Virgil

Virgil, in Latin Publius Vergilius Maro, was a Roman poet who lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of Augustus. His three great works, the pastoral Eclogues, the farming poem Georgics and the epic Aeneid, made him the leading poet of the Augustan age. For nearly two thousand years he was the model Latin author, read in every school and imitated by poets from Ovid to Dante and Milton.

According to the ancient biographies, which drew partly on a lost life by Suetonius, Virgil was born on 15 October 70 BC at Andes, a village near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul, the region of northern Italy that was absorbed into Italy proper during his lifetime. The exact site of Andes is disputed. These lives also inferred some details from his poems, so modern scholars treat them with caution.

His father is variously described as a potter or a servant who married his employer's daughter, but the education Virgil received suggests a well-off landowning family. He grew up in Cremona until he was about fifteen, then studied in Milan and Rome, considered a career in rhetoric and law, and turned to poetry and philosophy. Some short poems say he studied with the Epicurean teacher Siro in Naples. He was said to be shy and often in poor health.

After Julius Caesar's assassins were defeated at Philippi in 42 BC, Octavian, the future Augustus, confiscated land across northern Italy to settle his veterans. Tradition held that Virgil's own farm near Mantua was taken, although scholars now regard this as a guess drawn from the poems. The ten Eclogues, probably published around 39 to 38 BC, adapt the Greek pastoral poetry of Theocritus to Italian settings, and two of them dwell on the hardship of the confiscations. The fourth, which foretells the birth of a child who will bring back a golden age, was later read by Christians as a prophecy of Jesus.

By about 37 BC Virgil had joined the circle of Maecenas, Octavian's political adviser, who drew writers such as Virgil and Horace to his side. Over roughly the next eight years Virgil wrote the Georgics, four books on crops, trees, livestock and bees in the tradition of the Greek poet Hesiod, which he dedicated to Maecenas. Its tone shifts between hope and gloom. Virgil and Maecenas are said to have read it to Octavian after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC at Actium.

Virgil spent his last eleven years, from 29 to 19 BC, on the Aeneid, an epic in twelve books modelled on Homer. It follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas from the fall of Troy, through his doomed love affair with Dido, queen of Carthage, and a visit to the underworld, to his wars in Italy, where his descendants would found Rome. Prophecies of Roman greatness and of Augustus run through it, and scholars still argue whether it celebrates the new regime or quietly questions its cost.

In 19 BC he travelled to Greece, met Augustus in Athens, fell ill with fever and died soon after landing in Italy, at Brundisium according to the main tradition, on 21 September. He had asked that the unfinished poem be burned, but Augustus had his friends Varius and Tucca publish it with minimal changes. He was buried at Naples, where a structure called Virgil's tomb still draws visitors.

The Aeneid quickly became the central text of Roman education. Later Roman poets imitated or answered it, and Augustine recalled weeping over the death of Dido. In the Middle Ages Virgil acquired a reputation as a prophet and even a magician, and in the Divine Comedy Dante chose him as his guide through Hell and Purgatory. His influence runs through the epic tradition of Spenser and Milton, while his idealised countryside of Arcadia shaped European pastoral art and poetry for centuries.

Our -100 map shows the Roman Republic in the generation before his birth, and our -1 map shows the Roman Empire of Augustus some two decades after the poet's death.