Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro was born in 70 BCE near Mantua, in the Po Valley of what was then Cisalpine Gaul. His family was modest — his father is variously described as a potter or a small landowner — but prosperous enough to send him to school first in Cremona and Milan, then to Rome and Naples, where he studied rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek literature. He was a generation younger than Cicero and Catullus, and he came of age in the long civil wars that ended the Roman Republic. The political backdrop of his entire literary career was the consolidation of power by Octavian, who became the emperor Augustus in 27 BCE.

His first major work, the Eclogues (also called the Bucolics, c. 42–39 BCE), is a set of ten short pastoral poems modeled on the Greek poet Theocritus. They are conventionally read as escapist fictions of shepherds and singing contests, but several — particularly the first and ninth — register the dispossession of small farmers around Mantua whose lands were confiscated to settle Octavian's veterans after the battle of Philippi. The fourth eclogue, prophesying the birth of a child who will inaugurate a new golden age, was read by medieval Christians as a pagan foretelling of Christ; it is almost certainly nothing of the kind, but the misreading kept Virgil in continuous circulation through periods when other Roman poets fell out of view.

The Georgics (c. 29 BCE) is a didactic poem in four books on agriculture — crops, trees, cattle, bees — that is also a meditation on labor, civil war, and the relationship between Roman power and the Italian land. It is the most carefully constructed of his works and the one Virgil himself reportedly considered finest. The bee book at the end, with its embedded myth of Aristaeus and Orpheus, is among the most admired passages in Latin poetry.

The Aeneid, on which he worked for the last eleven years of his life and which he had not finished revising at his death, is a twelve-book epic on the legendary founding of Rome. Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escapes the burning city with his father on his back and his son at his hand, wanders the Mediterranean before establishing the line that will eventually become Rome. The poem deliberately rewrites Homer: the first six books mirror the Odyssey (wandering, hospitality, descent to the underworld), the last six the Iliad (war in Italy). It was commissioned, in effect, as a national epic for the Augustan regime, and it does the imperial work it was asked to do — Aeneas is duty-bound, Rome is destined, Augustus is glorified — but it does more than that. The poem is shot through with a counter-melody of loss: Dido's suicide, the death of Pallas, the killing of Turnus on the final page. The phrase sunt lacrimae rerum — "there are tears in things" — comes from the first book, and the long argument over whether the Aeneid endorses or mourns the empire it celebrates has been called the "two voices" debate by modern scholars. It has no settled answer.

Virgil died in 19 BCE at Brundisium, returning from a trip to Greece, before he could complete his revisions. He left instructions in his will that the manuscript be burned. Augustus countermanded the instruction and had the poem published. For new readers, the Robert Fagles translation (Penguin) reads cleanly and has Bernard Knox's introduction; Robert Fitzgerald's earlier version is more austere and more faithful to the meter; Sarah Ruden's translation is line-for-line and the most economical of the three. The Aeneid is the obvious starting point; the Georgics, read second, reward the more attentive reader.