Virgil: His Life and Times

by PeterLevi (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.25

  Virgil, doubtless the most famous of Roman poets, has fired the imagination of generations. Invented, re-invented and adopted in a vast rumbling of scenes, he has become as T.S Eliot pointed out the classic poet for 2000 years. In this biography, Peter Levi discards these appropriations and myths and sets out to reveal the life of Virgil, a poet who surveys us with anxiety. A poet of talent that grows, a friend of Horace and Ovid, the other members of the golden triumvirate of Roman poetry, he was the only one to bear the full idea of the Pax Romana and define the idea of civilization for generations to come. He forged these ideas in their entirety. His poetry may crack under the strain, as Marx's contemporary Mommsen believed, but it does not crumble.