place among those

Phoebo digna locuti.

Before he had completed his work the poet set out for Greece to visit the
places which he had described and which in his fastidious zeal he seems
to have thought in need of the same careful examination that he had
accorded his Italian scenery. Three years he still thought requisite for
the completion of his epic. But at Megara he fell ill, and being carried
back in Augustus' company to Brundisium he died there, in 19 B.C. at the
age of fifty-one. Before his death he gave instructions that his epic
should be burned and that his executors, his life-long friends Varius and
Tucca, should suppress whatever of his manuscripts he had himself failed
to publish. In order to save the Aeneid, however, Augustus interposed
the supreme authority of the state to annul that clause of the will. The
minor works were probably left unpublished for some time. Indeed, there
is no convincing proof that such works as the Ciris, the Aetna, and the
Catalepton were circulated in the Augustan age.

The ashes were carried to his home at Naples and buried beneath a
tombstone bearing the simple epitaph written by some friend who knew the
poet's simplicity of heart:

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.

His tomb[12] was on the roadside outside the city, as was usual--Donatus
says on the highway to Puteoli, nearly two miles from the gates. Recent
examination of the region has shown that by some cataclysm of the middle
ages not mentioned in any record, the road and the tomb have subsided,