Who is Virgil in Dante's Inferno?

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.) was one of the greatest Roman poets and is Dante the Pilgrim's guide through Hell and most of Purgatory, Virgil's Aeneid, tells the story of Aeneas's founding of Rome after the Trojan War and was a major inspiration for Dante's Divine Comedy. In the famous Book 6 of the Aeneid, the pagan Aeneas travels to the underworld, where he sees the wicked suffering and the virtuous living a life of comfort and ease. This episode provided Dante, along with other literary accounts of underworld journeys, with the basic structure for his vision of the Christian Hell. During the Middle Ages, Virgil had a reputation as a magician and wizard. St. Augustine, the Emperor Constantine, and others thought Virgil's Fourth Eclogue prophesied Christ's birth. Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil encounter the Roman poet Statius (45-96) on the Mountain of Purgatory (Purgatory 21), where Statius claims that Virgil's Fourth Eclogue was responsible for his conversion to Christianity.

Virgil's Aeneid was the basic Latin textbook in medieval schools. Students learned grammar, rhetoric and the language by translating Virgil's Latin. Dante would have been no exception. Since Latin was the language of the literate in the Middle Ages and since most people learned it from Virgil, his Aeneid was one of the most well-known books. It is still used in many Latin courses today.