Virgil (70 BCE - 19 BCE) was a Roman poet of the Augustan age and the author of three works that became central to Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid. [1] The Aeneid, an epic in twelve books on the Trojan refugee Aeneas and the mythical origins of Rome, was left unfinished at his death and was published on the instruction of the emperor Augustus. [2] Virgil was regarded as the pre-eminent Roman poet within his own lifetime and remained a school text and a model for European poetry for the next two thousand years. [3]
Life
Publius Vergilius Maro was born on 15 October 70 BCE near Mantua in northern Italy, in a region then part of Cisalpine Gaul. He was educated at Cremona, Milan, and Rome, studying rhetoric and philosophy, and appears to have been drawn to Epicurean thought during a period in Naples. Ancient biographies describe him as retiring in manner and in poor health, preferring Campania to the capital. [1]
His early adulthood coincided with the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic. Land confiscations in the north to settle veterans after the Battle of Philippi affected his family's property, an experience reflected in the Eclogues. He later enjoyed the patronage of Maecenas, the literary patron closest to Octavian, the future Augustus, and moved in the circle that included the poet Horace. [2]
The Eclogues and Georgics
The Eclogues, ten short pastoral poems completed around 37 BCE, adapted the Greek bucolic manner of Theocritus to an Italian setting, mixing idealised shepherds with allusions to contemporary dispossession and political hope. The fourth poem, foretelling the birth of a child who would usher in a new age, was read by later Christian writers as a prophecy of Christ, a reading that shaped Virgil's medieval reputation. [1]
The Georgics, four books on farming published around 29 BCE, treat crops, trees and vines, livestock, and beekeeping. Beneath the agricultural instruction runs a meditation on labour, order, and the relationship between human effort and the natural world, and the poem is often considered the most technically accomplished of his works. [3]
The Aeneid
Virgil devoted his last decade to the Aeneid, which follows Aeneas from the fall of Troy through his wanderings, his love affair with Dido of Carthage, his descent to the underworld, and the war in Latium that precedes the founding of the Roman line. The poem answers Homer deliberately, taking the Odyssey as the model for its first half and the Iliad for its second. [2]
It links the rule of Augustus to a divinely sanctioned destiny for Rome, while giving sustained attention to the cost of that destiny in suffering and loss, an ambivalence that has occupied readers and critics ever since. Virgil died at Brundisium, modern Brindisi, on 21 September 19 BCE while returning from a journey to Greece, with the poem unrevised. He is reported to have asked that it be burned; Augustus overrode the request and had it published. [1]
Influence
Virgil's work entered the Roman school curriculum almost immediately and never left it, making him the principal model of Latin poetic style for later antiquity. Christian writers including Augustine read him closely, and the medieval reading of the fourth Eclogue secured his standing as a virtuous pagan. [3]
Dante made Virgil his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, the clearest sign of his authority in medieval Europe. His influence extends through Renaissance and later epic, including Milton, and translations into the European vernaculars have appeared continuously since the sixteenth century. [4]
