The poets of the Augustan era were deficient, as a rule, in that creative genius which characterized the age of Pericles in Greece, their works being rather the fruits of art and industry. A long and careful training, in which Greek studies played a prominent part, prepared them for their high profession; Horace tells us that at the age of twenty-three he was still “seeking the truth among the groves of Academus.” Works on various subjects could now be consulted in the public libraries of Rome; and Alexandrian models helped to mould the literary taste of the day. (_Compare Sellar’s “Roman Poets of the Augustan Age.”_) =Virgil.=—In the little village of Andes near Mantua, on the 15th of October, B.C. 70, Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro), first saw the light. His boyhood was spent on the banks of the winding Mincio in a quiet round of rural pursuits; his father, as owner of a small farm, being among those whom the poet subsequently pictured as the happiest of men. [Illustration: ROMANS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE (Becker’s “Gallus.”)] Alive to the importance of education, Virgil’s parents set aside a portion of their slender means to provide for his instruction; and when he reached the age of twelve, his father entered him in a school at Cremona. In his seventeenth year he went to Rome, and there prosecuted the higher studies, familiarizing himself with the Greek poets, and spending his leisure in the composition of lyric pieces. Having completed his education, Virgil returned to his native place, where, amid the natural attractions that surrounded him, he conceived the idea of rivalling Theocritus in bucolic poetry, and in 42 B.C. began his Eclogues. After the victory of the Triumvirs in the civil war, the lands about Cremona and Mantua were divided among the soldiers who had served against Brutus, and the estate of Virgil, neutral though he had been, was taken from him. On the poet’s application to Octavius, however, it was restored, and in one of his Eclogues he gave utterance to his sincere gratitude. Shortly after, Virgil was ejected again, and this time narrowly escaped with his life by swimming the Mincio. Nor does he appear to have ever been reinstated. Octavius, however, loaded him with favors; and a house in Rome near the palace of his friend Mæcenas, with a lovely villa in the suburbs of Naples, where the climate agreed better with his delicate constitution than the damp air of the north, reconciled him to the loss of his boyhood’s home. The Eclogues, published about 37 B.C., established Virgil’s reputation as a pastoral poet, and gained him no mean place among the literary and political celebrities that crowded the house of Mæcenas. It was by the advice of this statesman that the poet undertook the most finished and original of all his productions,—the Georgics,—a work which, though only about 2200 lines in length, occupied him for seven years.