Inspirational Quotes by Virgil (Roman Poet)

Virgil (70 BCE–19 BCE,) born Publius Vergilius Maro, was a great Roman Latin poet. He set the archetype of a poet for whom poetry is both a way of life and a means for the deepest individual, cultural, and spiritual inquiry. Virgil’s grand epic, the Aeneid, is one of the most venerated and influential literary works in Western cultural history.

Virgil was born in Cisalpine Gaul in northern Italy. His father was a landlord and a farmer, prominent enough to provide Virgil with a solid education in Cremona, Milan, and finally Rome, where he arrived at the age of 17. He intended to become a lawyer but was too introverted to speak publicly. He also missed the Italian countryside, so he returned to his family’s farm and wrote poetry.

Virgil’s poetic triumph is expressed in three monumental works. His earliest, The Eclogues, celebrated idyllic rustic life and contrasted the present with the natural and the simple life. Virgil’s description of the rural landscape became popular because it reminded everyone of a simple time before a series of civil wars.

At a time when civil wars were tearing down Rome, the regime asked Virgil to write a poem that would influence Romans, who had left the countryside to return home and become farmers again. The Georgics, considered by many his finest work, is a didactic poem about grain production, trees, animal husbandry, and beekeeping. Although the poems formed a practical handbook, they were also entertaining and full of nationalistic paean conveying the love of the land and the lasting wisdom of rural values.

Roman Emperor Augustus was impressed with Virgil’s work and provided him a generous stipend to live on for the rest of his life, which he spent writing. Virgil wrote his epic poem, The Aeneid, based on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and presented the soldier Aeneas, traveling home from the Trojan war to found a new city that would develop into Rome.

Virgil wrote The Aeneid first in prose, and then meticulously transformed it into metered poetry. The poem was unfinished when Virgil died—to be precise, it is almost complete except for a few metrically incomplete lines of verse. The Aeneid is celebrated for its patriotic goal and its probing of the inner meaning of heroism and man’s fate.

Before Virgil died, he instructed that the poem should be destroyed. It is believed that Emperor Augustus himself overrode Virgil’s final desire and saved the Aeneid for posterity. It became the heart of the Roman school curriculum and has been in print for over 2,000 years.

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