scrupulous piety, and fashioned this into a compelling founding myth or nationalist epic that at once tied Rome to the legends of Troy, glorified traditional Roman virtues and legitimized the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes and gods of Rome and Troy."?