Terra antiqua potens armis atque ubere glaebae(130),--
produced with such vivid truthfulness and such enduring charm as by the Georgics. To express the whole meaning of Italy, it was necessary that the poet should feel a pride in her stubborn industry(131) as well as in her warlike energy; that he should cherish for the whole land, now united as one nation, an impartial love; and that he should be deeply susceptible of that beauty of season and landscape which was a more self-sufficing source of pleasure(132) to the cultivated Italian than even to the ancient Greek. Some sympathy with the 'Itala virtus'--the courage and discipline of the Marsian and other Sabellian races--Ennius had already expressed in his national epic; but he was interested solely in military and political life, in the activity of the camp and battle-field, the forum and senate-house. Virgil was the first and the only Roman poet to realise the full inspiration of that thought, to which he gives utterance in the close of one of his noblest passages,--
Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, Magna virum(133).
(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for the political feeling and tendency of his time. He could not indeed teach the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age, were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems, better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration. The poetry of Virgil co-operated with the policy of the Emperor in the work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new organisation to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy, Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively recent period, continued to be the master-force in European politics,--apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free national life on a large scale,--finds its earliest expression. And the loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil's time faith in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the necessary bond of civil order and union.