Vergil's Aeneid is surprisingly hard to find. Whether you look in a book store or online, you will mostly find translations of the great Latin epic into English by various authors. The most common translation is the one by John Dryden (1631-1700). Dryden renders Vergil's verse, itself constrained by the traditions and forms of Latin poetry, into the rhymed English verse of his own day. He did a superb job of it, forced and repetitious as it may sound to contemporary ears:
But John Dryden is not P. Vergilius Maro, and the Aeneis is written in Latin, not English. No translation can ever do more than approach the beauty of the original. The most a translator can hope for is that his translation will inspire his readers to seek the original text in the original language.
Of course, even this is a compromise. Reading, in Augustan Rome, was not a task for sissies! A number of conveniences that modern readers take for granted simply hadn't been invented yet, such as spacing between words, upper and lower case, and punctuation, just to mention a few!
"Wait!" says the Latin student. "Where are my macrons? Without lines over the long vowels, how do you expect me to place the accents right, let alone observe the meter of Latin verse?"
Sorry, Latin student. Macrons were invented for your textbooks. The Romans didn't use them, because they knew which vowels were long, and which weren't.
Furthermore, who needs spacing between words? Either you belong to the majority of the population, who can't read at all, or you're one of the educated elite. In either case, Latin is your native language. You don't need someone to put spaces between the words; you recognize them automatically.
In fact it was customary, at the time of the first Caesars, to put a small dot between the words of an inscription on a public monument, centered vertically. This fashion passed away, however, and consistent spacing was reintroduced, along with other punctuation, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Even when punctuation began to be used, it was not what we're accustomed to today. It arose spontaneously in many places, and evolved in separate traditions in different places. Punctuation in the Middles Ages was as different from ours as medieval music notation is from today's, and differed from place to place as well, since it was under no pressure to be comprehended quickly by an international audience of performers, as music notation was.
And need I mention that parentheses, quotation marks, dashes, and everything except the actual letters of the alphabet, are punctuation? None of these existed.
The distinction between upper and lower case also hadn't been invented in Classical times. Most alphabets of most written languages, in fact, even today do not have upper and lower case; check out the Unicode charts if you doubt this! Miniscule (lower case) originates in various calligraphic scripts of the Middle Ages, and in the printed blocks for initial letters used by early printers. In Caesar's time (any Caesar!) there were only capital letters.
Furthermore, some of our letters didn't exist yet. The Latin letters I and V represented semi-vowels, more like vowels in some contexts, more like weak consonants in others. I is a vowel in a word like "Italia", but a consonant (a sound like "y" in the English "yes") in "Iuppiter" or "Iuno". V is a vowel in, for example, "Vrsvla", but a consonant (a sound like "w" in English "we") in "Lavinia" or "Victoria". Spelling the vowels with I and U, and the consonants with J and V, comes long after the writing of the Aeneid. (The invention of W comes even later, when other, non-Latin languages began to be written down in the Middle Ages.)
Finally, there are abbreviations in Latin text. Remember, there were no printing presses. Every single book had to be written by hand. That's why there were so few of them, and so few copies of each! The public news was not printed (no newspapers), but written by hand and then posted in public places where people could come to read it. Calendars weren't on paper; they were carved in stone or wood and erected in the Forum for public use.
Standard abbreviations saved paper, ink, and most of all, time. Besides the familiar abbreviations for common names (M. for Marcus, L. for Lucius, Ma. for Manlius, etc.), words were cut short when they were obvious; see the inscription on the Pantheon, "M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIUM·FECIT", which is short for "MARCUS·AGRIPPA·LUCI·FILIUS·CONSUL·TERTIUM·FECIT". A total list of all the words and phrases abbreviated in Latin literature and Latin inscriptions is huge, and varies greatly from time to time and place to place.
Besides letter abbreviations, Latin text uses symbols freely; for instance, the final M of an accusative is rarely written, usually represented by a line over the V or A instead. Together, letter and symbol abbreviations make reading original Latin texts and inscriptions a daunting challenge even if you're fluent in spoken Latin!
In other words, reading Latin isn't for sissies.
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