Virgil

Biography

Publius Vergilius Maro, known as Virgil, was the greatest poet of ancient Rome. He was born near Mantua in northern Italy, the son of a farmer, and studied in Cremona, Milan and Rome. His first work, the Eclogues, is a collection of pastoral poems, and his Georgics are a long poem on farming and country life. With the support of his patron Maecenas he belonged to the circle around the emperor Augustus.

He spent the last ten years of his life on the Aeneid, the epic of the Trojan hero Aeneas, whose journey to Italy foretells the founding of Rome. He died in Brundisium in 19 BC before he could finish revising it, and asked that it be burned, but Augustus had it published. The Aeneid became the national epic of Rome, and for centuries Virgil was read in every school in Europe; Dante chose him as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy.