Vergil (Encyclopedia of the Ancient World)
Life
Vergil, the greatest of the Roman poets, sprang from peasant origins. The Roman historian Suetonius reports that his father was either a potter or a day-laborer who married his employer’s daughter. Her name, Magia Pollia, contributed to the medieval practice of reading Vergil’s works as poems of prophecy. This peculiar form of bibliomancy, which came to be known as the sortes Vergilianae, also accounts for the corrupted form of the poet’s name, “Virgil” (from virga, “wand”), which so...
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