Virgil

Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire. His Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid represent a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance and poetic beauty with profound meditations on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual to the state. From short pastoral poems on love and song Virgil progressed to the heroic myth of the founding of Rome. The Aeneid, immediately recognized in its own time as the greatest masterpiece of Latin literature, has also had incalculable influence on European literature in the two thousand years since its creation. Japser Griffin's short introduction to the poet opens up all these aspects of his works -- his creative genius, the depth of his political sensitivity, and his extraordinary reception in the culture of the western world.

Jasper Griffin is Professor of Classical Literature in the University of Oxford and Fellow of Balliol College.