The Aeneid , Rome's national epic and one of the literary masterpieces of Western civilization, was begun in 30 B. As he refined this work during his later years, Virgil led a comfortable, worry-free life, devoting himself to historical research for the Aeneid and enjoying the luxuries that his father's bequest and the emperor's patronage provided.
Especially encouraged by Augustus, to whom the poem is dedicated, he worked on the epic exclusively until his untimely death eleven years later, when the poem was substantially finished but lacked the final polish that, as a perfectionist, Virgil had hoped to give it. Virgil had planned to spend three years in Greece and Asia revising the Aeneid while visiting the sites it mentions.
He got as far as Athens, where he met Augustus, who, returning from a visit to the island of Samos, persuaded the poet to accompany him to Italy. Already in declining health, Virgil became severely ill en route and died in Brundisium — modern Brindisi — on September 21, 19 B.
On his deathbed, he reportedly composed a short, subtle epitaph for himself, which his friends inscribed on his now-vanished tomb in Naples: "Mantua me genuit; Calabri rapuere; tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces. Shortly before his death, Virgil requested that the Aeneid manuscript be destroyed, as he did not want to leave it in its unfinished state, but Augustus, mindful of the genius of a work that would long outlive the passing of his empire, wisely countermanded the poet's wish.
The emperor assigned two of Virgil's friends, Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to edit the manuscript for publication, but he cautioned them not to make any poetic additions. The work, completed near the end of 18 B. Three manuscripts of the Aeneid from the fourth and fifth centuries are the basis of the text of the poem in use today. Surprisingly, these manuscripts are relatively free from mistakes and generally agree with one another — evidence that the scribes who reproduced them were working with consistently good, earlier copies of the poem, which had to be painstakingly copied again and again by hand, a method that invited error.
It was the custom when composing by hand, as Virgil did, to write on tablets coated with wax. The text was etched into the wax surface by means of a stylus, an instrument with a sharp point at one end and a flat edge, used for erasing, at the other. Later, professional copyists, using a primitive pen and ink, transcribed the individual books of the Aeneid onto papyrus, a form of paper made from the papyrus plant. The papyrus sheets were then glued together and rolled into a scroll.
The reader would hold the scroll in one hand and unwind it with the other onto another spool, a very unwieldy method.
After Virgil's death, the Aeneid magnified his fame. It was studied in schools, and numerous biographies of the poet were written — a sure sign of popular interest.
Virgil's models were the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. The Aeneid can be divided into two parts of six books each or into three parts of four books each. Books 1 through 4, organized around Aeneas's narration of the destruction of Troy and his wanderings, have Carthage as their dramatic setting; Books 5 through 8 act as entertainment between the drama of 1 through 4 and 9 through 12, the story of the fighting in Italy.
Moreover, the even-numbered books are highly dramatic, while the odd-numbered books reflect a lessening of tension and have less dramatic value. Virgil worked on the Aeneid for the last eleven years of his life.
The composition of it, from a prose writing outline, was never easy for him. Augustus once wrote asking to see part of the uncompleted work. Virgil replied that he had nothing to send and added, "I have undertaken a task so difficult that I think I must have been mentally ill to have begun it. In 19 B. Virgil resolved to spend three more years on his epic after taking a trip to Greece, perhaps to check on some details necessary for his revision.
At Megara he contracted a fever and became so ill that he returned to Brundisium, where he died on September He left instructions that the Aeneid should be burned, but Augustus refused and ordered Various and Tucca, two friends of the poet, to edit it for publication. It appeared in 17 B. Gale, Monica. Virgil on the Nature of Things.
New York: Cambridge University Press, Levi, Peter. Virgil: His Life and Times. It describes the journey of the Trojan hero Aeneas to Italy and the wars he undertook once he had arrived there. But the poem does not merely give a version of Rome's earliest origins - it alludes to the whole course of Roman history, which will culminate in the reign of Augustus.
Thus the tragedy of Dido, the queen of Carthage, who was driven to kill herself by her passion for Aeneas, is the ultimate origin of the Punic Wars - Rome's later wars against Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean. Similarly, the struggle of Aeneas, as he attempted to found a city for his people, also in some respects prefigures that of Augustus in re-establishing Rome.
Virgil himself died of a fever in 19 BC. On his deathbed he is supposed to have ordered the 'Aeneid' to be destroyed, but on Augustus's orders it was published.
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