Shadi Bartsch is a Guggenheim Laureate, the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor in Classics at the University of Chicago, winner of a Charles J. Goodwin Award, and the inaugural director of The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She has been a professor of classics for nearly three decades, has published twelve books (monographs and edited volumes), and translated three of Seneca's tragedies: Thyestes, Medea, and Phaedra.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 b.c.), known as Vergil, was born near Mantua at the end of the Roman Republic. He was the most famous poet of his age and his Aeneid gave the Romans a great national epic equal to the Greeks', celebrating their city's origins and the creation of their empire. Vergil is also credited with The Eclogues and The Georgics.