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pp. 248, “Virgil, doubtless the most famous of Roman poets, has fired the imagination of generations of writers, poets, and readers. His work has been invented, reinvented, and triumphantly adapted by some of the greatest poets throughout the tragic course of Western history–from Dante to Chaucer to Milton–and Virgil has become the classic poet for two thousand years.

In this biography, the eminent classicist Peter Levi uses Virgil’s poems, like the Eclogues, Georgics, his epic, The Aeneid, as well as his historical and archeological evidence, to discard many of the myths surrounding Virgil’s life. In doing so, he uncovers the life of a poet whose powerful imagination and ethereal ability helped shape the epic vision of modern man. Indeed, Virgil’s densely written and beautifully complex verse dominated Augustan Rome, the period of unprecedented prosperity, peace, and expansion that inaugurated the Golden Age of Roman poetry. Virgil, in fact, was the one poet who most fully understood the Roman Empire’s enduring legacy and through his poetry defined the idea of civilization for generations to come.

Although contemporary critics and readers often overlook Virgil’s genius, Levi demonstrates that to neglect Virgil is to truncate many of the literary foundations of our culture. Here, then, Levi presents the most searching reassessment of the Roman genius since T.S. Eliot’s Virgil and the Christian World in 1946.

Insightful and poignant, Virgil is a remarkable biography of a poet who has single-handedly exerted an influence on Western culture rivaled only by the teachings of Christianity.”