Ancient Classics: Virgil

For most of the last decade of his life, Virgil, who had withdrawn from the city of Rome into the congenial countryside of Campania near Naples, worked on his great Latin epic, Aeneid. Inspired by the form and content of his incomparable Greek predecessor, Homer, Virgil self-consciously sought to create a national epic for the emergent Roman Empire under the rule of its first emperor, Augustus Caesar...

A collection of 10 dactylic hexameter poems in the pastoral mode, most of Virgil's Eclogues celebrate the attractions of a stylized, poetic, and largely mythical rural life. The first and the ninth of them, by contrast, are autobiographical in their content. Following Julius Caesar's assassination, the Roman conspirators against him, Brutus and Cassius, were defeated at Philippi. To pay the victorious troops, lands were allotted to veterans. Virgil's ancestral estates near Mantua were among the lands seized as a part of that distribution...

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 bce), Roman poet, author of Bucolics (Eclogues), Georgics, and the Aeneid. To adapt a bon mot of Bernard Williams's on the relation between Greek philosophy and Western philosophy, we might say that Virgil's legacy to Western literature is Western literature. Perhaps it is only with regard to Virgil that T. S. Eliot could begin a lecture entitled "What Is a Classic?" (1944) by asserting as self-evidently true that "whatever the definition we arrive at, it cannot be one that excludes Virgil—we may say confidently that it must be one which will expressly reckon with him." For Virgil became a European classic, not only in the sense that he was a central author for many European readers for many centuries, but also in the further sense that his works crucially helped such readers to define themselves as Europeans...

Born in the village of Andes near Mantua in what was then Cisalpine Gaul, Virgil is thought to have had a working-class father, perhaps a farmer or a potter, and a priestess or sorceress (magia) mother named Polla. He received an extensive formal education, first at Cremona, then at Milan (Roman Mediolanum), and finally in Rome itself, where among other subjects he studied philosophy and rhetoric. One of his teachers is known to have been the Epicurean philosopher, Siron. That Virgil was able to afford this extensive education suggests that his family had independent means...