Virgil

Virgil ( Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 bc), the greatest of Roman poets. He imitated successively the pastorals of Theocritus, the didactic poems of Hesiod and Aratus, and the epics of Homer, making original contributions to all three genres. In his Eclogues he added a new level of meaning to the pastoral's idealization of country life by alluding to topics of contemporary interest; in the Georgics he transformed the bald didacticism of his models into a panegyric of Italy and the traditional way of rural life; and in the Aeneid he committed the epic to the presentation of a major patriotic theme. He began by working within the conventions of Hellenistic poetry, but later, helped by the patronage of Augustus, widened his stylistic range and created a diction and a manner of presentation that were all his own.

Many generations found in him their main gateway to the sublime. In the Middle Ages he was regarded as a seer and a magician, and the ‘Messianic Eclogue’ (below) led Dante to choose him as a guide through Hell and Purgatory. His Aeneid served as a model for all the Latin epics of the medieval period and then for the new classical epic of the Renaissance. There are Virgilian similes in Spenser, Virgilian motifs in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece and Milton's Paradise Lost. The Georgics came into their own in the 18th cent., when they provided a model for descriptive poets like J. Thomson. In the 19th cent. came Wordsworth's ‘Laodamia’ and Tennyson's avowal in ‘To Virgil’ of indebtedness beyond the obvious. Dryden's version of his works (1697) remains probably the finest. Gavin Douglas, writing in Scots, produced a vivid Aeneid (1513) and W. Morris a ponderously medieval one (1885). Recently there have been interesting translations by C. Day-Lewis of the Georgics (1940) and the Aeneid (1952).