Germany to the empire but only as to whether
the frontier should be on the Elbe or the Rhine. Varus' defeat
decided Augustus for the Rhine.

Now we come to what he did for Italy: his second trump card, if
we call Spain his first. Spain belonged to the future, Italy to
the present. Her cycle was half over, and she had done nothing
(in B.C. 29) very worthy with it. First, an effort should be
made towards the purificatior of family-life: a pretty hopeless
task, wherein at last he was forced to banish his own daughter
for notorious evil-living. He made laws; and it may be supposed
that they had some effect _in time._ A literary impulse towards
high dignified ideals, however, may be much more effective than
laws. He had Maecenas with his circle of poets.

Of course, poetry written to order, or upon imperial suggestion,
is not likely to be of the highest creative kind. But the high
creative forces were not flowing in that age; and we need not
blame Augustan patronage for the limitations of Augustan
literature. There is no time to argue the question; this much
we may say: the two poets who worked with the emperor, and wrote
under his influence and sometimes at his suggestion, left work
that endures in world-literature; that is noble and beautiful,
and still interesting. I mean Virgil and Horace, of course.
Ovid, who was not under that influence, but of the faction
opposed to it, wrote stuff that it would be much better were
lost entirely.

The poet's was the best of pulpits, in those days: poets stood
much nearer the world then than for all the force of the
printing-press they can hope to do now. So, if they could preach
back its sacredness to the soil of Italy; if they could recreate
the ideal of the old agricultural life; something might be done
towards (among other things) checking the unwholesome crowding to
the capital,--as great an evil then as now. Through Maecenas and
directly Augustus influenced Virgil, the laureate; who responded
with his _Georgics._

It is a wonderful work. Virgil was a practical farmer; he tells
you correctly what to do. But he makes a work of art of it all
poetical. He suffuses his directions for stock-raising and
cabbage-hoeing with the light of mythology and poetry. He gives
you the Golden Age and Saturn's Italy, and makes the soil seem
sacred. He had the Gaul's feeling for grace and delicacy, and
brought in Celtic beauty to illumine the Italian world. The
lines ar