Abstract

Macrobius quotes in his „Saturnalia“ (sat. 1, 24, 11) a letter from Vergil to Augustus, which is commonly accepted as authentic and regarded as a precious document of the friendship between the poet and the Emperor. In this article, however, I shall argue that the letter was not written by the poet Vergil. Instead, it is a prosopopoiia, which presupposes a passage in Suetonius’ „Life of Vergil“. Therefore, the text has to be re-classified in the history of Roman literature: It belongs to the ancient traditions of pseudo-epistolography and of prosopopoietic fictions based on Vergil’s biography and poetry.