The Aeneid1697 · public domain
The English Aeneid that mattered most for two hundred years, and still the one that sounds like an epic. Dryden works in rhymed heroic couplets, which forces him to expand and rearrange constantly, so this is Virgil at one remove: grander, louder, and more end-stopped than the Latin. The compensation is momentum. Read the opening beside Mackail and you can see the trade exactly, ten lines of rhyme where the Latin has seven of hexameter. Free, complete, and the version Pope, Johnson and Wordsworth all had in their ears.