which their age had to supply, are not ignorant of the malady from which it suffers; they know that their despair and their materialism are born of the misery of long years of sanguinary strife; and Tibullus, in one of the sweetest of his Elegies, utters a wish which is the Ave of the storm-tossed Republic to the approaching peace of the Empire:—_At nobis, Pax alma, veni._[107] _Cum domino Pax ista venit._[108] Virgil and Horace are poets of the Empire, and strike the dominant note of the new epoch. It was not the mere courtly complaisance of genius for its patrons that led Virgil and Horace to identify their muse with the religious and moral reforms of Augustus. It was rather a conscious recognition of the spiritual needs of the new age which led poets and statesmen alike to further this joint work. It is the custom to regard the labours of Augustus as resulting in the superimposition on the social fabric of mere forms and rituals which would have been appropriate were society only a fabric, but which were utterly inadequate to serve as anything better than a superficial ornament to an expanding and developing organism.[109] But, taken in conjunction with the poems of Virgil and Horace, they show their real character as outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. It is true that Horace at times attributes the disasters from which his countrymen have suffered to their disregard of the ancient religious ceremonies; to their neglect of the _templa ædesque labentes deorum et fœda nigro simulacra fumo_;[110] but in the six famous Odes which stand at the head of Book III he emphasizes the national necessity of chastity, fidelity, mercy, loyalty to duty; and he utters not less emphatic warnings against the general danger from avarice, ambition, luxury. The essentially religious character of the Æneid is evident to every reader. That is no mere formalism which inspires with moral vigour the splendid melodies of the Sixth Book.[111] Although the Poet uses the conventional machinery of Elysium and Tartarus to emphasize the contrast between Virtue and Vice by contrasting the fates that await them hereafter; yet justice, piety, patriotism, chastity, self-devotion; fidelity to friend and wife and client; filial and fraternal love: never received advocacy more strenuous and sincere, never were sanctioned by praise more eloquent, or reprehension more terrible, than in those immortal verses which it is an impertinence to praise. The question which presented itself to Augustus, to his ministers and to his poets, was how to re-invigorate and preserve those qualities by her practice of which Rome had become _pulcherrima rerum_. And we cannot wonder that an important part of their answer to this question lay in the direction of restoring those ancient religious ceremonies and moral practices which had been most conspicuously displayed when Rome was making her noblest efforts to accomplish her great destiny. The sanction of antiquity is