P. Vergilius Maro
Rome's greatest poet
70 BC – 19 BC
Publius Vergilius Maro was born in 70 BC near Mantua, in the flatlands of Cisalpine Gaul, the son of a farmer prosperous enough to educate his boy in Cremona, Milan, and finally Rome. He came of age during the death throes of the Republic — the proscriptions, the civil wars, the confiscation of Italian farmland to settle veterans. His own family may have lost land in the redistributions after Philippi. These experiences left their mark: no Roman poet writes with such tenderness about the cost of empire, or with such ambivalence about the violence that founds civilisation.
His first major work, the Eclogues (c. 39–38 BC), transplanted the Greek pastoral of Theocritus into the Italian countryside, but with a political edge that Theocritus never attempted. The fourth Eclogue's prophecy of a golden age under a miraculous child was later read by Christians as a prophecy of Christ — the most consequential misreading in Western literary history. The Georgics (c. 29 BC), ostensibly a didactic poem about farming, is in reality a profound meditation on labour, death, and renewal, written in the most perfect Latin hexameters ever composed.
The Aeneid, left unfinished at his death in 19 BC, is the poem that made him immortal. Commissioned — or at least encouraged — by Augustus and his minister Maecenas, it tells the story of Aeneas's journey from the ruins of Troy to the founding of Rome. It is both a national epic celebrating Roman destiny and a deeply humane poem that mourns the suffering that destiny demands. Virgil reportedly asked on his deathbed that the manuscript be burned; Augustus overruled him, and the poem became the central text of Western education for the next two thousand years.
Virgil's influence is immeasurable. Dante chose him as his guide through Hell and Purgatory. Milton's Paradise Lost is unthinkable without the Aeneid. T.S. Eliot called him the classic of all Europe. He remains, after Homer, the poet against whom all others in the Western tradition are measured.