Yet just as Virgil was growing to manhood it became obvious, as we have seen, that this great power was in reality on the verge of breaking up. She had abandoned justice and duty, and given herself to greed and pleasure. Her government was rapacious: she was sucking the life-blood of the nations. She had lost her old virtues of self-sacrifice, purity of family life, reverence for the divine. The rulers of the world had lost the sense of duty and discipline; they were divided into jarring political factions, and had felt the bitterness of civil war, in which men killed each other in cold blood almost for the sake of killing. But with Julius Cæsar’s strong hand and generous temper it must have seemed to many that a better time was coming, and among these was the young poet from Mantua under the rampart of the Alps. No one who knows Virgil’s poems well can have any doubt that all his hopes for himself and his family, for Italy and the Empire, were bound up with the family of the Cæsars. The sub-alpine region in which he was born and bred had been for ten years of his boyhood and youth under the personal rule of the great Julius, and had supplied him with the flower of that famous army that had conquered first Gaul and then the world. It is possible that the poet owed his position as a Roman citizen to the enlightened policy of Cæsar. Even now we cannot read without a thrill of horror the splendid lines in which he records the eclipse of the sun and the mourning of all nature when the great man was murdered by so-called patriots.[12] With such patriots, with the rapacious republican oligarchy, he could have had no sympathy, and there is not a trace of it in his poems. When, during the civil wars that followed the murder, he was turned out of his ancestral farm near Mantua to make room for veteran soldiers, he owed the recovery of it to the master of those soldiers, the second Cæsar, whom henceforward he regarded not only as his own protector and friend, but as the one hope of the Empire. Now this younger Cæsar, nephew and adopted son of Julius, though not a great soldier or a hero in any sense, was yet one of those rare men who learn wisdom in adversity, and use it to overcome passion and violence in themselves and others. He came gradually to see that Italy and the world could not be rescued from misery and despair by war and strong government alone. He grasped the fact, which Sulla had missed, that the one thing wanting was loyalty—loyalty to himself and belief in his mission: loyalty to Rome and Italy, and belief in their mission in the world. Confidence in him, and in the destiny of Rome, might create in men’s minds a hope for the future, a new self-respect, almost a new faith. Divided and depressed as they were, he wanted to set new ideals before them, and to get them to help him loyally towards the realisation of those ideals. Economically, morally, religiously, Italy was to rise to new life in an era of peace and justice.