Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil between 29 and 19 BC. Virgil died on the 21st of September, 19 BC, before he could finish revising the poem, and it was published posthumously on the orders of Augustus.
The Aeneid comprises 9,896 lines written in dactylic hexameter, divided into twelve books. The first six books follow Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Italy, often compared to Homer's Odyssey, while the latter six cover the war in Latium, paralleling the Iliad.
The central theme is pietas, the Roman ideal of selfless duty toward family, gods, and society. Aeneas is called "pious Aeneas" twenty times in the poem and serves as the embodiment of this virtue, repeatedly sacrificing personal desire to fulfill his fated role as the ancestor of the Romans.
Virgil considered the poem unfinished and left instructions that the manuscript should be burned. He had not completed his revision and reportedly also objected to one scene in Book 8 for its incompatibility with Roman moral virtues. Augustus overrode the request and ordered the poem published with minimal editorial changes.
The poem provides mythic legitimacy to Augustus by tracing his lineage through Aeneas' son Iulus to the gens Julia, the family of Julius Caesar. Book 6 contains a prophecy naming Augustus as the man who will bring a new Age of Gold to Rome, and the shield made for Aeneas in Book 8 depicts Augustus' victory at the battle of Actium in 31 BC.
The first complete Anglic translation was the Scots Eneados by Gavin Douglas, completed in 1513. Later notable English versions include translations by John Dryden in the 17th century, Robert Fitzgerald in 1981, Robert Fagles in 2006, and Shadi Bartsch in 2021, among many others.