By 31 BC, Augustus was the sole ruler of Rome, changing the Republic into an Empire. Octavian, now called Augustus, defeated Lepidus and sent him into exile, and defeated Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, after which Antony and his wife Cleopatra committed suicide. The Second Triumvirate was successful and divided rule of the Roman Republic between themselves, but soon began to fight. Octavian, a young man who had been adopted into Caesar's family, created the Second Triumvirate along with Marc Antony and Lepidus to avenge Caesar's death. Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC by men who wanted to preserve the Republic. After a civil war, Caesar had proclaimed himself the sole dictator of Rome. First, Caesar had unofficially set up a three-man leadership system called the Triumvirate. The old system of the Roman Republic, governed by two leaders called consuls, had crumbled during the time of Julius Caesar. Virgil composed the Aeneid during a turning point in Rome's history. He died of an illness he caught on a trip to Greece before he'd finished revisions. He cared so much about its perfection that he reportedly only wrote a few lines a day. Virgil worked on the Aeneid from approximately age 39 to his death at 50.

Again, though, the Georgics are more complex than they first seem, as the work shifts between praising the ease and joy of farming, and highlighting the tragedies of disease and natural disasters. His second major work, the Georgics, follows the form of earlier didactic Greek works, supposedly teaching lessons about farming. On the surface, these poems are about singing shepherds and countryside life, but they already contain the themes of love, heartbreak, and loss of homeland that run throughout so much of Virgil's work. At around age 28, he began writing his first major work, the Eclogues, a collection of ten pastoral poems. He was probably from a well-off, landowning family, because they had the money to send him to study throughout Italy. No biography of Virgil from his time survives, but scholars have pieced together his probable life story from commentaries on his works.

The essential aeneid