This is a tough one. Death of Virgil tells the story of emperor Augustus requiring a dying Virgil to leave Athens and surrender the manuscript of the Aeneid before destroying it as a fitting end to pure art. Since the Aeneid glorifies Augustus, it is a struggle between the artistic and the political: for Rome, the Aeneid is the gift that keeps on giving, even after Virgil passes on.
I read the complete Aeneid recently in the Fagles’ translation. If you like history, especially history punctuated by war, death, and destruction, the Aeneid is a valuable historical artifact and at a minimum provides a useful textbook for the teaching of Latin (where they still do that). Otherwise, the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome is somewhat flat and boring.
