Virgil and the Aeneid

The story

The poet from Mantua

Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) was born on 15 October 70 BC at Andes, a village near Mantua, in a family of small farm owners. Where exactly Andes was we do not know for certain: scholars propose places such as Pietole, Calvisano or Redondesco. He studied first in the schools of Cremona and Milan, where he came to know Epicurean philosophy, which seeks serenity by avoiding pointless worries, then went to Rome to study rhetoric, the art of public speaking, in order to become a lawyer.

His career as a lawyer was not a success: he could not even deliver his first case; Virgil gave it up. Then he moved to Naples, where he spent time with teachers of philosophy such as Siro and Philodemus of Gadara and began to write poetry. In 42 BC, after the battle of Philippi, the lands around Mantua were distributed to veteran soldiers and his family too risked losing its farm. Thanks to influential friends, at least at first, he avoided the worst. In 38 BC Maecenas, a rich friend of artists who was very close to Augustus, gave him an estate in Campania.

The early works

Virgil wrote three great works. The Eclogues, composed between 42 and 39 BC, are ten pastoral poems, inspired by the Greek poet Theocritus, in which shepherds sing of love and the countryside. The Georgics, written between 37 and 30 BC and dedicated to Maecenas, are a poem in four books on the work of the fields, the growing of trees, livestock farming and even beekeeping, that is, the keeping of bees. Then came his greatest work.

The Aeneid

The Aeneid is an epic poem in twelve books, with a total of about 9,896 lines. The lines are hexameters, a long type of verse, typical of ancient epic. Virgil sketched its structure in 29 BC, began to write it in 27 BC and worked on it until his death, in 19 BC. Around 23–22 BC he read some parts to Augustus, probably the sixth book.

The poem tells of the adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan prince. After the destruction of Troy, Aeneas flees the burning city with his father Anchises and sails towards Italy, where the gods have decreed that he is to found a new race. On the journey he reaches Carthage, in Africa, where Queen Dido falls in love with him. When Aeneas sets sail again to obey destiny, Dido takes her own life. In the sixth book Aeneas goes down to the Underworld, the kingdom of the dead, guided by the Cumaean Sibyl, a priestess who prophesies, and meets his father Anchises, who shows him the souls of the great men who will one day be the Romans.

The second half tells of the war in Latium. Aeneas marries Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, but another suitor, Turnus, rebels and it comes to a duel. Virgil built the poem in two parts: the first six books imitate Homer's Odyssey, the sea voyage; the last six imitate the Iliad, the war. It is a way of placing Latin epic on the same level as Greek.

The poem also has a political purpose. It shows Rome as the heir of Troy and links Augustus and the Julian family to Aeneas and the gods: it is a celebration of traditional Roman values and of the new age of peace.

The last wish

Virgil made a journey to Greece, perhaps to receive technical advice on the poem. On the way back he fell ill and died at Brindisi on 21 September 19 BC. Shortly before, the story goes, he asked his friends Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid, because he had not had time to revise it. The poem, in fact, was not finished: in the text there are 58 lines left half complete, the so-called tibicines, that is, the “props”.

The two friends did not obey. They handed the manuscript to the emperor, and Augustus ordered it to be published as it was. Without this decision, one of the masterpieces of world literature would have been lost. Virgil's body was taken to Naples: in the Piedigrotta district there is a mound, called the tomb of Virgil. On the tomb there was, according to the tradition, an epitaph recalling Mantua as his birthplace, Salento as the place where he had died and Naples as the place of burial, together with the three works he had sung.

Virgil, Dante's guide

Even after his death Virgil remained one of the best-loved and most studied poets. Dante Alighieri, centuries later, chose him as his guide in the Inferno and the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy, recognising him as a master and a supreme poet.