Virgil was not much over thirty when his first substantial work was given publication. This consisted of the Eclogues, or Bucolics, ten longish poems, ostensibly pastoral, modelled, to a certain extent, on the Greek poet Theocritus. These poems were by no means purely escapist literature; they were full of allusions to recent political events, sympathy for the victims of civil war, appeals to the victors for compassion, gratitude that the patrimonial estates had suffered less severely than some others under the policy of rewarding the veterans with places on the land. The young Octavian, victor, with Mark Antony, over the Caesaricides Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, was impressionable enough to be guided in decent ways, following his great-uncle’s tradition of clemency; and Octavian, on his part, was sufficiently tactful, as well as shrewd, to want to have the poets on his side. The great success of the Eclogues rendered it highly desirable that Virgil, along with other poets, be given something like official status; the wealthy counsellor Maecenas, patron of the arts and member of the inner circle, put a villa in his own gardens at the poet’s disposal. Here Virgil found new friends, notably the poet Horace, five years his junior--it lay much to the credit of Octavian’s decency that place could be made for a young satirist who had fought against him at Philippi (probably not very hard, if we can believe Horace’s own account) and whose published work had been caustic about the government. So Virgil had security, recognition, freedom to travel with the distinguished on official journeys, or to come and go as he pleased, with the privilege of staying, whenever he was so minded, in his quieter gardens near Naples. It was nearly a decade before the publication of his next major work, the Georgics, a long poem, in four books, on the subject of husbandry. Those returned veterans, settled by tens of thousands on the land, knew, it seemed, little of farming, and, for that matter, probably cared less. It was Virgil’s responsibility, under Octavian’s sanction, to instruct them, to see to it that they should both know and care, have practical information as to what must be done with crops and cattle and bees, and at the same time develop faith and pride in what they were doing, return to the simple virtues of the fathers, the good old republican ways. For all its official status, however, the poem was just a little too honest to be what we should consider ideal propaganda. There is no sentimental rapture in the Georgics, no idolization, idealization, or idyllization of what life on a farm is like; the sober-minded citizen, in fact, might easily be dissuaded from agriculture entirely by the accurate description of the various kinds of hell farming would put him through.