Supreme poet of the Latin language (70–19 BC), who lived through the collapse of the Republic into Augustus's empire and wrote the Aeneid — Rome's national epic, giving the new order a heroic founding myth and a sense of destiny. The poem also served Augustus's politics directly, since Augustus claimed descent from Aeneas. Virgil's polished, melancholy hexameters set the standard for epic and for Latin itself. He was so revered that medieval Christians read him as a pagan prophet of Christ, and Dante made him his guide through Hell and Purgatory.
According to ancient tradition, on his deathbed in 19 BC the most celebrated poet in Rome asked his friends to burn the great epic he had spent more than ten years writing. The Aeneid was nearly finished, but Virgil thought it imperfect and wanted it destroyed. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, overrode the request and ordered the poem saved. That single decision shaped Western literature. The Aeneid became the national epic of Rome, the model against which later poets measured themselves, and one of the most studied poems in the Western tradition. The poet who wanted his masterpiece in ashes instead gave Rome's empire one of its defining literary myths.