important literary project. A poet was required to sing the praises of country life in such a manner as to encourage the movement “back to the land,” which Augustus was trying to foster. In his _Georgics_ Vergil frankly admits that he is fulfilling the “hard commands” of Mæcenas. The _Georgics_ are a treatise on husbandry, but here again it is not first-hand work. We are informed that Vergil’s poetry had regained him his paternal farm at Mantua. But the _Georgics_ were not written on the farm. They were diligently composed in a library at Naples. They arose from the study of Aratus and Hesiod, not from memory of Italian life, and even in those gorgeous passages where Vergil is praising a country life, it is not of the Italian farm that he is thinking but of literary hills and dells in Greece. I think it is clear that the poet took little pleasure in his task. He very gladly digresses from the description of soils and mattocks to tell us a charming piece of Greek mythology or to introduce a literary reference. Octavian had been a “powerful god” already in the Eclogues before he became Augustus. Now the only question is which of the stars shall receive him after death. “Already the blazing Scorpion contracts his arms and leaves thee more than a fair share of heaven.” Vergil pauses to depict the triumph of Augustus--Nile flowing with blood, Asia tamed, the Niphates driven back, the Parthian conquered. No literary catchword was ever more absurd than the phrase “rustic of genius” applied to Vergil. As soon as he had the means, he gladly turned his back upon his ancestral farm to become a student and a courtier. Nevertheless Mæcenas was magnificently served. Vergil had already forged a weapon of matchless music and eloquence in his surging hexameters, and he used it to depict the honest joys of rustic toil, the laborious tranquillity of the farm, the beauty and interest of nature. He was instantly recognised by Augustus as the destined laureate of the new Rome.