This may seem too grand an ideal for a man like Augustus Cæsar, who (as I have said) was no hero, and who certainly was no philosopher. But it is none the less true that he understood that “peace hath her victories no less renowned than war”: and that his own conviction, based, perhaps, on shrewd political reasonings, inspired his poets and historians to hail a new age of peace and prosperity. In one way or another they all fell in with his ideas. Their themes are the glory and beauty of Italy, the greatness of Rome, the divine power which had given her the right to rule the world, and the story of the way in which she had come to exercise that right. But as Virgil is the greatest figure in the group, so is his _Æneid_ the greatest work in which those ideas are immortalised. The Roman Empire has vanished, the ancient city, which rose in fresh magnificence under Augustus, has crumbled away; but the _Æneid_ remains the one enduring monument of that age of new hope. It is said that Augustus himself suggested to the poet the subject of the _Æneid_. If so, it was characteristic of a man who used every chance of extending his own fame and influence without forcing them on the attention of his people. If a poem was to be written on the great theme of the revival of Rome and Italy, Augustus himself could not of course be the hero of it, nor even Julius: political and artistic feeling alike forbade. But a hero it must have, and he must be placed, not in the burning light of the politics of the day, but in the dim distance of the past. Such a hero was found in the mythical ancestor of the Julian family, Æneas, son of Venus and Anchises. A legend, familiar to educated Romans, told how this Trojan hero, whose personality appears in Homer, wandered over the seas after the fall of Troy, and landed at last in Italy; how he subdued the wild tribes then dwelling in Latium, brought peace and order and civilisation, and was under the hand of destiny the founder of the great career of Rome. His son Iulus, whose name the Julii believed themselves to bear, was in the legend the founder of the city from which Rome herself was founded; and thus the family of the Cæsars, the rescue of Italy from barbarism, and the foundation of the Eternal City, might all be brought into connexion with the story of Æneas the Trojan. Here, then, was the hero, the type of which the antitype was to be found in Augustus.