During the first century B.C. there was a great spread of Messianic Ideas over the Roman world, and Virgil's 4th Eclogue, commonly called the Messianic Eclogue, reflects very clearly this state of the public mind. The expected babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian (Augustus) the first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded it in Virgil's verse. Unfortunately it turned out to be a GIRL! However there is little doubt that Virgil did--in that very sad age of the world, an age of "misery and massacre," and in common with thousands of others--look for the coming of a great 'redeemer.' It was only a few years earlier--about B.C. 70--that the great revolt of the shamefully maltreated Roman slaves occurred, and that in revenge six thousand prisoners from Spartacus' army were nailed on crosses all the way from Rome to Capua (150 miles). But long before this Hesiod had recorded a past Golden Age when life had been gracious in communal fraternity and joyful in peace, when human beings and animals spoke the same language, when death had followed on sleep, without old age or disease, and after death men had moved as good daimones or genii over the lands. Pindar, three hundred years after Hesiod, had confirmed the existence of the Islands of the Blest, where the good led a blameless, tearless, life. Plato the same, (1) with further references to the fabled island of Atlantis; the Egyptians believed in a former golden age under the god R[a^] to which they looked back with regret and envy; the Persians had a garden of Eden similar to that of the Hebrews; the Greeks a garden of the Hesperides, in which dwelt the serpent whose head was ultimately crushed beneath the heel of Hercules; and so on. The references to a supposed far-back state of peace and happiness are indeed numerous. (1) See arts. by Margaret Scholes, Socialist Review, Nov. and Dec. 1912.