What it is
The Trojan War, from before the Iliad to the sack.
The story starts before the Iliad, with Jason, the Argonauts and an earlier Greek attack on Troy, and runs through Paris and Helen, the long sequence of battles, and the deaths of Hector, Troilus, Achilles and Paris, to the betrayal and sack of the city. Dares replaces Homer’s divine interventions with human motives and politics.
What the Latin is like
Direct narrative Latin.
The Latin is direct narrative, short and unusually accessible for a complete ancient account of the war. On LC’s difficulty scale it scores 4.6 (Intermediate).
In the reader
The preface and all forty-four chapters.
The reader has the prefatory letter and all forty-four chapters, from the 1825 Artopoeus/Valpy edition, collated page by page, about 7,600 words. Display text is macronized.
Read next
Aeneid: Liber II
Aeneas tells the fall of Troy: the same story, in Virgil’s hexameters.
Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri
Another fast narrative, an adventure romance of late antiquity.