Virgil (70–19 BC) was a poet of immense virtuosity and influence. His Eclogues deal with bucolic life and love, his Georgics with tillage, trees, cattle, and bees. His Aeneid is an epic on the theme of Rome’s origins. Poems of the Appendix Vergiliana are traditionally, but in most cases wrongly, attributed to Virgil.
“The classic of all Europe.” —T. S. Eliot
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born in 70BC near Mantua and was educated at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. Slow inspeech, shy in manner, thoughtful in mind, weak in health, he went backnorth for a quiet life. Influenced by the group of poets there, he mayhave written some of the doubtful poems included in our Virgilianmanuscripts. All his undoubted extant work is written in his perfecthexameters. Earliest comes the collection of ten pleasingly artificialbucolic poems, the Eclogues, which imitated freely Theocritus’idylls. They deal with pastoral life and love. Before 29 BC came one ofthe best of all didactic works, the four books of Georgics on tillage, trees, cattle, and bees. Virgil’s remaining years were spent in composing his great, not wholly finished, epic the Aeneid,on the traditional theme of Rome’s origins through Aeneas of Troy.Inspired by the Emperor Augustus’ rule, the poem is Homeric in metre andmethod but influenced also by later Greek and Roman literature,philosophy, and learning, and deeply Roman in spirit. Virgil died in 19BC at Brundisium on his way home from Greece, where he had intended toround off the Aeneid. He had left in Rome a request that all itstwelve books should be destroyed if he were to die then, but they werepublished by the executors of his will.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Virgil is in two volumes.
