Character List

Achaemenides (a-kuh-mihn-ih-deez) A Greek crewman of Ulysses, he is accidentally abandoned on Sicily, home of the Cyclopes, when his companions flee from the angry one-eyed giants. The Trojans rescue him in Book III. Achates (uh-kay-teez) Known as “the faithful Achates,” he is Aeneas’s armor-bearer and a devoted follower of the […]

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About The Aeneid

Long before Virgil’s time, Romans liked to believe that among their ancestors were the legendary Trojans, who, under Aeneas’s leadership, sailed from Troy, in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), westward across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and settled in Latium, site of the future Rome. This legend of Aeneas’s voyage, which […]

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About Brave New World

Historical Background The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication — the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production — also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. With the […]

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Book Summary

The first scene, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned according to the society’s strict caste system, establishes the antiseptic tone and the theme of dehumanized life. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in this world. Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus […]

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Poem Summary

Aeneas tells how Troy fell to the Greeks on the night they invaded it by means of a wooden horse. Among other incidents, he describes the murder of Troy’s King Priam by the Greek warrior Pyrrhus; the death of his own wife, Creusa; and his own escape with his father, […]

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