Vatican library digitises 1,600-year-old edition of Virgil

Seventy-six pages and 50 illustrations from the great Latin epic made available to all, part of a project to put all its 80,000 manuscripts online

The Vatican Apostolic Library has digitised one of the world’s oldest manuscripts, an illustrated fragment of Virgil’s Aeneid that dates back 1,600 years.

Created in Rome around 400AD, the Vatican Virgil consists of 76 surviving pages, and 50 illustrations. The fragments of text are from the Latin poet’s Aeneid, his epic tale of Aeneas’s journey from the sack of Troy to Carthage, the underworld and then Italy, where he founds Rome. It also contains fragments from Virgil’s poem of the land, The Georgics, but the original manuscript is likely to have contained all of Virgil’s canonical works. According to Fine Books magazine, it is “one of the oldest [copies of The Aeneid] to survive the centuries”.

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