In 19 BC the most celebrated poet in Rome lay dying of fever in Brundisium and begged his friends to burn the unfinished Aeneid. They refused, and the Emperor Augustus stepped in to overrule the dying man’s wish. This episode traces the life of Publius Vergilius Maro from his birth near Mantua in 70 BC, through an expensive education in Cremona, Milan, and Rome, to his decision to abandon rhetoric and politics for Epicurean philosophy and poetry. Sickly, introverted, and nicknamed Parthenius by his schoolmates, Virgil was not built for the Forum, yet his quiet writing drew the attention of the most powerful men in the world.

We look at how the Eclogues processed the trauma of Octavian’s land confiscations through fictional shepherds, how Eclogue 4 was later read by Christians as a prophecy of Christ, and how the patron Maecenas recruited Virgil to write the Georgics, a farming manual that doubles as a meditation on rebuilding a fractured state. The discussion then turns to the Aeneid’s structure, its dark and abrupt ending with the killing of Turnus, and the long debate over whether it is propaganda or a critique of empire. Finally, we follow Virgil’s strange afterlife as a medieval sorcerer, the Sortes Vergilianae, the legend of Virgil in the basket, and Dante’s choice of Virgil as his guide through Hell.

• Why the potter’s-son legend does not match the education Virgil actually received
• How pastoral fiction let Virgil critique Octavian’s regime without inviting retaliation
• The Georgics’ bee society, its plague and Orpheus episodes, and its reading to Octavian after Actium
• The Aeneid’s Homeric structure, Dido’s curse, and the account of Octavia fainting at the Marcellus passage
• The epitaph Virgil reportedly wrote for himself and the ethical question of ignoring an artist’s final wish