Virgil, Statius and Dante

Abstract

When Virgil died at Brundisium nineteen years before the birth of Christ, the Aeneid was unpublished and lacked the poet's final revision. But it was not unknown. His occupation with it had excited wide interest and great expectation. He had read parts of it to friends. Three books of it, ii, iv, and vi, he had read to Augustus, whose sister Octavia also was present at the reading of the sixth book and fainted when the poet read the passage at the end which is a tribute to her son Marcellus. Marcellus died in 23 B.C. Six years before that, in 29, the year of Octavian's triple triumph, Virgil had read to him at Atella the four books of the Georgics. And much earlier still, in 40 B.C. he had foretold in an eclogue the coming of a golden age. So later ages thought of Virgil as the court poet of Augustus, though the historian may be inclined to deny that the word ‘court’ can be justly applied to Augustus' household. Certainly for these later ages he was the poet of the empire rather than of the republic. The hope and expectation of his contemporaries was that he would be the poet of Rome and Italy.