The Aeneid

Troy has fallen, and the prince Aeneas escapes the burning city carrying his old father on his shoulders and leading his young son by the hand. Destined by the gods to found a new home in Italy, he wanders the Mediterranean for years, is shipwrecked at Carthage, where Queen Dido falls in love with him, and descends into the underworld to meet his father's ghost, before fighting a bitter war in Italy against the hero Turnus.

Virgil (70–19 BC) spent the last ten years of his life on the epic, which gave Rome, under the emperor Augustus, a founding story to rival Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. He died before finishing it and asked for it to be burned, but Augustus refused. Dido's tragedy in Book IV is one of literature's great love stories, and Dante later chose Virgil as his guide in The Divine Comedy.