Slow in speech, shy in manner, thoughtful in mind, weak in health, he went back north for a quiet life. Influenced by the group of poets there, he may have written some of the doubtful poems included in our Virgilian manuscripts. All his undoubted extant work is written in his perfect hexameters. Earliest comes the collection of ten pleasingly artificial bucolic poems, the Eclogues, which imitated freely Theocritus's idylls. They deal with pastoral life and love. Before 29 BCE came one of the best of all didactic works, the four books of Georgics on tillage, trees, cattle, and bees. Virgil's remaining years were spent in composing his great, not wholly finished, epic the Aeneid, on the traditional theme of Rome's origins through Aeneas of Troy. Inspired by the Emperor

    In his absence, the half-remembered story of the Trojan War took on a distinctly Arthurian flavour, with the heroes Achilles and Hector reimagined as armoured knights on horseback, duelling with broadsword and lance. In 1412 the Prince of Wales commissioned John Lydgate, monk of Bury St. Edmunds Abbey and literary heir of Chaucer, to write him an English epic to rival those in the French and Latin. The result was Troy Book: 30,000 lines of decasyllabic rhyming couplets, completed in 1420 and dedicated to its patron—now King Henry V. Lydgate’s primary source was the Latin prose Historia Destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonne, with supplementary material provided by Ovid, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as a variety of obscure Late Latin texts, such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, and the Mythologiae of Fulgentius. With this edition Troy Book receives its first translation into Modern English, allowing a new generation of readers to view the Trojan War through the eyes of a fifteenth-century Briton. D. M. Smith includes a detailed introduction tracing the development of the Troy myth from the Cyclic Poets to Lydgate and beyond, along with extensive notes on Lydgate’s sources, and the narrative’s relationship with the established Graeco-Roman mythology. Long dismissed as a medieval curiosity, Troy Book is at last restored to its proper context in the literary evolution of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle.