He found good teachers there, Siro, Philodemus, highly trained men of the Epicurean school, versed not only in Greek thought but familiar, also, with the wisdom of the East. He found good fellow-students, too, a remarkable list of influential Romans, men who were to be his lifelong friends, as Naples was to be made his permanent home, in spite of traveling, later, and the honor of an official residence at Rome. Naples was a pleasant place to be during those years, above the battles that broke and raged not only up and down the peninsula, but to east and west, in Spain, in Gaul, in Thessaly, in Africa. The republican institutions which had sufficed an agrarian economy were breaking down under the pressures of the new rising mercantile and almost industrial society; there had even been something like a primitive proletarian revolution under Spartacus; no Epicurean scorn for political ambitions could keep men’s consciences from being deeply troubled. Virgil, conservative at heart, yet with a great admiration for Julius Caesar the man, seems not to have been too bitter about the imminence of a dictatorship; he would have preferred it not to be so called, and he hoped, with all his soul and spirit, that it would be wisely and mercifully administered, and he said so. He was twenty-six when Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., and the shock of that event was enough to drive from his mind the ideas he had formed, in a groping and immature wishfulness, of writing a national epic.