Virgil (70-19 BC), or Publius Vergilius Maro, was the greatest Roman poet. The Romans regarded his "Aeneid," published two years after his death, as their national epic.

Virgil's life spans the bloody upheavals of the last decades of the violent Roman civil war (133-31 B.C.) and the first years of the era of order, stability, and peace created by Augustus (the grandnephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, he succeeded him in power at Rome). Virgil's contemporary poets were the lyricist and satirist Horace and the writers of elegy Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Together they are known as poets of the Golden Age of Latin literature, or more simply, as Augustans. Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, realized the propaganda value of literature, and so he cultivated writers, encouraged them to eulogize his new regime, and subsidized them if necessary. Of all the Augustans, Virgil was the...