The first Antonine was conscious that the soft, luxurious city life of which Rome was the great example, and which was too faithfully copied in the wealthy provincial centres, was enfeebling the Empire,--the builders and makers of Rome he well knew were the hardy race of men who feared the old gods and who were ready to fight and die for their country, and these men were the peasant-farmers produced by the old rural life of Italy. He would set the fashion himself, and if possible popularize this better and nobler way of living. He would bring back the memories of those great ones who had been the makers of that mighty empire. It was no mere love of antiquity, no special taste for antiquarian lore, which induced Antoninus Pius to grave upon his coins the immemorial symbols telling of the ancient traditions belonging to the great past of Rome,--symbols many of which have been immortalized in the “haunting and liquid” rhythms of the poet loved in Rome,--Æneas carrying his father; the white sow sacrificed to Juno by the fugitive Æneas on the banks of Tiber; Mars and Rhea Sylvia; the sacred wild fig-tree beneath whose branches the wolf found the children Romulus and Remus; the wolf suckling the baby founders of the Queen City; the augur Nævius and his razor before King Tarquinius Priscus; Horatius who defended the bridge against the hosts of Porsenna. It was not the instinct of a curious and scholarly archæologist, but a deep and far-reaching purpose, which prompted Antoninus Pius to search out and rebuild the little unknown Arcadian village of Pallanteum, the ancient home of Evander, the host of Æneas,--Evander, the founder of the earliest Rome, whose beautiful story is told in the noble epic of Vergil.[36] The Emperor would popularize, would bring before his people the glorious memories of the storied past--the wonderful story of Rome--its cherished traditions which told of the old love of the Immortals for Rome. Antoninus Pius was by no means the first who felt that the greatness of Rome had been built up by that hardy race of men who had lived the simple homely life of rural toil, by men who feared the gods and believed in the rewards and punishments of the Immortals. The great statesman Emperor Augustus more than a century earlier had recognised this, and his poet Vergil had pressed home this truth in his deathless verses. In the Eclogues, and still more in the Georgics, men were led to reverence the old simple manners and customs; and in the charmed verses of the Æneid the same teaching was enforced with yet greater eloquence and earnestness. “Work and pray” was the conclusion of the Georgics (_in primis venerare deos_), was the burthen of the poet’s solemn charge.