VIRGIL

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IPA (US):

• VIRGIL (noun)
  The noun VIRGIL has 1 sense:

1. a Roman poet; author of the epic poem 'Aeneid' (70-19 BC)

  Familiarity information: VIRGIL used as a noun is very rare.

• VIRGIL (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A Roman poet; author of the epic poem 'Aeneid' (70-19 BC)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

Publius Vergilius Maro; Vergil; Virgil

Instance hypernyms:

poet (a writer of poems (the term is usually reserved for writers of good poetry))

 Context examples 

We all sat in amazed silence round the fire, like the heroes of Virgil when the Harpies came down upon them.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at every sounding line.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

It is as well just to have a tag or two of Horace or Virgil: ‘sub tegmine fagi,’ or ‘habet fœnum in cornu,’ which gives a flavour to one’s conversation like the touch of garlic in a salad.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I could plainly discover whence one family derives a long chin; why a second has abounded with knaves for two generations, and fools for two more; why a third happened to be crack-brained, and a fourth to be sharpers; whence it came, what Polydore Virgil says of a certain great house, Nec vir fortis, nec foemina casta; how cruelty, falsehood, and cowardice, grew to be characteristics by which certain families are distinguished as much as by their coats of arms; who first brought the pox into a noble house, which has lineally descended scrofulous tumours to their posterity.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)