The Aeneid has a story to tell, of how Aeneas after the fall of Troy reaches Italy with a small group of followers (Books 1-6) and there fights a war with some of the native inhabitants which ends in his victory (Books 7- 12). The plot of the Aeneid is quickly told, and not that long in the enactment, but its temporal outreach is enormous, from the prehistoric past to Virgil's own day and beyond (a time-scale Ovid will extend and parody in the Metamorphoses). Like all good stories, it also has much to say about story-telling itself, and the way we plot our ends in history: and at every point who speaks and who sees admits itself of more than one story.

Narrators

The narrator of the poem is a first-century BC Latin poet, whom it is easiest to call 'Virgil': he generally retains epic anonymity, but on occasions reveals his hand (e.g. 7.1, Caieta is buried litoribus nostris, 'on our shores', or 9.446-9, Nisus and Euryalus will be famous as long as the Roman father has power si quid mea carmina possunt, 'if my poems can (do) anything'). But from the beginning we meet other storytellers within the poem: the Muse who tells him the causes of events (1.8), the anonymous narrator who told Juno of the plot of the poem before it even began (1.20 audierat, 'she had heard . . . ' : compare Dido's desperate desire Iliacos iterum demens audite labores, 'to hear again in madness the Trojan labours', 4.78), the script of the Fates (1.260) based - or is it the other way round? - on a treatment by Jupiter himself, the Master Narrator of all.

Servius (called Marius or Maurus Servius Honoratus in MSS from the ninth century onwards) was a grammarian of the fourth century AD, the author of a celebrated commentary on Virgil. This is generally held to be based on a commentary (now lost) by an earlier fourth-century AD commentator, Aelius Donatus (the teacher of St Jerome), and exists in two forms: the longer, known as Servius Auctus, Servius Danielis, DServius, or DS, was first published in 1600 by Pierre Daniel, and is thought to be a seventh- to eighth-century expansion of the shorter form on the basis of material from Donatus' commentary not used by Servius himself. We know little about Servius' life, but he appears as a young man in Macrobius' dialogue the Saturnalia (dramatic date 383-4, but probably composed later in the fifth century) as a respectful follower of the pagan leader Aurelius Symmachus (Sat. 1.2.15).

Servius' commentary comes at the end of a long period of Virgilian commentary, which had begun in the first century BC. The commentary form itself goes back to Hellenistic and earlier Greek scholarship, above all on Homer, and in a sense Servius' work bears the same relationship to Homeric commentary as the Aeneid does to the Iliad and Odyssey. The format is the familiar one of a lemma (one or more words of the text) followed by comments, in the manner of a modern variorum edition: sometimes scholars are named, but more commonly (especially in the shorter version) we have merely expressions like 'some say . . . others . ..' The text is typically seen as raising a 'problem' (quaestio), to which a 'solution' is offered: the methodology goes back to the beginnings of Homeric commentary.