Virgil

Virgil was the pre-eminent poet of Augustan Rome, and his work was treated as classic within his own lifetime. Born near Mantua to a landowning family, he found a patron in Maecenas and through him the favour of Augustus. The pastoral Eclogues and the didactic Georgics preceded the Aeneid, an epic of Rome's Trojan origins written across his last decade and left unrevised at his death. He asked for the poem to be burned, and Augustus overruled him. The Aeneid became the central text of Latin education in the West, and its author became Dante's guide through Hell.