Virgil is the name of a Roman poet who lived about 2,000 years ago (70-19 BC). His full Latin name was Publius Vergilius Maro, and in Latin his family name is spelled Vergilius — which is why you sometimes see the English spelling "Vergil" in older or more careful books. Both spellings mean the same man; "Virgil" is the common one now.

He wrote a very long poem called The Aeneid. It follows a man named Aeneas, who escapes from the city of Troy after the Greeks burn it, wanders the sea for years, and finally reaches Italy — where his descendants will one day build Rome. So the poem is really a story about where Rome came from. Romans loved it the way a country loves its own founding story.

You meet the name in three kinds of places. In a literature class, Virgil is one of the two or three names people expect an educated person to know. In discussions of Dante's Divine Comedy, Virgil is the character who guides Dante through Hell — Dante admired him that much. And as a first name for men, mostly older American men, it is a real name people are given, so "my uncle Virgil" has nothing to do with poetry.

Because the name is short and stands for "the great old poet," people sometimes use it loosely for a guide or a wise older figure: "he was my Virgil in that company." That use is literary and a bit showy — you will read it more often than you will hear it.