VIRGIL, Roman poet, born; the author of epics in three modes: the Bucolics (or Eclogues), the Georgics and the substantially completed Aeneid, the last being an epic poem in the heroic mode, which comprised twelve books (as opposed to 24 in each of the epic poems by Homer) and became the Roman Empire’s national epic.  

In themes the ten eclogues develop and vary epic song, relating it first to Roman power, then to love, both homosexual (ecl. 2) and panerotic (ecl. 3), then again to Roman power and Caesar’s heir imagined as authorizing Virgil to surpass Greek epic and refound tradition, shifting back to love then as a dynamic source considered apart from Rome. Hence in the remaining eclogues Virgil withdraws from his newly minted Roman mythology and gradually constructs a new myth of his own poetics: he casts the remote Greek region of Arcadia, home of the god Pan, as the place of poetic origin itself.

In passing he again rings changes on erotic themes, such as requited and unrequited homosexual and heterosexual passion, tragic love for elusive women or magical powers of song to retrieve an elusive male. He concludes by establishing  Arcadia as a poetic ideal that still resonates in Western literature and visual arts. Since Virgil depicted his hero Aeneus seeking advice from his father Anchises in the underworld, Dante Alighieri made the shade of Virgil his own guide for his pilgrimage through the inferno and part of purgatory in his own epic poem The Divine Comedy.