Virgil

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born in 70 BC near Mantua, in northern Italy, to a family of modest farmers. He grew up close to the land, and that early life never left his poetry. He studied in Cremona, Milan, and Rome. He trained for the law but found he had no gift for public speaking, so he turned to verse instead. His first major work, the Eclogues, sang of shepherds in an idealized countryside. His second, the Georgics, was a poem about farming that doubled as a meditation on labor, loss, and the fragile order of the world. Both drew the attention of Maecenas, the wealthy adviser to the emperor Augustus who supported promising writers, and through him Virgil gained the emperor's favor. He spent his final eleven years on the Aeneid, an epic about the Trojan hero Aeneas, who flees his burning city to found the line that will one day become Rome. Virgil was a slow, exacting craftsman; he compared himself to a bear licking her cubs into shape. He died in 19 BC before finishing his revisions, and asked that the poem be burned. Augustus refused, which is why we can still read it.