Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC – 19 BC), known as Virgil was an ancient Roman poet. Born near Mantua, he lived through the fall of the Republic and into the Augustan period. He was or perhaps is the most popular Latin poet in Western literature, thus a guiding light and eventually a major influence. Of him, Dante in his Divine Comedy seeks guidance to navigate the circles of Hell.

Virgil composed Eclogues, Georgics and the epic, Aeneid. Aeneid, his finest work is regarded as a foundational classic of Western literature. His works revolutionized Latin poetry and became standard educational text, part of school curricula which eventually all Latin-educated students were familiar with. The works have been referred over and over in multiple works of multiple artists thus still living a life of their own. Both as an inspiration and reference, Virgil has been an ever-giving fountain for Western literature.

To contextualise him and place him in time amidst the other classical luminaries – Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Horace were his contemporaries of Augustan period. Homer, the Greek poet who is said to have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey lived in 8th century BC. Virgil would have encountered him in education as Greek poets were regarded as core education for a Roman then. Amongst the philosophers, Plato lived in Greece in the 5th and 4th century BC and Aristotle in the fourth century BC. Both are regarded as foundational philosophers in the Western tradition. These too Virgil would have encountered in his education, at least Plato. Plato and Aristotle would have encountered Homer. "Plato argues with Homer in the Republic, and Aristotle’s Poetics treats Homer as the model." As ages went by, the legacy literature has expanded, and each new generation encounters them afresh, yet these are the shining lights amidst an ever growing universe of literature and philosophy.

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As to the period he lived in, Roman republic collapsed then and eventually Augustan period began. To get a better flavor of the age, perhaps think of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, although they dealt with leaders and not with the rest of the farmlands and rural areas where people were displaced and farms were confiscated.

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I like to think of young Virgil, a poet writing his Eclogues (pastoral), his Georgics (rural, field work, following the idea of Hesiod's 'Works and Days'), and eventually as a poet, who has grown up on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, he too wishes to write a poem of epic proportions. He begins on the ambitious work of sitting beside Homer, picking up a singular character, and a singular backdrop and composes the Aeneid. The beautiful thing about historical/mythical/poetic works is that they already exist deeply in public memory and each new artist, if equal to it, stokes that simmering fire into a bright blaze with his work.