The political revolution which transformed the Republic into the Empire, and the state of public feeling, which, arising spontaneously, yet received direction from the will and policy of Augustus, thus appear to be the most important conditions determining the character of the Augustan literature, and distinguishing it from that of the previous age. Poetic art was employed as it had never been in any former time as an instrument of government. If anything could have made the new order of things acceptable to the best representatives of the old Republican traditions, the purity and elevation imparted to the idea of the Empire in the verse of Virgil must have had this effect. The poetical imagination, susceptible as it is in the highest degree of emotions produced by the spectacle of ancient or powerful government or of a people nobly asserting its freedom, has little prophetic insight into the working of political causes. Nor need it be regarded as a sign of weakness or time-serving in the poets of the Augustan Age that they did not foresee the gloom and oppression which were destined to follow so soon after the prosperous dawn of the Roman Empire.
The establishment of the Empire affected the new poetry also by the personal relations which it established between the leaders of society and the leaders of literature. The early Republican poets were for the most part strangers to Rome, men of comparatively humble position, who by their merit gained the friendship of some of the great families, but who at the same time depended for their success on popular favour. The poets of the last days of the Republic were themselves members of the great families, or men intimately associated with them; and they wrote to please themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.