The Aeneid, Rome's national epic and one of the literary masterpieces of Western civilization, was begun in 30 B.C., and all of Rome, and especially the royal court, followed its progress. As he refined this work during his later years, Virgil led a comfortable, worry-free life, devoting himself to historical research for the Aeneid and enjoying the luxuries that his father's bequest and the emperor's patronage provided. Especially encouraged by Augustus, to whom the poem is dedicated, he worked on the epic exclusively until his untimely death eleven years later, when the poem was substantially finished but lacked the final polish that, as a perfectionist, Virgil had hoped to give it.
Virgil had planned to spend three years in Greece and Asia revising the Aeneid while visiting the sites it mentions. He got as far as Athens, where he met Augustus, who, returning from a visit to the island of Samos, persuaded the poet to accompany him to Italy. Already in declining health, Virgil became severely ill en route and died in Brundisium — modern Brindisi — on September 21, 19 B.C., close to his fifty-first birthday. On his deathbed, he reportedly composed a short, subtle epitaph for himself, which his friends inscribed on his now-vanished tomb in Naples: "Mantua me genuit; Calabri rapuere; tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces." The epitaph, which translates as "Mantua gave me birth, Calabria took me away, and now Naples holds me; I sang of pastures, farms, leaders," summarizes Virgil's three great works, which chronicle the history of Rome, from shepherds to farmers to soldiers.
Shortly before his death, Virgil requested that the Aeneid manuscript be destroyed, as he did not want to leave it in its unfinished state, but Augustus, mindful of the genius of a work that would long outlive the passing of his empire, wisely countermanded the poet's wish. The emperor assigned two of Virgil's friends, Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to edit the manuscript for publication, but he cautioned them not to make any poetic additions. The work, completed near the end of 18 B.C., achieved immediate acceptance throughout the Mediterranean world as the definitive Roman epic.
