Virgil began the Aeneid around 29 BCE, after the Eclogues and the Georgics, and worked on it for about ten years. The ancient life attributed to Suetonius and preserved by Donatus reports that he drafted the whole in prose first, then versified sections out of order as they attracted him, and read parts aloud to Augustus and his household, including book six, at which Octavia is said to have fainted at the lines on her dead son Marcellus.
In 19 BCE he travelled to Greece intending to spend three years revising. He met Augustus in Athens, turned back, fell ill, and died at Brundisium on 21 September. The ancient sources report that he had wanted the manuscript burned as unfinished, and that Augustus overrode this and instructed the literary executors Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca to publish with minimal editing and no additions. Whether the burning request is fact or a story grown around an unrevised masterpiece cannot now be determined; what is certain is that the poem as published contains around fifty-seven incomplete lines, half-verses that trail off, which no editor since has filled in.
The political programme is explicit. The Julian family claimed descent from Iulus, Aeneas' son, and so from Aeneas' mother Venus; the poem makes that lineage the hinge of world history and has Jupiter promise empire without limit. Augustus is named in prophecy twice, in book one and in the parade of souls in book six. This is court poetry in the sense that it serves a regime's account of itself, and it is also a poem full of doubt about what that account costs.