Virgil
70–19 BCE
Biography
Publius Vergilius Maro, known in English as Virgil, was a Roman poet who lived from 70 to 19 BCE, through the years when Augustus was establishing his rule. He was born near Mantua in northern Italy and later made his life in and around Rome, where wealthy patrons such as Maecenas supported him. Within his own lifetime he was counted among the finest poets in Latin, and in the centuries that followed his work was taught in schools across Europe.
He wrote three major works. The Eclogues are pastoral poems about shepherds and their songs, the Georgics is a long poem on farming and rural life, and the Aeneid is an epic in twelve books. The Aeneid follows Aeneas, a Trojan who escapes the ruin of his city and sails west to found the line that will become the Romans. Virgil was still revising the poem when he died in 19 BCE. He is said to have asked that it be burned, but Augustus ordered it published.
The site holds The Aeneid in John Dryden's verse translation, published in 1697, which is why the book is credited to both names. The poem's story of exile and the founding of a new home has been read and imitated for two thousand years. Dante made Virgil his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, and readers who come to Virgil through this book meet the epic that gave Western literature one of its models.
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Books
The Aeneid
by Virgil (translated by John Dryden)
Aeneas flees burning Troy, loses Dido's love at Carthage, descends to the underworld, and fights his way to Italy to found the line that will build Rome. Dryden's 1697 version in heroic couplets was the standard English Aeneid for two centuries. This book contains scenes of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.