e Roman world.

Virgil, in the year 40 B.C., being then a pastoral poet imitating
Theocritus,--nothing very serious,--wrote a strange poem that
stands in dignity and depth of purpose far above anything in his
model. This was the Fourth Eclogue of his Bucolics, called the
_Pollio._ In it he invokes the "Sicilian Muse" to inspire him to
loftier strains; and proceeds to sing of the coming of a new
cycle, the return of a better age, to be ushered in, supposedly,
by a 'child' born in that year:--

_Ultima Cumaci venit jam carminis aetas;
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo;
Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
Jam nora progenies coelo demittitur alto._

This was taken in the Middle Ages as referring to the birth of
Jesus; and on the strength of having thus prophesied, Virgil
came to be looked on as either a true prophet or a black
magician. Hence his enormous reputation all down the centuries
as a master of the secret sciences. The chemist is the successor
to the alchemist; and in Wales we still call a chemist
_fferyll,_ which is _Virgil_ Cymricized. Well; his reputation
was not altogether undeserved; he did know much; you can
find Karma, Reincarnation, Devachan, Kama-loka--most of the
Theosophical teachings as to the postmortem-prenatal states,--
taught in the Sixth Book of the _Aeneid._ But as to this
_Pollio_ Eclogue: even in modern textbooks one often sees it
asserted that he must have been familiar with the Hebrew
Scriptures;--because in the Book of Isaiah the coming of a
Messiah to the Jews is prophesied in terms not very unlike those
he used. To my mind this is far-fetched: Virgil had Gaul behind
him, if you must look for explanations in outside things; and at
least in after ages Celtic Messianism was as persistent a
doctrine as Jewish. A survival, of course; in truth the
initiated or partly initiated among all ancient peoples knew that
avatars come. Virgil, if he understood as much about Theosophy
as he wrote into the Sixth Aeneid, would also have known, from
whatever source he learnt it, the truth about cycles and
Adept Messengers.

There has been much speculation as to who the child born in the
year of Pollio's consulship, who was to bring in the new order of
ages, could have been. But we may note that in the language of
Occultism (and think of Virgil as an Occultist), the 'birth of a
child' had always been a symbolical way of speaking of the
inititation of a ca