Historical Figure
Virgil
d. 19 BC
1st-century-BC Roman poet
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Biography
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. Some minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars regard these as spurious, with the possible exception of some short pieces.
Timeline
The story of Virgil, told in moments.
Born Publius Vergilius Maro near Mantua in northern Italy. His family were modest landowners. He studied rhetoric in Cremona and Milan, then philosophy in Rome under the Epicurean teacher Siro.
Lost his family farm when Octavian's soldiers confiscated land for veterans after the Battle of Philippi. The experience haunted his poetry. His first major work, the Eclogues, contains laments for dispossessed farmers.
Published the Eclogues, ten pastoral poems. Maecenas, Augustus's cultural minister, noticed and became his patron. Virgil joined the circle of poets that included Horace and Propertius.
Completed the Georgics, a poem about farming in four books. Read it aloud to Augustus over four consecutive days. The emperor loved it. The poem elevates plowing, beekeeping, and cattle into meditation on civilization itself.
Began the Aeneid, an epic tracing Rome's origins from the fall of Troy. Augustus wanted a national poem. Virgil spent 11 years writing it. He told friends he needed three more years to finish.
Died at Brundisium after falling ill on a trip to Greece. He was 50. On his deathbed, he asked friends to burn the unfinished Aeneid. Augustus overruled the request. The poem survived and became the foundation of Western literary tradition.
In Their Own Words (20)
No stranger to trouble myself I am learning to care for the unhappy.
Line 630, as translated in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999); spoken by Dido., 1999
In youth alone, unhappy mortals live;But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive:Discolored sickness, anxious labor, come,And age, and death's inexorable doom.
Book III, lines 66–68 (tr. John Dryden).
So hard and huge a task it was to found the Roman people.
Line 33 (tr. Robert Fitzgerald)
Begin, baby boy, to recognize your mother with a smile.
Book IV, line 60 (tr. Fairclough)
Let my delight be the country, and the running streams amid the dells—may I love the waters and the woods, though I be unknown to fame.
Book II, lines 485–486 (tr. Fairclough)
Artifacts (15)
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