In the age of Augustus there was no censorship of letters such as generally prevailed under the stricter emperors of later days. Livy was permitted to publish his great history without curtailment of its strong republican tendency. When libels and pasquinades appeared against Cæsar he was content to contradict them in a proclamation. Nevertheless he made his influence weightily felt in the world of letters. He gave more than £10,000 to Varius for a tragedy which posterity has not thought worth while to preserve. He was himself a kindly and patient listener at the recitation of poems and history, speeches and dialogues, which formed the usual mode of first publication in those days. He only insisted that his own deeds should not form the subject of trivial composition by inferior authors. Horace appears at first to have been warned off from treatment of imperial politics. Vergil too in his early days received a hint not to sing of wars and kings. But later on both these writers were explicitly enlisted in the service of the state. In this part of the work Mæcenas was the emperor’s chief agent. Mæcenas, whose name has come to symbolise literary patronage, was a wealthy noble of an old Etruscan family who was content, like Cicero’s friend Atticus, to pull the wires of state largely by keeping generous hospitality and knowing all the important characters of his day. Luxurious and effeminate in his tastes, he gathered a group of talented authors round his table, and very distinctly suggested to them the lines upon which he desired them to work. Vergil, Varius, Horace, and Propertius were members of his salon. Another noble of high lineage, M. Valerius Messalla, maintained a rival coterie whose most prominent member was the elegiac poet Tibullus. Vergil, a half-Italian native of Mantua, who was not even a citizen by birth, had sprung into fame with his _Bucolics_, a series of pastoral idylls in the style of Theocritus. But though he was a provincial by birth, though he writes of shepherds and sings pathetically of his ancestral farm, nothing is more untrue than to regard him as a son of the soil, or an inspired ploughboy after the manner of Robert Burns. On the contrary he had received an elaborate education in the style of the day under Greek masters at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. He was steeped in Greek philosophy and letters. His shepherds are not the unsophisticated rustics of the Mantuan plain. They are shepherds “à la Watteau,” borrowed from the pages of Theocritus, and though many a brilliant epithet displays the Italian’s loving observation of nature, the background of the work is artificial and literary rather than rustic or natural. His shepherds, like Sidney’s, talk politics under a transparent disguise, which is often extremely incongruous. They are often engaged in praising Gallus or Varus or Pollio, the young poet’s patrons. It was the success of the _Bucolics_ which led Mæcenas to choose Vergil for carrying out an