Virgil, Ovid, and the Augustan Poets

Virgil, Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE), spent the last decade of his life composing the Aeneid, a twelve-book Latin epic in dactylic hexameter that had not yet received its final revision at his death; tradition holds that Virgil, dying at Brundisium after a journey to Greece, asked that the manuscript be burned as unfinished, and that Augustus personally overrode this request and ordered its publication, with only light editorial intervention, by Virgil's literary executors Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca. The poem narrates the journey of the Trojan hero Aeneas, a minor figure in the Iliad, from the fall of Troy to his settlement in Italy, where his descendants will eventually found Rome; it is structured in two clearly balanced halves, an "Odyssean" first six books of wandering, including Aeneas's tragic love affair with Dido, queen of Carthage, and his descent to the underworld in Book 6, followed by an "Iliadic" second six books of war in Italy against the Rutulian king Turnus. Virgil draws constantly and deliberately on Homer, reworking entire episodes, similes, and even individual lines from the Iliad and Odyssey, while also weaving in Roman historical and religious material, most famously the prophetic pageant of future Roman heroes that Aeneas's father Anchises reveals to him in the underworld, linking the mythical Trojan past directly to Rome's own history down to Virgil's own time.