Georgics_, and these glowing pictures of farm life
did quite as much to carry out the emperor's plans as the _Aeneid_
later. And Virgil was not alone in writing of country life; Tibullus,
even more gentle than the gentle bard of Mantua, was telling the same
story in another form.

By this time the myths which Greece had given to Rome or which Rome had
made for herself on Greek models were absolutely a part of the national
past. These too entered into Augustus's scheme. Thus another protege of
Maecenas, the poet Propertius, was gradually weaned from love poetry and
filled instead with a hunger for the myths of Roman temples and of old
Roman customs, so that Cynthia slowly gives way to Tarpeia and
Vertumnus, and the Rome of Augustus to the Rome of Romulus. Even the
irrepressible Ovid tried in his exuberant fashion to assist in this work
and started in his _Fasti_ to write a history of the religious
festivals of the Roman year. But above all these, and infinitely more
important in its influence, towers the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. All through
the varied incidents of the twelve books there runs the scarlet thread
of a great purpose, the glorification of Rome and of Augustus. From the
sack of Troy, through the long wanderings and the fierce wars in Latium,
down to the final conquest of the enemy, we see Aeneas led by the hand
of the gods whose will it was that Rome should be. The lesson is very
evident. The providence which guided us in the past still protects us;
we have no right to be discouraged, and our future is assured us under
the same gods who brought our fathers out of the land of the Trojans,
through the midst of the Greeks. But there is concealed in the _Aeneid_
another lesson, much more directly useful to Augustus. Its hero, the
immaculate pious Aeneas, is the direct ancestor of the Julian house to
which Augustus belongs, and the founding of Rome shows not only the good
will of the gods toward the city, but in no less degree their special
appointment and protection of the leader. The descendants of the house
of Aeneas are therefore the divinely appointed rulers of Rome.

There can be no question but that this poetry had an effect none the
less far reaching because its influence was difficult to estimate and
analyse. It was not necessary for the psychological result that men
should actually believe in these myths; much was gained if they allowed
their thoughts to dwell on the ideas presented in them. It was the
sedime