Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue, from which my text is quoted, is often called the “Messianic Eclogue.” It is a strange poem. In the midst of a book of pastoral eclogues very closely modelled on the Idylls of Theocritus, the young poet from Mantua inserts one in which he invites the Sicilian Muses, that is, the Muses of Theocritus, to assist him in a loftier strain than usual. His poem is a vision, a prophecy of a return of the golden age to accompany the birth of a child. It is not easy to determine what child. The poem was written for the consulship of Pollio, who had helped Vergil to recover his paternal farm. Thus it is very probable that the poem was really a piece of very gross flattery directed to a patron. Nevertheless the prophecies of peace on earth which it foreshadows chime so strangely with the Messianic language of Isaiah that the scholars of the Middle Ages alternatively placed Vergil among the prophets or condemned him as a wizard. But apart from that approaching event to be witnessed in an obscure village of the client-princedom of Judæa there was even in secular history a general expectation of better days to come. The Virgin Justice did in sober fact return to the Roman world when Octavian, in 29 B.C., came home to celebrate his triumph over the three continents. I make high claims for Octavian[41]--or as he may now be called by anticipation “Augustus”--in history. Julius Cæsar has usurped the credit of inventing that wonderful system the Roman Empire. The credit really belongs to Augustus. Monarchy, indeed, had for two generations at the least become inevitable at Rome, as everybody, from Catiline to Cicero, was bound to admit. In the scramble to realise it Julius Cæsar had won the day and had thereupon proceeded to introduce his conception of its proper form. He died before his plans were perfected and we have no means of knowing his inner purpose. But we know that he had spurned the dignity of the senate, had taken some of the paraphernalia of royalty and set up his statue alongside of the old kings of Rome. His plan of a naked despotism had failed, because he had not reckoned with the tyrannicide sentiment of the Roman nobles. His assassination was no mere episode or accident. It was impossible to live like an oriental despot in the republican city without an oriental bodyguard. Julius Cæsar had failed through pride. When he fell, the whole dreary round of proscriptions, triumvirate, and civil wars had to begin again. The inevitable monarchy had to be devised afresh on a different basis: that was the task of Augustus. He devised it in such a manner that it lasted in the West for just five centuries and in the East for nearly fifteen. Indeed it can hardly be said to be totally extinct now in the twentieth. Judged by results then, the work of Augustus was clearly a consummate piece of statesmanship. When we consider the methods by which that result was obtained we shall, I think, esteem Augustus as