The Life of Vergil by Suetonius (early 2nd Century, A.D) is available online in Latin and English. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993: 40-3 (a brief but nuanced account of 20th-century shifts in interpretation of the Aeneid in light of broader thinking about colonialism and empire) Horsfall, A Companion to the Study of Virgil (2 nd ed), Leiden: Brill, 2001, p.1-26 (a thorough scholarly account of the sources for Vergil’s life)Ĭ. Written by: James Uden, Classics, Columbia University ‘Something greater than the Iliad is being born’ ( Elegies 2.34.65-6). Even before its publication, it was hailed by contemporaries as a work surpassing all rivals: ‘surrender, Roman writers, surrender Greeks!’, wrote the love poet Propertius. He accomplished this by merging the minor Homeric character of Aeneas with traditional native Italian myths and stories about Rome’s origins. Finally, with his third major work, the Aeneid (unfinished at his death in 19 BCE), Vergil intended to create a national epic, a ‘mirror of both poems of Homer’ as his biographer Suetonius expressed it ( Life of Vergil 20). 29 BCE), a four-book ‘didactic’ (or ‘educational’) poem about agriculture, which combines an evocation of the dignity and hardship of Italian farming life with elements of myth, most notably in the emotional retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story in Book 4. 39 or 38 BCE), a book of pastoral poetry, depicting the lives of shepherds in highly artificial and romanticized manner, but combined innovatively with elements of colloquial language, literary polemic, and political commentary. We also hear that he worked at an extremely slow pace, licking each line into shape like a she-bear does her cubs – a picturesque story that seeks to account for the learnedness, density and polish of his Latin style.Īs well as some juvenilia of doubtful attribution (including curse poetry, a parody of the love poet Catullus, and poems about the phallic god Priapus), all three of Vergil’s major works survive. We hear, for example, that he was sickly, shy, and had a sexual preference for men rather than women, details that can be sourced back partly to his representation of homosexual love between languid shepherds in his Eclogues. The ancient tradition about Vergil elaborated a large number of myths about his life that symbolically reflect the tenor and themes of his works scholars must therefore proceed very carefully in order to establish firm biographical information. His name can also be spelled ‘Virgil’ in English, a corruption of the Latin name invented in the Middle Ages to suit beliefs about the magical properties of his texts ( virga means a magical wand in Latin). Publius Vergilius Maro (or Vergil) is the greatest of the ancient Latin poets, and the author of Rome’s national epic, the Aeneid. His best-known work, the Aeneid, told of a Trojan prince, Aeneas, who escaped the burning of Troy in the final days of the Trojan War to eventually make his way across the. A portrait of Virgil from the Vergilius Romanus, 5th-century illustrated manuscript of the poet’s works. Armando Mancini (CC BY-SA) Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE), better known to most modern readers as Virgil, was one of the greatest poets of the early Roman Empire.
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