Virgil

On September 21, 19 BC, Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro], Roman poet of the Augustan period who wrote the Aeneid, died at the age of 50. An excerpt from the article:

"Although Virgil was not pleased with the epic, Augustus, who claimed to be a descendant of Aeneas, was ecstatic. It could be that the emperor believed that the poem demonstrated a final fulfillment of Rome's destiny. Virgil himself believed that it was Rome's fate to forgive the conquered and defeat the proud in war. The opening lines of the poem speak of Aeneas' destiny:

Of arms I sing, and of the man who first
From Trojan shores beneath the ban of fate
To Italy and coasts Lavinian came,
Much tossed about on land and ocean he
By violence of the gods above, to sate
Relentless Juno's ever-rankling ire,
In war, too, much enduring, till what time
A city he might found him, and bear safe
His gods to Latium, whence the Latin race
And Alba's sires, and lofty-towering Rome.

(Virgil, 103)

Legacy
For eleven years Virgil worked on the poem but died before its final revision. He was not pleased with it, and asked his friend Lucius Varius Rufus to destroy it; however, the fellow poet refused. While on a trip to Greece, Virgil became ill at Megara, dying on September 21, 19 BCE before he could return home. He was buried at his villa in Naples. The emperor had the epic published despite the poet's last wishes.

Virgil's poems, especially the Aeneid, have lived on for over 2,000 years and are still being read and analyzed to this day. Excerpts of his poems were even found on the excavated walls of Pompeii. He was an inspiration to countless authors who followed him. Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, chose Virgil as his guide through the Inferno's nine levels of hell. The author Melinda Corey wrote a new introduction to a recent reissuing of Longfellow's translation of The Divine Comedy. She believed Dante chose Virgil because the poet represented everything the author wanted to be: the greatest poet of his time."