Virgil died in 19 BC having asked that the Aeneid be burned. He had spent eleven years on it, had not finished it to his satisfaction, and left instructions that the manuscript be destroyed rather than published incomplete. Augustus overruled the request. Two of Virgil’s literary executors, Varius and Tucca, published what existed. The unfinished poem became the foundational text of Western literature, the work that every subsequent European writer of ambition had to read and respond to, the poem against which Dante measured himself when he chose Virgil as his guide through Hell. The work Virgil thought too imperfect to survive has survived everything.