Books by Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Virgil or Vergil, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period celebrated as Rome’s supreme poet and one of the towering literary geniuses of world history. Born near Mantua in northern Italy, Virgil was patronized by Gaius Maecenas and Emperor Augustus. He first achieved fame with the Eclogues (or Bucolics), a pastoral collection that transformed Greek bucolic verse, followed by the Georgics, a didactic masterpiece celebrating rural agriculture and philosophical labor. His crowning achievement, the Aeneid, is a monumental twelve-book epic modeled after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, recounting the heroic wanderings of the Trojan prince Aeneas as he fulfills his divine destiny to found the Roman civilization. Renowned for its melancholic beauty, moral gravitas, and exquisite hexameter verse, Virgil's Aeneid became the national epic of the Roman Empire and a foundational cornerstone of Western European education and literature.