Virgil

Virgil wrote the Aeneid and asked on his deathbed that it be burned. Born near Mantua in 70 BC to a family of small landowners, he was educated at Cremona, Milan and Rome, studied rhetoric and Epicurean philosophy at Naples, and was too shy and physically frail for public life. The family land was among that confiscated to settle Octavian's veterans after Philippi, an event that runs through his first work. The Eclogues, ten short pastoral poems published around 39 BC, present shepherds in an idealised Arcadia while allowing the dispossession into the background. The fourth prophesies a child whose birth will restore a golden age, which Christians later read as a prophecy of Christ and which is why Dante made him his guide. The Georgics, four books on farming completed around 29 BC, are a technical poem on crops, trees, cattle and bees, and simultaneously an argument about labour, order and Italy after a century of civil war. They took seven years. He then spent eleven years on the Aeneid, twelve books following a Trojan survivor to Italy to found the race that became Rome. It gave Augustus's regime a founding myth, and it is far more ambivalent than a commission requires: its hero abandons Dido to duty, weeps constantly, and the poem ends abruptly with him killing a suppliant in rage. He caught fever on a journey to Greece in 19 BC and died at Brundisium, leaving the poem unrevised and instructing that it be destroyed. Augustus overrode it.

• Lived: 70 BCE – 19 BCE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: poet, writer