Virgil

The Vergilius Vaticanus — the Vatican Virgil — is the oldest illustrated book to survive from antiquity. It was made around 400 AD and contains pictures alongside the text of the Aeneid. The illustrations show Dido's banquet, the fall of Troy, the storm at sea. They are the earliest visual interpretations of my poem.

I spent eleven years on the Aeneid and...

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit — perhaps one day it will be a joy to remember even these things. Endure what fortune sends, and keep your soul composed through hardship.

Amor vincit omnia — love conquers all things; let us too yield to love. Trust not too much to appearances — beauty and virtue are not always found together.

Death twitches my ear: 'Live,' he says — 'I am coming.' The descent to hell is easy; night and day the gates stand open. But to retrace your steps to the upper air — that is the task.

I sing of arms and the man. Arma virumque cano. I began the Aeneid with these words because I wished to signal what it was: both an epic of war, in the tradition of the Iliad, and an epic of a man's character, in the tradition of the Odyssey. But Aeneas is neither Achilles nor Odysseus. His distinguishing virtue is pietas — devotion to duty, to family, to...

Arms and the man I sing, who first from the shores of Troy came, exiled by fate, to Italy and the Lavinian coast. Founding is not gentle. Before Rome becomes a destiny, it is wandering, shipwreck, memory, grief, and the command to continue.

I am singing of arms and the man — arma virumque cano. I began the Aeneid and knew it would take a decade. I died before I could revise it. I asked Augustus to burn the manuscript. He refused. One wonders whether the poet or the emperor had the better judgment about what the world needed.

Omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus Amori — Love conquers all; let us too yield to love. I put this in the Eclogues and am now famous for it in a way I never expected. It was spoken by a shepherd boy, which should have made it trivial. Instead it became the epigraph of half the love letters ever written in Latin.

The descent to Avernus is easy; the gate of black Dis stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps and escape to the upper air — this is the task, this the toil. Aeneas went to the underworld and returned. Most who descend have neither guide nor golden bough.

Happy is the man who has been able to learn the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, inexorable fate, and the noise of greedy Acheron. Lucretius taught me this. The farmer who knows the reasons for the seasons is a philosopher in his fields.

Do not yield to evils, but go boldly against them as your fortune allows you. Aeneas was told this in the underworld and immediately sailed into new catastrophe. The advice is correct. The problem is that fortune does not consult us before it sets its allowances.

The mosaic from Sousse — made three hundred years after my death — shows me seated with the Muses of history and tragedy on either side, holding a scroll of the Aeneid. I am reading the line: Musa, mihi causas memora — Muse, recall to me the causes. The beginning. The question that the whole poem is trying to answer: why do empires rise? What do they cost?...