Virgil

Virgil was a Roman poet who lived in the first century BCE. He was born on 15 October 70 BCE in Andes, a village near Mantua in northern Italy, and died on 21 September 19 BCE. He lived through the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic and the rise of Augustus, and his poetry was shaped by that turbulent age.

He wrote three major works: the Eclogues, short pastoral poems; the Georgics, a poem about farming and the land; and the Aeneid, an epic about the Trojan hero Aeneas and the roots of Rome. The Aeneid was unfinished when he died, and tradition holds that he wished it destroyed, though it was preserved. Virgil became the model Latin poet for later centuries. Dante chose him as his guide in the Divine Comedy, and his work has shaped European literature ever since.