22 Facts About Virgil

Virgil composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid.

Already acclaimed in his own lifetime as a classic author, Virgil rapidly replaced Ennius and other earlier authors as a standard school text, and stood as the most popular Latin poet through late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, exerting inestimable influence on all subsequent Western literature.

Biographical information about Virgil is transmitted chiefly in of the poet prefixed to commentaries on his work by Probus, Donatus, and Servius.

The Donatian life reports that some say Virgil's father was a potter, but most say he was an employee of an apparitor named Magius, whose daughter he married.

Today, the anglicisations Vergil and Virgil are both considered acceptable.

Virgil spent his boyhood in Cremona until his 15th year, when he is said to have received the toga virilis on the very day that Lucretius died.

Virgil is said to have been tall and stout, with a swarthy complexion and a rustic appearance.

Virgil seems to have suffered bad health throughout his life and in some ways lived the life of an invalid.

In Eclogues 1 and 9, Virgil indeed dramatizes the contrasting feelings caused by the brutality of the land expropriations through pastoral idiom but offers no indisputable evidence of the supposed biographic incident.

Sometime after the publication of the Eclogues, Virgil became part of the circle of Maecenas, Octavian's capable agent d'affaires who sought to counter sympathy for Antony among the leading families by rallying Roman literary figures to Octavian's side.

Virgil came to know many of the other leading literary figures of the time, including Horace, in whose poetry he is often mentioned, and Varius Rufus, who later helped finish the Aeneid.

At Maecenas's insistence Virgil spent the ensuing years on the long dactylic hexameter poem called the Georgics, which he dedicated to Maecenas.

From Virgil's admiring references to the neoteric writers Pollio and Cinna, it has been inferred that he was, for a time, associated with Catullus's neoteric circle.

In handling this theme, Virgil follows in the didactic tradition of the Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days and several works of the later Hellenistic poets.

Virgil's intentions are to reach Italy, where his descendants Romulus and Remus are to found the city of Rome.

Virgil made use of several models in the composition of his epic; Homer, the pre-eminent author of classical epic, is everywhere present, but Virgil makes special use of the Latin poet Ennius and the Hellenistic poet Apollonius of Rhodes among the various other writers to whom he alludes.

Ancient commentators noted that Virgil seems to divide the Aeneid into two sections based on the poetry of Homer; the first six books were viewed as employing the Odyssey as a model while the last six were connected to the Iliad.

Some scholars have argued that Virgil deliberately left these metrically incomplete lines for dramatic effect.

Poets following Virgil often refer intertextually to his works to generate meaning in their own poetry.

Virgil played him along and agreed to an assignation at her house, which he was to sneak into at night by climbing into a large basket let down from a window.

In consequence, Virgil came to be seen on a similar level to the Hebrew prophets of the Bible as one who had heralded Christianity.

Possibly as early as the second century AD, Virgil's works were seen as having magical properties and were used for divination.