Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil)
Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil)
15 Oct. 70-21 Sept. 19 b.c.e.
Poet
Last Request. Vergil (also spelled Virgil) was born on 15 October 70 B.C.E. in Andes near Mantua in northern Italy. His father sent him to Cremona and Milan to be educated. Later he went to Rome to study rhetoric. His attempt at representing someone in a lawsuit was a complete failure since he proved to be a clumsy speaker. Therefore, he went to Naples to study Epicurean philosophy. His family lost their farm in Octavian’s land expropriations of 41 B.C.E. Vergil later received some reparations for it. By 38 he had been introduced to Maecenas, the famous patron of poets. Together with Horace, he accompanied Maecenas on a diplomatic mission to Brindisi in 37. Two years later he published his Bucolics, consisting of 10 Eclogues. The next ten years were spent writing the Georgics, which he read to Augustus in 29. The final eleven years of his life he spent writing the Aeneid, of which he read books 2, 4, and 6 to Augustus in 23 B.C.E. In 19 he intended to take a three-year sabbatical in Greece to finish the work, but he fell ill and was taken back by Augustus to Brindisi. There he died on 21 September 19 B.C.E. In his will he asked for the unfinished Aeneid to be burned, but Augustus commissioned two of Vergil’s friends, Plotius Tucca and Varius Rufus, to edit and publish the work.
Sources
Jasper Griffin, Virgil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
S. J. Harrison, Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Richard Heinze, Vergil’s Epic Technique, translated by Hazel and David Harvey and Fred Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Nicholas Horsfall, A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden Holland: E.J. Brill, 1995).
L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).