After defeating Pompey, Caesar reigned alone until the Ides of March in 44 B.C., when Brutus and Cassius, two senators, assassinated him. Crassus was killed around 53 B.C., and Caesar initiated civil war against Pompey. During Virgil’s youth, the First Triumvirate-Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus-governed the Roman Republic. Before Augustus became emperor, though, internal strife plagued the Roman government. Virgil lived at the height of the first age of the Roman Empire, during the reign of the emperor Octavian, later known as Augustus. Virgil’s writing gained him the recognition of the public, wealth from patrons, and the favor of the emperor. Soon afterward, civil war forced him to flee south to Naples, where seven years later he finished his second work, the Georgics, a long poem on farming. Around 41 B.C., he returned to Mantua to begin work on his Eclogues, which he published in 37 b.c. The son of a farmer, Virgil studied in Cremona, then in Milan, and finally in Rome. The Aeneid Context Virgil, the preeminent poet of the Roman Empire, was born Publius Vergilius Maro on October 15, 70 B.C., near Mantua, a city in northern Italy.
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