The death of Julius Cæsar seemed to plunge the world once more into darkness. We have evidence enough of the general feeling of horror and despair,—a despair hard to realise in our days, when settled and orderly government saves us from all serious anxiety about our lives and property. Power fell into the hands of a far more unscrupulous man than Cæsar, the Mark Antony of Shakespeare’s play; but he had a rival in Cæsar’s nephew and adopted son, afterwards known as Augustus. Civil war, of course, followed: first, war between these two and the murderers of Julius, and then war between the two victors. Antony, who had in a division of the Empire taken the eastern half, and married Cleopatra, the beautiful queen of Egypt, was crushed at the naval battle of Actium: the Empire became once more united, and hope began to spring up afresh. Instead of following the melancholy history of these years (44 to 31 B.C.) let us try to realise the need of a complete change in men’s minds and in the ways of government, if the Roman Empire was to be preserved, and Mediterranean civilisation with it. We can best do this by learning something of the two men who more than all others brought about the change: Virgil, the greatest of Roman poets, and Augustus, the most fortunate and discerning of Roman statesmen. Augustus began a new system of government, based, no doubt, on the ideas of Julius, which lasted, gradually developing itself, till the fifth century of our era. Virgil, the poet of the new Roman spirit, kept that spirit alive into the Middle Ages, and rightly read, he keeps it still before us. If Virgil had lived in an ordinary age, when the flow of events was smooth and unruffled, he might have been a great poet, but hardly one of the world’s greatest. But he lived in a crisis of the history of civilisation, and he was called to do his part in it. For a century before he wrote, the one great fact in the world was the marvellous growth of the Roman dominion. When he was born, seventy years before the Christian era, Rome was the only great civilised power left, and a few years later it looked as if she had not even a barbarian rival to menace her, except the Parthians far away in the East. The Roman was everywhere, fighting, trading, ruling; nothing of importance could be done without the thought—What will Rome say to it?