The second book of the Aeneid - here translated into Castilian hexameters, in obedience to the rhythm of the original - was recited by Virgil, along with the fourth and sixth, as a first of his epic, before Prince Octavius ​​and some members of his family, at the beginning of the year 22 BC. It is the most autonomous of the entire work, a narrative unit in itself. Aeneas, as a character-frame, retrospectively tells Dido and his Carthaginian courtiers, at the twilight aftermath of a banquet, the fall of Troy, his homeland, conquered by the Greeks by the stratagem of the wooden horse, and the origin of his own leadership over surviving Trojans:
"Everyone was silent and attentive fixed their gaze on him;
From a high place like this then Father Aeneas spoke:
'Queen, you command me to rekindle unspeakable pain again,
how the Danaans ruined the Trojan forces and a kingdom
worthy of pity. '
The author of this translation, Vicente Cristóbal, is professor of Latin at the Complutense University. He has already published translations, in prose and in verse, of the most famous Latin poets (Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid) and other ancient texts; and he is convinced of the possibility of effectively transferring into the language of today the ancient poetic rhythms of Greeks and Romans.