Who wrote the epic poem 'The Aeneid'?

The epic poem The Aeneid was written by Virgil, the major Roman poet of the Augustan age. Its Latin title is Aeneis, and the poem follows Aeneas, a Trojan survivor destined to become an ancestor of the Roman people.

Virgil composed The Aeneid between about 29 and 19 BC, though he died before giving the poem a final revision. The work contains twelve books in dactylic hexameter. Its first half follows Aeneas’s wandering journey from the ruins of Troy toward Italy, while its second half describes the war he fights in Latium.

Readers often confuse Virgil with Homer because The Aeneid deliberately engages with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The opening six books echo the Odyssey’s travel narrative, and the final six resemble the Iliad’s warfare. Virgil’s poem is not Greek, however: it is a Latin epic that helped provide Rome with a heroic foundation story.