Virgil

Abstract Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 bce) was a Latin poet, already celebrated in his own lifetime, who wrote during the triumviral period and the principate of Augustus. All his poems reflect on contemporary history while engaging with a range of literary traditions from the archaic to the contemporary neoteric. Virgil achieved renown as a poet c. 39–38 bce with the publication of the Eclogues (or Bucolics), which take after Theocritus’s Idylls. He went on to write the Georgics, a didactic poem ostensibly about farming (29 bce), and the Aeneid, a heroic epic in the Homeric manner about the Trojan refugee Aeneas’s flight from Troy and his struggles to found a city that would be the origin of Rome. Several minor poems collected in the Appendix Vergiliana are attributed to Virgil, but were probably not written by him. His work set the standard for Latinity and inspired many later imitators and artistic and critical responses.