Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC) was Rome’s pre-eminent poet, author of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid, the national epic that follows the Trojan Aeneas from the ruins of Troy to the founding of the Roman line. He worked on the Aeneid for the last decade of his life under the emperor Augustus and left it unfinished at his death, reportedly asking that it be burned — a wish Augustus overrode. Laocoön’s warning about the horse comes early in Book 2, where Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy.