Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire. In his poems we see a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance and beauty with profound meditation on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual to the State. Griffin examines Virgil's work, from his short pastoral poems on love, to his heroic myth of the founding of Rome, The Aeneid, and discusses its incalculable influence on writers from Dante and Milton to Tennyson and T.S. Eliot.