Description
This introduction was first compiled half a century ago for the Temple Classics. I have now revised it with the help of my friend Mr L. P. Wilkinson (author of Ovid Recalled and of other works of Classical Scholarship), and I wish to offer him my warmest thanks. The life of Publius Vergilius Maro, whom the modern world knows as ‘Virgil,’ was not eventful. He was born in 70 B.C., in the country near Mantua. His father, who was probably a farmer, gave him a good education. He went to school at Cremona and Milan, and afterwards took a course of rhetoric at Rome. He is said also to have studied Greek under Par- thenius, an admirer of the Alexandrine school of poetry; and (inspired perhaps by Lucretius’s newly published De Rerum Natura) he turned towards poetry himself, abandoned his intended profession of the law, left Rome, and went to Naples to study Epicurean philosophy under Siro. Later on he moved away from Epicureanism to a stoical and mystical point of view more suited to his temperament; but he continued to live in or near Naples for most of his career.
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