Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil was Rome’s greatest poet producing in Latin the great epic poem the Aeneid, the well-known epic poem of twelve books that became the Roman Empire’s national epic. Virgil became the archetype of future poets well into the Renaissance.

Virgil was born on the 15th of October 70 BC at Andes, a little village near Mantua. His mother’s name was Maia, and his father was probably a small landowner.

Virgil learned country ways in his father’s pottery shop and form anima husbandry, beekeeping and lumbering.  At the age 17, he enrolled on oratory and law at Marcus Epidius’s school in Rome, where the young Octavian and Mark Antony had studied.

Virgil wrote three major works, the Eclogues published I 37 BC, which brought him to the literacy circle of Horace, Pollio, Maecenas and ultimately Octavian (Augustus).

In 37 BC, he and Horace traveled together to southern Italy when he began work on his second major work with Georgics, published in 29 BC.

Then he immediately began work on his third and greatest work, the Aeneid which was unfinished at the time of his death in 19 BC at Brundusium. Until his death at the 51, Virgil labored on the Aeneid, a nationalistic paean to the Trojan prince Aeneas and to Rome’s foundations.
Virgil