You'd think you would always side with a poet over an emperor meddling in his work, but thank god Augustus overruled Publius Vergilius Maro’s final wish. For ten years, Virgil had been working on an epic poem, the first half of which would be modeled on the Odyssey and the second half of which would be the Roman answer to the Illiad. Traveling with Augustus from Italy to Greece, Virgil became ill with a fever and died at fifty in the harbor at Brundisi, leaving instructions that his poem be destroyed because it was unfinished. Instead, Augustus had it published and The Aeneid was immediately recognized as the masterpiece it remains today. Although the epic includes a moving episode between the male lovers Nisus and Euryalus, Virgil’s greatest gay works are in his The Eclogues. The second of those poems is Alexis, which begins unabashedly
The shepherd Corydon with love was fired/ For fair Alexis, his own master's joy
So ardent is the slave’s desire for his owner’s favorite youth, and so fine is the poem, that the name Corydon has endured for 2,000 years as a symbol of same-sex love, from the Elizabethan sonnets of Richard Barnfield to the title of Andre Gide’s defense of homosexuality in 1920. In 2009 reader Ed Oliver reminded everyone about the Georgics, his favorite work by Virgil.
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