Virgil (Past Masters)

Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire, and in his poems we see a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance with profound meditations on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual and the State. From short pastoral poems he progressed to the heroic myth of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, recognized as the greatest masterpiece of Latin literature and an incalculable influence on Dante, Milton, Berlioz, Tennyson, and T.S. Eliot. In this concise introduction to the poetic achievement of Virgil, Griffin explores the thought of this great poet, placing him in his historical and literary context.