They are a fleet of twenty ships of fighting men, who have lost a war and been exiled from their homeland. After being caught up in furious storms on the sea, only seven of the ships, including that of the fleet commander, have made it to a foreign, unknown shore.
Then the author of the story goes into detail about the simple details of survival.
The commander’s boon companion gets a fire going. He strikes a spark from the flint. The leaves take up the fire. He spreads dry fuel around the leaves. A blaze is kindled in the tinder. The description is as straightforward as a primitive camping video on making fire.
What happens next? The men fetch out water damaged grain from the fleet and set about making it edible. They bring out the tools they need to recover it – the utensils of the goddess of the grain – and prepare to parch it by the blaze, so that they can then crush it with a stone. Just as animated or re-enactment videos show Roman soldiers doing when on the march, they will grind their own flour.
Only after these details are taken care of, does Virgil get back to describing what Aeneas is doing. Because the epic is the Aeneid. The twenty ships are the Trojans who lost to the Greeks; the commander of their fleet is Aeneas. The boon companion is Achates. The goddess of the grain is Ceres. And they are shipwrecked near the town of Carthage in the north of Africa.
I’m reading through the Aeneid using a 1917 translation of books I-VI by Frederick Holland Dewey, A. B., available in the Internet Archive. It contains the original text and a literal interlinear translation. Besides improving my scattered knowledge of Latin, I’m actually reading the story for the first time. I’ve gathered some knowledge of the story from the culture, but so far, it appears that I haven’t gathered much. Most of the movies and other entertainment media seem to focus more on the Illiad and the Odyssey. I’m not recognizing much of the story so far.
I think I’ll post my thoughts here, as I read through the epic. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I’ve discovered that Roman soldiers used the Aeneid to teach themselves to read and write Latin. So I’m reading it, too.
Love the Aeneid! I really want a French copie, as I find the English one awesome but I also like to read most of these old stories in my native tongue.
The way you described the events is really poetic in its own right, have you considered writing your own epic poem?