Virgil was born on 15 October 70 BCE in Andes, a village near Mantua in northern Italy. The traditional site of his birth is Pietole, though the exact location of Andes is debated. His father was a prosperous farmer or landowner with a small estate, woods and the means to educate his son. Virgil's love of the Italian countryside in the Georgics and Eclogues grew from this background, but later legend transformed the modest family farm into the idyllic birthplace of the poet of Rome.

He was educated at Cremona, Milan and Rome. The ancient biographical tradition says that he studied rhetoric, medicine, astronomy and philosophy before settling on poetry. He joined the Epicurean circle of Siro at Naples, where he absorbed Greek philosophical teaching and the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes and the Roman neoterics. Naples, ancient Parthenope, became his adopted home. He later described himself as nurtured in sweetest Parthenope and devoted to obscure pursuits of peace.

The traditional biography connects his earliest poetry with the confiscation of land after the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE. Octavian rewarded his veterans with property taken from communities in northern Italy, and the Eclogues dramatise dispossessed shepherds, disrupted farms and the uncertainty of rural life. It is tempting to identify Tityrus in Eclogue One with Virgil himself, whose farm is restored by a young god, but the poem is pastoral fiction. The biographical reading cannot be proved from the text.

Virgil entered the circle of Gaius Maecenas, the wealthy adviser and patron of Octavian. Through Maecenas he became intimate with Horace, Varius Rufus, Plotius Tucca and other leading writers. He was also connected with Asinius Pollio, Cornelius Gallus and the poetic circles of the late Republic. His poems from the 40s and 30s show how the wars of Caesar's heirs transformed the Italian landscape and the poet's art. Pastoral song becomes a vehicle for land, politics, love and loss.

The Eclogues, also called the Bucolics or pastorals, are a collection of ten hexameter poems composed between about 42 and 39 or 38 BCE. They adapt the bucolic poetry of Theocritus to Roman circumstances. Shepherds sing beneath trees, trade verses, court lovers, mourn dead friends and lament lost land. The collection creates Arcadia not as a real Greek region but as an ideal landscape in which poetry can survive amid history.

Eclogue One shows Tityrus resting in the shade and praising the young god who allowed him to keep his land, while Meliboeus describes exile and dispossession. Eclogue Two gives Corydon's hopeless love for the beautiful Alexis. Eclogue Three stages a singing contest filled with insults, riddles and rural boasts. Eclogue Four, addressed to Asinius Pollio, predicts the return of a golden age through the birth of a mysterious child. Because the poem later seemed to predict the birth of Christ, it became the so-called Messianic Eclogue.

Eclogue Five has two shepherds sing of Daphnis, first dead and then deified. Eclogue Six presents Silenus, bound by shepherds, singing a song that moves from the creation of the world through mythic history. Eclogue Seven is another singing contest between Corydon and Thyrsis. Eclogue Eight contains Damon's song of rejected love and Alphesiboeus' song of a woman trying to draw her absent lover home with magic. Eclogue Nine dramatises another land seizure through the voices of Moeris and Lycidas. Eclogue Ten brings the historical elegist Cornelius Gallus into Arcadia, where love itself threatens the pastoral world.

The Eclogues made pastoral one of the great genres of European literature. Sannazaro, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton and countless later writers inherited the dialogue of song and land, peace and exile. Virgil's shepherds are artificial in the sense that their language is learned and their landscape idealised, but the poems carry genuine anxiety about civil war, confiscation and the future of Italy.

After the Eclogues, Maecenas encouraged Virgil to write a didactic poem on agriculture. The Georgics appeared around 30 or 29 BCE after years of composition. The four books teach the care of crops, trees and vines, livestock and horses, and bees. Their subject is rural labour, but their range extends to weather signs, plagues, myth, philosophy, Roman politics and the place of human beings within nature.

Book One teaches the farmer how to choose fields, plough, sow, manure, prune, harvest and read the weather. It ends with a terrifying catalogue of omens that preceded civil war and Caesar's death: eclipses, comets, earthquakes, storms and rivers of blood. Work is necessary, but it does not protect humanity from political violence. Book Two celebrates trees and vines, praising Italy in the famous Laus Italiae, a hymn to the land's climate, crops, cities and peoples. Book Three treats horses, cattle, sheep, goats and the diseases that destroy herds, ending with the grotesque plague of Noricum. Book Four turns to bees and ends with the story of Aristaeus, whose bees die and are restored through a mysterious ritual, within which Virgil tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The Georgics combine technical instruction with literary meditation. Virgil follows Hesiod's Works and Days, Aratus' weather signs, Nicander's didactic poetry, Lucretius' Epicurean epic and Callimachus' refined learnedness. Yet the poem refuses a simple philosophy of nature. Work is noble and necessary; nature is fruitful and dangerous; civilisation depends on labour, discipline and order; and peace is precious because war lies just beyond the field. Augustus appears as the ruler under whom Italy may recover, but the poem's optimism is hard-won rather than naive.

The composition of the Aeneid occupied the last eleven years of Virgil's life, from 29 to 19 BCE. Propertius already announced the forthcoming epic in 26 BCE: something greater than the Iliad is being born. The poem's opening makes its subject clear: I sing of arms and the man. Arms point to the Iliad, the man to the Odyssey. Virgil joins the two Homeric poems into one Roman epic, moving Aeneas from wandering exile to Italian war.

The first six books follow the Odyssey. Aeneas flees Troy carrying his aged father Anchises and leading his son Ascanius. Juno, enemy of the Trojans, raises a storm that drives his fleet to Carthage, where Queen Dido receives the exiles. Venus, Aeneas' mother, causes Dido to fall in love with him. Aeneas tells the story of Troy's fall in Book Two, the most famous narrative of the wooden horse, Priam's death and the city's destruction. Book Three recounts the Trojans' wanderings from Thrace to Delos, Crete, the Strophades, Actium, Buthrotum and Sicily. Book Four brings Dido's passion, Aeneas' departure, her curse of eternal enmity between Carthage and Rome, and her suicide on a burning pyre.

Book Five holds funeral games for Anchises in Sicily, including ship races, footraces, boxing, archery and the equestrian exercise of the lusus Troiae. Book Six sends Aeneas to the Underworld. The Sibyl guides him past monsters and the souls of the unburied dead to meet Dido, Deiphobus and Anchises. Anchises shows him the pageant of Roman souls waiting to be born, from Romulus and the kings to Augustus, and ends with the untimely death of Marcellus. The book joins Greek heroic descent to Roman destiny and became one of the principal models for later visions of the afterlife.

The second half of the Aeneid follows the Iliad. Aeneas lands in Latium, where Latinus receives him and promises his daughter Lavinia. Juno and Allecto stir war. Turnus, king of the Rutulians, claims Lavinia and gathers Italian peoples against the Trojans. Book Seven opens the gates of war. Book Eight shows Aeneas travelling to the future site of Rome, where Evander offers him a humble welcome, the Hercules and Cacus story is told, and Vulcan forges a shield depicting Roman history from Romulus to Augustus at Actium. Book Nine contains the night raid of Nisus and Euryalus, the attack on the Trojan camp and Turnus' escape. Book Ten gives the battle in which young Pallas, entrusted to Aeneas by Evander, is killed by Turnus. Book Eleven presents the councils of the Latins and the death of the warrior maiden Camilla. Book Twelve ends the poem with the single combat between Aeneas and Turnus. Turnus begs for mercy, but Aeneas sees Pallas' belt upon him and kills him in fury.

The Aeneid is both a triumph and a lament. It celebrates Roman destiny, pietas, disciplined rule and the peace Augustus claimed to restore. It also records the human cost of empire: Dido's destruction, the fall of Troy, Italian bloodshed, the deaths of Pallas, Nisus, Euryalus, Camilla and Turnus. Aeneas is a model of dutiful endurance, but he often appears sorrowful, hesitant or violent. The poem ends not with reconciliation but with rage. This unresolved ending has generated centuries of debate over whether Virgil wrote an imperial celebration, a subtle critique of Augustan power or a tragedy built inside a national epic.

Virgil's technical mastery is central to his achievement. His hexameter became the model of Latin epic metre. He uses epic repetitions, allusion, symmetry and delayed revelation with extraordinary precision. His style joins grandeur and intimacy. A battle can turn on a simile from nature; a heroic speech can contain a child's grief; a cosmic prophecy can end in private mourning. His language became so authoritative that Roman poets wrote within the Virgilian tradition as much as they competed against it.

The ancient reception began immediately. Horace praised him, Propertius prophesied him and Ovid parodied him. In Amores 1.1 Ovid adapts the opening of the Aeneid to elegy. His Metamorphoses contains a compressed Aeneid in Books Thirteen and Fourteen, transforming Virgilian epic into a world of endless change. Lucan wrote a civil war epic that challenged Virgil's divine machinery and Augustan teleology. Statius ended the Thebaid by telling his poem to follow the Aeneid at a distance and worship its footsteps. Silius Italicus filled the Punica with Virgilian imitation. Roman schoolboys memorised Virgil, and Virgilian lots, passages chosen at random for prophecy, became a popular form of divination.

Augustus and his family occupied a special place in the epic. Virgil read Books Two, Four and Six to the emperor. The ancient story that Octavia fainted when the poet reached the passage about her dead son Marcellus became one of the most famous legends of the poet and patron. Whether or not the event occurred, it expresses the emotional power that Virgil's reading possessed for the imperial household. The Aeneid gave Augustus a Trojan ancestry and cast his victory over Antony and Cleopatra as the latest fulfilment of Rome's destiny.

Virgil's death became a legend of its own. In 19 BCE he travelled with Augustus to Greece, intending to spend three years revising the Aeneid. At Megara he suffered from sunstroke or fever. He returned to Italy weakened and died at Brundisium on 21 September 19 BCE. The ancient life tradition says that he asked Varius and Tucca to burn the unfinished Aeneid. Augustus intervened, and the executors published it with as few editorial changes as possible.

The poem did not survive in a fully polished state. The text contains a number of half-lines and possible rough transitions. The famous half-line Italiam, non sponte sequor in Book Six is not necessarily unfinished; Virgil uses half-lines elsewhere, sometimes for deliberate effect. Nevertheless, the general tradition that the epic had not received Virgil's final three years of revision is credible. Varius and Tucca may have made some changes, but no ancient witness records specific alterations.

Virgil was buried near Naples. The epitaph attributed to him says that Mantua gave him life, the Calabrians death, Naples now holds him, and he sang of pastures, farms and commanders. The cave or tomb connected to Virgil near Naples became a site of pilgrimage and legend. Medieval storytellers made him a magician, and the name Virgil became connected with charms, oracles and hidden powers. The Welsh word fferyll, derived from Virgil, came to mean a magician or chemist.

The medieval reception was immense. Augustine confessed that he had wept over Dido while failing to weep over his own separation from God. Virgil became the model of pagan wisdom. Dante chose him as guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, presenting him as the voice of reason and poetic authority who cannot enter Paradise because he lived before Christ. Eclogue Four was read as a prophecy of Christ, and Virgil acquired a quasi-Christian authority unmatched by any other Roman poet.

The Renaissance made Virgil the model of epic. Petrarch honoured him; Boccaccio and Landino interpreted him allegorically; Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost all stand in the Virgilian tradition. Translations by Gavin Douglas, Surrey, Phaer, Marlowe, Dryden and later poets carried him into English. Dryden's 1697 translation made the Aeneid part of English Augustan literature. His poems inspired paintings of Dido, Aeneas, Orpheus, Aristaeus, the ploughman and the farmer's daily meal.

The Appendix Vergiliana requires careful treatment. It is a collection of minor poems attributed to Virgil in antiquity or by later editors. It includes the Culex or Gnat, Ciris, Dirae, Lydia, Copa, Moretum, Aetna, Priapea, Catalepton, Epigrammata and Elegiae in Maecenatem, along with shorter pieces in some manuscript traditions. Statius and Martial mention the Culex as Virgilian, Quintilian quotes Catalepton Two as Virgil's, and the ancient vitae attribute several early poems to him. Yet the collection as a whole is not Virgilian. Its poems differ in style, metre, date and literary outlook, and most scholars assign them to later imitators or to a mixed pseudo-Virgilian tradition.

The Culex tells how a shepherd kills a gnat that has saved him from a snake, then dreams that the gnat reproaches him and receives a tomb. It was interpreted in antiquity as Virgil's earliest poem, but the surviving poem alludes to the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, making a juvenile date impossible. Some scholars have revived arguments for its authenticity or for a lost Virgilian Culex behind the extant text, but the standard position treats the poem as a sophisticated pseudo-Virgilian work, probably from the early imperial period.

The Catalepton consists of short poems and epigrams, some of which may preserve genuine early Virgilian pieces. Quintilian's citation gives individual support, but the collection as transmitted mixes authentic possibilities, imitations and later additions. The Ciris is a neoteric epyllion on Scylla's betrayal of her father Nisus for Minos. The Moretum describes the poor farmer Simylus, his African slave Scybale and the preparation of a cheese-and-herb paste. The Copa presents a tavern keeper inviting a traveller to pleasure. The Aetna treats the volcano in didactic form. The Dirae and Lydia appear linked by theme and perhaps authorship.

The Elegiae in Maecenatem cannot be Virgil's work because Maecenas died in 8 BCE, eleven years after Virgil. The poems belong to a later consolation tradition. The Priapea and Epigrammata are collections of obscene or short poems that may contain isolated Virgilian pieces but are not secure works. De Institutione Viri Boni, Est et Non and De Rosis Nascentibus belong to Ausonius, not Virgil. Renaissance editions enlarged the appendix with many spurious pieces, and modern editors print only the core poems under the conventional title.

The accurate record of Virgil's works is therefore clear. Three works are secure: the Eclogues in ten poems, the Georgics in four books and the Aeneid in twelve books. No tragedy, history, prose work or separate philosophical poem survives under secure attribution. The Appendix Vergiliana is a collection of pseudo-Virgilian poems, not a fourth work by Virgil. Individual poems, especially the Culex and pieces in the Catalepton, remain debated, but no complete Appendix poem can be placed in the core canon without qualification.

Virgil's influence rests on the tension within his three major works. The Eclogues turn dispossession into song. The Georgics turn labour into an examination of civilisation. The Aeneid turns imperial destiny into a poem of grief as well as triumph. His shepherd sings beneath a tree threatened by history. His farmer works in a land exhausted by war. His hero reaches Italy only after losing Troy, Creusa, Anchises, Dido and countless companions. The achievement of Rome carries the memory of everything destroyed to build it.