Virgil

Virgil grew up on a farm near Mantua in northern Italy, studied rhetoric and philosophy, and rose under the patronage of Augustus's inner circle after his early pastoral poems, the Eclogues and Georgics, established him as Rome's foremost living poet.

He spent the last decade of his life on the Aeneid, a deliberate national epic modeled on Homer that traces the Trojan refugee Aeneas's journey to Italy, through shipwreck, a doomed love affair with the Carthaginian queen Dido, and war, to found the line that becomes Rome, casting Roman destiny itself as an epic subject worthy of Homer's gods and heroes.

He died in 19 BCE with the poem still unpolished, reportedly asking that the manuscript be burned; Augustus overruled him, and it became the central text of Roman education for the rest of antiquity.