Virgil was born October 15, 70 b.c., at Andes, near Mantua, and died in 19 b.c. He studied at Cremona and from there went to Milan and Rome, where he studied rhetoric. In 41 b.c., he met Horace. The Aeneid ("Story of Aeneas") took some eleven years to write (29-19 b.c.). It is an epic in twelve books, 12,847 lines. Virgil "in defiance of history and chronology" added "the legend of the chaste Dido, who killed herself to avoid a second marriage." The Aeneid is the story of the founding of Rome by one of the survivors of the fall of Troy, Aeneas. (The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., pp. 1123-1128).