biography
| name: |
Virgil or Vergil
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| |
in full Publius Vergilius Maro
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (70–19 BC)
|
| biography:
| Latin poet, born in Andes, near Mantua. He studied rhetoric and philosophy in Rome, and became one of the endowed court poets who gathered round the minister and patron, Maecenas. His Eclogues (37 BC) were received with great enthusiasm. Soon afterwards he withdrew to Campania, where he wrote the Georgics or Art of Husbandry (36–29 BC), and for the rest of his life worked at the request of the emperor on the Aeneid, an epic poem in 12 books modelled on the epics of Homer, which relates the wanderings of the Trojan hero Aeneas after the fall of Troy. When this was almost completed, he travelled in Greece and Asia, but fell ill, and died in Brundisium. His wish that the poem (unfinished at his death) should be burned was not respected. His works, written mainly in hexameter verse, have exerted an immense influence on later classical and post-classical writers, among them Dante, Milton, and Dryden. |
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