Publius Vergilius Maro, now called Vergil or Virgil, was the greatest epic poet of the Roman world. Born in Mantua in 70 BCE, he did with the pen for Augustus what Agrippa did with the sword: establish a Stoic, autocratic order of the civilized world. His Aeneid, a Homeric epic of Rome’s ancestor, Aeneas, synthesized mythological, patriotic and philosophical justifications for Roman domination under a sovereign son of god.

Book Six describes Aeneas’ arrival at Cumae, where he meets the Sybil prophetess, who leads him into Hades to meet his father’s shade. He explores in graphic detail the realms of the dead, the infernal torments of Tartarus, and the purgatorial paradise of Elysium. Thus, Vergil guides both pilgrim and poet Dante in Aeneas’ footsteps, all the way from the dark wood to the ascension of souls from Lethe’s waters.

The Aeneid was written in Latin dactylic hexameter, a didactic epic meter borrowed from the Greeks. Each line, averaging 13 syllables, is divided into six “feet”, each consisting of either a dactyl (long syllable and two short syllables) or a spondee (two long syllables). Every fifth foot must be a dactyl, the sixth a spondee. For example, line 295 of Aeneid VI (long syllables capitalized):

Hinc via Tartarei quae fert Acherontis ad undas
 
HINC via / TARtare/I QUAE / FERT acher/ONtis ad / UNDAS
 
Hence leads the path to the waters of the Tartarean Acheron

Vergil died at Brundisium in 19 BCE, two decades before the birth of Jesus. However, Vergil’s fourth Eclogue, read by Augustine as prosaic of Christ’s coming, preserved his fame far into the Middle Ages, despite the Church’s intolerance of paganism and the values of antiquity. Through the Inferno, Vergil’s inspiration reawakens ancient legends in harmony with the dominant Christian mythos.