About This Edition

Reading Virgil is a companion site to the poems of Virgil, the Roman poet of the first century BCE. It is built around the English translation by John Dryden, published in 1697, and is issued by RavensEdge Publishing.

The text printed on the site is the public-domain transcription of Dryden’s translation in Project Gutenberg, ebook #228, checked against scanned earlier printings of the translation.

Source text

The base text is Project Gutenberg #228. Its readings are compared with scanned earlier printings of Dryden’s translation, and a correction is made only where a printed page shows a different word, number, tense or contraction.

Where a printing is unclear or differs in a way that cannot be settled, the base text is kept. Each correction is recorded with its evidence and listed in the errata.

Spelling and elisions

The base text is in modern spelling, and that spelling is kept. Old spellings of the same word, the long s and the interchange of u/v and i/j are not treated as corrections.

Elisions such as “forc’d,” “thro’” and “heav’n” are kept as Dryden printed them.

Line numbering

Line numbers follow Dryden’s translation, as it is printed on the site. They are numbers of the English lines, and they do not match the line numbers of the Latin original.

Names

Proper names appear in the forms Dryden used in his translation, and the pages of the site follow those forms so that they match the printed text. Where a modern form differs, the difference is explained at the first mention of the name.

Dryden’s material and the site’s material

Dryden’s own matter, including his dedications, prefaces and arguments, is printed as his. The reference pages of the site are separate and survey the ancient sources and later scholarship themselves.