Ahve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith, and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode X L I I. Virgil.

If you know anything about Roman poetry, it's probably about the work of the poet Virgil.

Best known for his work on the blockbuster epic The Aniid, even if you don't know a storyline, you definitely know something that it's inspired.

This episode was a listener request from Carlos Valoso in Brazil.

Here's Rianna Evans.

Publius Maro, better known as Virgil, is for very good reason the best known poet from ancient Rome,

often considered the finest exponent of the Latin language.

The most important Roman poet, he's writing at the time of Augustus and he's quite closely associated with the Augustan regime in some ways.

Now Virgil was born in 70 b.C. and he was born in a part of Italy which technically isn't really considered Italy at the time he's born he's born in the very north

The time we call Kisalpine Gaul

Educated in the way that a reasonably wealthy Roman family would educate their son, but he's not from a politically active family.

He's kind of on the outer a little bit coming from that bit of Northern Italy. So we don't know too much about

his early life, but we do know that he was absolutely grounded in Greek and Roman literature to the extent that a lot of people for instance

my colleague Chris Mackie think that he knew every word of Homer back to front that

he could have just recited the Iliad and the Odyssey to you.

It's actually not that unlikely considering that memory is treated in a very different way in

antiquity so you know memorizing lines of poetry is

something that is normalized for them and it's something that actually is part of

their education. It's a lot more expensive to get written texts. So being able to

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