Aeneas and the Once and Future Troy

A new play which brings together scenes from two of the great epic poems of the classical world to tell the story of Aeneas will be staged at St John’s College next month.

Aeneas and the Once Future Troy is arranged and abridged by Professor Patrick Boyde, the University’s Emeritus Professor of Italian, who has been organising semi-staged productions of plays in Ancient Greek for the last 10 years. The new production will be in both Greek and Latin (with English subtitles), drawing on speeches from the Iliad of Homer and Virgil’s Aeneid, and enabling audiences to experience the intensity of the poetry in the original languages.

Aeneas himself appears in both epics, which were composed hundreds of years apart. In Homer he is the defender of Troy, whereas in the Aeneid he becomes the founding father of a “new” Troy in the form of Rome. Professor Boyde himself learned to read Homer in the Ancient Greek after retiring and was motivated to stage productions by his passionate belief that poetry must be read aloud in the language in which it was written in order to be fully appreciated and understood.

The two performances will take place on Wednesday 19 and Thursday 20 February at 7.30 pm at the College’s theatre in the Divinity School. Admission is free but booking is recommended; bookings can be made here. A trailer is also available to watch on YouTube.