Augustan poet of Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid
Virgil (70–19 BC), Publius Vergilius Maro, wrote Latin’s core trio—Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid—for the Augustan age. Already a classic in life, he displaced Ennius in schools and dominated late antiquity through early modernity; Chaucer still felt the pull. Lives by Donatus and Servius, drawing on Suetonius, remain patchy.
Commentaries mix fact with allegory squeezed from the poems, so biographies stay problematic even when vivid. Influence on Western literature is the surer datum.
The ancient lives place his birth on 15 October 70 BC, in the consulship of Pompey and Crassus, at the village of Andes near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul. A tradition that Dante accepted identifies Andes with Pietole, just southeast of Mantua, though the life ascribed to Probus puts it thirty Roman miles away. By the fourth or fifth century AD his name had shifted from Vergilius to Virgilius, possibly through puns on uirga, wand, reflecting his medieval reputation as a magician, and the altered form stuck even after Poliziano showed the original in the fifteenth century.
He grew up in Cremona, reportedly receiving the toga of manhood in 55 BC on the day Lucretius died, then moved to Milan and Rome and dropped rhetoric and law for poetry. Described as tall, dark and rustic-looking, often sickly and so shy that schoolmates called him Parthenias, the virgin, he began the Eclogues in 42 BC, the year of Philippi, and they probably appeared around 39–38 BC. Before 37 BC he joined the circle of Maecenas, Octavian's adviser, who rallied writers to Octavian's cause.
He spent his last eleven years, 29 to 19 BC, on the Aeneid, reportedly at Augustus's request. Travelling to Greece around 19 BC to revise it, he met Augustus in Athens, fell ill on the voyage home and died at Brundisium. His remains went to Naples, where his self-written epitaph names Mantua, the Calabrians and Parthenope, and recalls that he sang of pastures, farms and leaders. A tomb traditionally called his, at Piedigrotta near Mergellina harbour, drew Grand Tour travellers through the nineteenth century.
Source: Virgil
