Vergil

Virgil — Publius Vergilius Maro — was the preeminent poet of the Roman Augustan age, whose three major works defined Latin poetry for two millennia. Born in 70 BC near Mantua in northern Italy, he received a thorough rhetorical and philosophical education before turning to poetry. His Eclogues, pastoral poems drawing on Theocritus, were followed by the Georgics, a didactic poem on farming that is simultaneously a meditation on labor, loss, and the restoration of order after civil war. His masterwork, the Aeneid, tells the story of Aeneas — Trojan refugee and founder of Rome — in twelve books modeled on Homer. The poem became the foundational text of Roman education and of Western literary tradition. Dante chose Virgil as his guide through the Inferno, the highest tribute the medieval world could offer. Virgil died in 19 BC before finishing final revisions to the Aeneid.

Common Themes