20 BC – 10 BCs

Events in 20 BC – 10 BC 1

• 19 BC Virgil completes the Aeneid Publius Vergilius Maro — Virgil — dies in 19 BC leaving the Aeneid, Rome's national epic, incomplete. He had worked on it for eleven years on Augustus's commission. The poem traces the Trojan hero Aeneas — ancestor of Romulus and of the Julian family — from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome's destiny in Italy, weaving myth, history and political flattery into twelve books of Latin hexameter. It becomes the central text of Roman education and will shape Western literature for two millennia.