Virgil (70–19 BC) was an ancient Roman poet and the author of The Aeneid, an epic poem about Rome’s founding that became one of the most influential Latin texts of antiquity and helped shape the Roman view of the city’s history and its role in the world.
He was born Publius Vergilius Maro, but other details of Virgil’s early life are unknown. During the period after the assassination of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), Virgil emerged from obscurity as an ally and propagandist for Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus (63 BC–AD 14).
Virgil’s first major work, Eclogues, was written in the period just after Caesar’s death. The poem—in parts erotic, in others political—served a useful purpose for Octavian by supporting the legitimacy of his claims to power.
Virgil’s next poem, The Georgics, was finished in 29 BC, just after Octavian had defeated his major enemy, Mark Antony (83–30 BC). Virgil supposedly read it aloud to the emperor as Octavian was recuperating from an illness that summer.
The Aeneid took Virgil the last ten years of his life to write, and it was still unfinished at the time of his death. The poem tells the mythological story of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who fled after Troy’s defeat in the Trojan War and then traveled, surviving many hardships, to Italy, where his ancestors founded Rome. It ends by casting Roman imperialism in terms of divinely ordained national destiny, an ideology that underpinned the expansion of the empire for the next four centuries.
Others, I take it, will work better with breathing bronze and draw living faces from marble; others will plead at law with greater eloquence, or measure the pathways of the sky, or forecast the rising stars. Be it your concern, Roman, to rule the nations under law (this is your proper skill) and establish the way of peace; to spare the conquered and put down the mighty from their seat.
Virgil died while accompanying Augustus on a trip to Greece. The Aeneid was published after the poet’s death and immediately hailed as a masterpiece in the tradition of Homer’s Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. And, by establishing the national myth of its founding, The Aeneid helped define the self-image of Rome and justify its growing empire.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Many memorable Latin phrases from Virgil’s works are still cited in Western culture. Omnia vincit amor—“Love conquers all”—appears first in Virgil’s Eclogues; timeo Danaos et dona ferentes—“I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts”—comes from The Aeneid; and the motto of the United States, E pluribus unum, meaning “one composed of many,” was adapted from one of Virgil’s poems.
- One of the original volumes in the US Library of Congress was a well-thumbed copy of The Aeneid donated by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826).
- Virgil was a major influence on Dante (c. 1265–1321) and appears as a character in The Divine Comedy (c. 1321).
