hinc patriam parvosque Penates Sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuvencos(396).
This ideal Virgil seems to regard as one that might be attained by man, if he only could be taught how to appreciate it(397); nay, that has been attained by him in happier times when the land was cultivated by free men, each holding his own plot of ground. This was the life of the old Italian yeomen, the life by which Etruria waxed strong and brave, the life to which Rome herself owed the beginning of her greatness(398). It is the life which the national imagination, in its peaceful mood, and yearning to return into the ways of innocence and piety, discerned in that distant Golden Age, when all men lived in contentment and abundance under the rule of the old god, from whom the land received the well-loved name 'Saturnia tellus(399).'
Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, Hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit Scilicet, et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma, Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces. Ante etiam sceptrum Dictaei regis et ante Impia quam caesis gens est epulata iuvencis, Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat; Necdum etiam audierant inflari classica, necdum Impositos duris crepitare incudibus enses(400).
THE GEORGICS AS THE REPRESENTATIVE POEM OF ITALY.
The consideration of the motives which influenced Virgil to undertake the composition of the Georgics, of the form of art adopted by him, of the national interest attaching to his subject, of the materials used by him and the sources from which he derived them, of the author who most influenced him in speculative idea and in the general manner of treating his subject, leads to the conclusion that, in its essential characteristics, the poem is a genuine work of Italian art and inspiration. If the original motive influencing him was the ambition to treat of rural life in the serious spirit of Hesiod, as he had done in the lighter vein of Theocritus, that motive was soon lost in the strong impulse to invest with charm and dignity the kind of life in which the Italian mind placed its ideal of worth and happiness. By thus identifying himself with a great national object Virgil raised himself to a higher level of art than that attained by poets whose interests are purely personal and literary.