Difference between revisions of "Virgil"

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A bust of Virgil, from the entrance to his tomb in Naples, Italy.

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), who was born at Mantua in Italy on October 15th, 70 BCE and died on September 21st, 19 BCE, was a well known Roman poet & philosopher. He studied at the rhetorical schools of Cremona, Milan, and finally Rome. Maecenas, the Augustan socialite and (in)famous homosexual, was his patron and he was friends with Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome.

Three of Virgil's works are known to have been of note:

• Eclogues are pastoral poems about his own day
• Georgics is a didactic poem on farming, using the world of the farmer as a model for the world at large.
• Aeneid was the work he spent the last decade of his life on. It was an epic poem, the about the wanderings of Aeneas after the Trojan War and his travels to found the city Rome, which would one day become the Roman Empire. It is this work for which he is most known in history.

In Dante's classic The Divine Comedy, it is Virgil who as the noble pagan and symbol of wisdom who is the man to lead him through the lower levels of his journey, showing the respect that he still had in European culture over 1000 years after his death.

Sources

The New American Desk Encyclopedia, Penguin Group, 1989