Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro was born in 70 BC into a farming family near Mantua in northern Italy and became Rome's greatest poet. He first wrote the Eclogues, poems of shepherd life, then the Georgics, in praise of the land and its labour, and finally, at Augustus' request, spent the last eleven years of his life on the national epic, the Aeneid. He fell ill and died in 19 BC on his way back from Greece; on his deathbed he asked that the unrevised epic be burned, but Augustus forbade it. Dante made him his guide in the Divine Comedy and called him 'my master'.