Born Andes, Cisalpine Gaul, (Lombardy, Italy), 15 October 70 BCE
Died Brundisium (Brindisi, Italy), 20 September 19 BCE
The Roman poet Virgil adapted and incorporated traditional themes and earlier literary treatments of astronomy into his own works. According to ancient accounts and evidence from his poems themselves, Virgil, the most illustrious of Latin poets, was born in the small village of Andes near Mantua in the Po Valley region of Italy. Details of his family circumstances and childhood are uncertain, but he seems to have been educated at Cremona and later at Milan before going to Rome. He also spent time in Naples, where he associated with the Epicurean philosophical community there. In 42 BCE after the victory of Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) in the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, Virgil's family property was confiscated to settle veterans but subsequently restored. After the publication of his earliest poems (circa38 BCE) Virgil was...
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Selected References
Aujac, G. (1984–1991). “Astronomie.” In Enciclopedia Virgiliana. Vol. 1, pp. 382–385. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana.
Braund, S. M. (1997). “Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, edited by Charles Martindale, pp. 204–221, esp. 207–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (For Virgilian cosmology in literary contexts.)
d'Hérouville, P. (1940). L'astronomie de Virgile. Paris: Les Belles Letters. (The standard treatment of Virgilian astronomy.)
Ramsey, John T. and A. Lewis Licht (1997). The Comet of 44 B. C. and Caesar's Funeral Games. Atlanta: Scholars Press, esp. Chap. 4, pp. 61–94 and Chap. 7, pp. 135–153. (For the Sidus Iulium.)
Virgil (1971). The Aeneid of Virgil, a verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press. The Aeneid, translated by R. Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1983.
——— (1982). The Georgics, translated by Robert Wells. Manchester: Carcanet New Press. Georgics. 2 Vols, edited by Richard F. Thomas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 (Latin text and English commentary); Georgics. 2 Vols, edited by R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. (Latin text and English commentary)
——— (1997). Vergil's Eclogues, translated by Barbara Hughes Fowler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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McMahon, J.M. (2007). Virgil [Vergil]. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1426
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