Vergil

A farmer’s son is born on the Mantuan plain in 70 B.C.—but even the name he inherits cannot settle where his family came from. Was Vergil Roman, Etruscan, Celtic, or something less easily named?

In the last years of the Roman Republic, northern Italy was a province shaped by migration, citizenship and old rivalries. Tenney Frank begins his biography by testing the legends against what little evidence survives: the poet’s Latin name, his father’s possible farm and pottery, and the uncertain tales told by later biographers. Vergil grew up with the means to study at Rome and Naples and first prepared for public life, yet the path from the Mantuan countryside to poetry cannot be read from ancestry alone. What did this boy inherit from his home—and what did he make of the upheaval around him?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

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