Person70 BC – 19 BC

Virgil

Also called: Vergil, Publius Vergilius Maro

Roman poet who, after the Eclogues and the Georgics, wrote the Aeneid, the epic of Rome’s founding, in the age of Augustus, and died before finishing it

Born in 70 BC, the son of a landowner, in the village of Andes near Mantua in northern Italy, he studied at Cremona, Milan and Rome. He made his name with the Eclogues (c. 39–38 BC), written after nearly losing his land in the confiscations of the civil wars, and with the patronage of Maecenas published the Georgics (c. 29 BC) on the labours of farming. Living mostly in Naples, he then spent ten years on the Aeneid. Falling ill on a journey to Greece in 19 BC, he died at Brundisium and was buried at Naples. The Middle Ages even saw him as a prophet and magician, and Dante made him his guide through the underworld in the Divine Comedy.

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29 BC – 19 BCVirgil’s Aeneidauthor
From about 29 BC, after Augustus had ended the civil wars, the poet Virgil composed the Aeneid, an epic in twelve books on how the Trojan Aeneas came to Italy and laid the roots of Rome. When Virgil died in 19 BC with the poem unfinished, Augustus had it published as it stood.

People who appear alongside

Augustus63 BC – AD 14
First Roman emperor (r. 27 BC – AD 14); as Octavian, Caesar’s adopted heir, he won at Actium and founded the principate

Themes this person appears in

The Founding Myths of Rome1200 BC – 1471
From Aeneas escaping burning Troy to Dido, Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women and Lucretia — the origins the Romans claimed for themselves, in story order, alongside the sites of Lavinium and the Palatine, the Aeneid and Livy’s History, the Ara Pacis and the Capitoline Wolf