Virgil had already directed his attention to the didactic poem, and the _Georgics_ are in their way his best creation. Didactic poetry is not approached with the same expectation as in the case of the higher kinds of poetry, and it is scarcely possible to draw the line between instruction and amusement. When the existence of this monstrosity has once been justified it must be allowed a certain amount of free play. Virgil had here the great advantage of dealing with a subject in which he was really interested and into whose treatment he put his whole heart. A deep feeling for nature and really genuine human sympathy with the subject, which are precisely what is nowhere to be perceived in the _Æneid_, occasionally break forth in the poem on agriculture. An artificial shepherd’s life, much like the idyls of the eighteenth century, is delineated in the _Eclogues_, and its unreality is only surpassed by Calpurnius, an imitator of the age of Nero. Whilst the didactic poem proper received no further attention worth noting during this period, the elegy was successfully dealt with. In Albius Tibullus (54-19 B.C.) it even acquired a characteristic, one might almost say more national form than is the case with its other representatives. In his elegies, Tibullus is as essentially free from the Greek influence as is conceivable in an age which was steeped in Hellenism; he treated the few themes, which are to be found in his poems, entirely from the human standpoint, and it is only by this means that he tries to affect the reader. The sameness which is easily produced in such works--love and sentimental sorrows are constantly recurring--he has successfully avoided by an extraordinary elegance and charm of treatment. The reader willingly follows the dreamy thought of the poet without blaming him for having led him rather into a world of dreams than into one of living and strong feeling. The productions of S. Propertius (49-15 B.C.) are already much inferior. He also had true feeling, and the thoughts which it awakened in him are for the greater part not borrowed from his models. But it is overloaded with the learned accessories of Alexandrian learning, and the deep feelings of the poet are unduly thrust into the background by blatant mythological embellishments. Far more splendid and brilliant is the talent of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.-17 A.D.) who cultivated a wonderful borderland between didactic and elegiac poetry. But all his poems have one trait in common, although the _Metamorphoses_ and _Fasti_ may differ from the amatory poems, the _Tristia_ and the _Heroides_; they, for the first time, display in a more and more decided fashion the arts of the schools of the rhetoricians.