Who they were
Virgil was the pre-eminent poet of ancient Rome, writing in the age of Augustus.
What they did
He wrote the Eclogues and the Georgics and, above all, the Aeneid, an epic tracing the Trojan Aeneas’s journey to Italy as the mythic ancestor of Rome — a national epic that also honored Augustus’s regime. He left it unfinished at his death and reputedly asked for it to be burned.
Legacy
The Aeneid became the central classic of Latin literature and European education. Virgil was revered through the Middle Ages and was chosen by Dante as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy.