Virgil: Volume II. Aeneid, Books VII-XII. The Minor Poems (Loeb Classical Library)

About this book

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born in 70 BCE near Mantua and was educated at Cremona Milan and Rome. Slow in speech shy in manner thoughtful in mind weak in health he vent back north for a quiet life. Influenced by the group of poets there he may have written some of the doubtful poems included in our Virgilian manuscripts. All his undoubted extant work is written in his perfect hexameters. Earliest comes the collection of ten pleasingly artificial bucolic poems the Eclogues which imitated freely Theocrituss idylls. They deal with pastoral life and love. Before 29 BCE came one of the best of all didactic works the four hooks of Georgics on tillage trees cattle and bees. Virgils remaining years were spent in composing his great not wholly finished epic the Aeneid on the traditional theme of Romes origins through Aeneas of Troy. Inspired by the Emperor Augustuss rule the poem is Homeric in metre and method but influenced also by later Greek and Roman literature philosophy and learning and deeply Roman in spirit. Virgil died in 19 BCE at Brundisium on his way home from Greece where he had intended to round off the Aeneid. He had left in Rome a request that all its twelve books should be destroyed if he were to die then but they were published by the executors of his will. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Virgil is in two volumes.