For leaders who built empires throughout history, The Aeneid has been a blueprint for how to take over land that belongs to ...

Historians are skeptical that this has a basis in fact, but it was useful propaganda for Augustus Caesar, who established himself as Rome’s first emperor while Virgil was writing his poem.

His rural upbringing influenced all his poetry, especially his earlier work, like the “Eclogues”. As he was growing up, Rome was in crisis, with power-hungry nobles fighting between themselves.

His name only appears once, in a poem written to him by his friend ... In 96 AD, after Domitian was murdered, Juvenal returned to Rome. With no money or career, he struggled to survive and ...

Mort's collection "Music for the Dead and Resurrected" won the 2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. Her other honors include a 2021 Rome Prize in literature and ...

therefore Rome, and her empire, are sanctioned by the heavens. That divine sanctioning of empire is what many leaders in the decades and centuries that followed took from the poem, too.