Today is the birthday, in 70 BCE, of Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil. He was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid.
He stood as the most popular Latin poet through late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, exerting major influence on Western literature. T. S. Eliot famously began a lecture on the subject “What Is a Classic?” by asserting as self-evidently true that “whatever the definition we arrive at, it cannot be one which excludes Virgil – we may say confidently that it must be one which will expressly reckon with him”.
As a schoolboy, I spent hours reading and translating his work and cursing him prolifically; I still remember parts: “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit litora” (“I sing of arms and of a man, an exile driven by fate, who first came from the shores of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian coasts”).
Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia by Jean-Baptiste Wicar,
Here’s Fleetwood Mac telling us lies… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCGD9dT12C0
