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Virgil

Virgil (70–19 BCE) was born near Mantua, studied in Milan, Rome, and Naples, and wrote under the shadow of Augustus. The Eclogues are pastoral with a political weather; the Aeneid is Rome's epic of a man who leaves a burning city and must found another. Duty, piety, and the cost of a future: Aeneas carries them like luggage he cannot put down. Virgil died at Brundisium with the poem, tradition says, still unfinished. The Latin line taught Europe how an epic should breathe.

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