“Others shall mould, I doubt not, the breathing bronze more delicately and draw the living features out of marble, others shall plead causes more eloquently, map out the wanderings of the sky with the rod, and tell the risings of the stars. Thou, Roman, forget not to govern the nations under thy sway. These shall be thy arts: to impose the rule of peace, to spare the subject, and defeat the proud.” In these lines we hear the proud Philistinism of an imperial people. This is the genuine Roman (dare I add “British”?) attitude towards the arts and sciences. They are for others to provide, for Greeks and Egyptians. Even oratory, the highest achievement of the Roman genius in literature, is thus scornfully thrown to the foreigner. The Romans knew that they could buy or seize better statues than they could carve: their task was to conquer and govern--not an ignoble art. The _Æneid_ is explicitly a national laureate poem. The poet seeks to enshrine all Roman life in his pages, to epitomise Roman history and to introduce allusions to characteristic pieces of myth and ritual. He inserts whole lines of Ennius or Lucretius when they please him. They are superseded and replaced. Just like Dryden, he feels that he is the heir of the ages. The extraordinary popularity which Vergil attained even in his own lifetime grew in the course of a few centuries almost into a cult. His tomb became an object of pilgrimage; in early Christian times he became a prophet and in the Middle Ages a wizard. The gentleness and purity of his personal life played their part in the creation of this strange Vergilian legend.