Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, known in English as Virgil, was a Roman poet born in 70 BC near Mantua in northern Italy and died in 19 BC at Brundisium on his return from a journey to Greece. He grew up on a small farm and studied rhetoric and philosophy at Cremona, Milan, and Rome, before settling in the circle of literary patrons gathered around the emperor Augustus and his minister Maecenas.

Virgil's first major work, the Eclogues (also called the Bucolics), appeared around 37 BC and consists of ten pastoral poems modeled on the Greek poet Theocritus. The collection mixes shepherd dialogues with veiled commentary on the land confiscations that followed the Roman civil wars, and it established him as the leading poet of his generation.

He spent the next several years on the Georgics, a four-book didactic poem on farming, viticulture, animal husbandry, and beekeeping, completed around 29 BC. Polished and politically resonant, the work earned the patronage of Augustus and set Virgil to work on his epic Aeneid, the twelve-book story of the Trojan hero Aeneas's flight from Troy and the founding of the Roman line in Italy.

Virgil worked on the Aeneid for the last decade of his life and reportedly asked on his deathbed that the unfinished manuscript be burned. Augustus overruled the request, and the poem became the central text of Latin literature, shaping Dante, medieval Christian allegory, Renaissance epic, and countless later writers.

The name Virgil descends from the Roman family name Vergilius, of uncertain origin, sometimes linked to Latin virga meaning a young branch or rod. Medieval scribes spelled it Virgilius by association with Latin virgo, meaning maiden, lending the poet a faintly mystical air. He carried the name as Rome's defining literary voice.