The Aeneid is a special case in the reception of classical literature. It is the classical poem that has had the greatest and most continuous influence over post-classical literature in the West. Almost every European country has tried, at some time or another, to claim the story of the Aeneid for itself. We are all descended from the Trojans. There are many reasons for the dominance of Virgil's poem over the tradition, most of which I can only hint at in this paper. I am going to focus on just one reason why the Aeneid played such an important role in the tradition, namely that the poem is itself concerned with the reception of the classical past. The earliest translators of the Aeneid into vernacular European languages were highly conscious of the fact that this is a poem about translation, and about reception. I will concentrate on Gavin Douglas, who wrote one of the first complete translations of the Aeneid into a vernacular language.

Douglas’ Eneados was the first complete British version of any work of Greek or Latin literature. Douglas, who was not English, but Scottish, was the Roman Catholic provost of St. Giles’ church, Edinburgh. He finished the poem in 1513, but the translation was not published until after his death – it appeared in 1553.