Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC) was a Roman poet, born near Mantua in northern Italy to a farming family. His Eclogues, pastoral poems written during the civil wars, brought him the patronage of Maecenas and the friendship of Augustus; the Georgics, a poem on farming, followed. He spent his last eleven years on the Aeneid, an epic on the Trojan founder of the Roman people, and was returning from Greece to revise it when he fell ill and died at Brindisi, asking that the manuscript be burned. Augustus ordered it published instead. For the Middle Ages he was the master poet and Dante's guide through Hell.