“Unasked the earth shall shower upon thee, sweet boy, thy first baby gifts, the gadding ivy with the fox-glove, and lily-bean entwined with smiling bear’s-foot. The goats shall bring home uncalled their milk-filled udders; the harts shall no longer fear great lions; and flowers shall spring to caress thee where’er thou liest down. The asp shall perish; the treacherous, poison herb shall perish too; and everywhere shall spring Assyrian balm.”[160] The Greeks and Romans had a great system of cycles and ages, not unlike the Hindu Kalpas and Manvantaras. One cycle follows another, the beginning of each being marked by the sun, moon and stars all occupying their original positions. The Roman phrase for cycle is “great year.” Each great year is subdivided into “months,” that is ages. The first age of each great year is the golden, when Saturn reigns, and a divine race of men occupies the earth; the last is the iron age, when Apollo reigns, and men are sinful. Virgil declares, then, that the end of the old cycle has come, and that the new cycle is about to begin with all the splendour of the golden age. Saturn will reign; Justice and Peace will return to the earth; a god-like race of men will spring up all over the world; nature will be redeemed; and primitive simplicity and innocence will reappear. Idyllic scenes of peace and plenty—trade and manufacture all forgotten—give the poem a wonderful charm. The most outstanding idea of the prophecy, however, is that the new age opens with the birth of a boy, who is to receive special divine help, and is to be at once the pattern and the prince of the new time. Who the boy was that Virgil had in mind, the critics have not been able to decide.[161] Clearly he was a son born in 40 B. C. to one of the leading Romans; but we can say no more. Evidently Virgil believed that the civil wars were over, that a new era of peace had begun, and that this boy might be looked forward to as the ruler who should effectively transform the empire, revive primitive virtue and simplicity, and banish the foul demon war forever. His prediction was not verified: no boy born in 40 B. C. became a world-ruler and regenerator; and, besides, nine long years of doubt and fear, horror and blood, had to be endured, before Octavian became, by the battle of Actium, the acknowledged master of the Roman world; and, while he completed the task of Cæsar, and succeeded in doing the work of a great ruler in a marvellous fashion, no one would dream of saying that he fulfilled the ideal of this poem.