Silenus’s strain is a poetical lecture on natural philosophy. He is as didactic in his waking soberness as some of his disciples are in their cups. He describes how the world sprang from the four original elements, and narrates the old fables of the cosmogonists--the Deluge of Deucalion, the new race of men who sprang from the stones which he and Pyrrha cast behind them, the golden reign of Saturn, the theft of fire by Prometheus, and a long series of other legends, with which he charms his listeners until the falling shadows warn them to count their flocks, and the evening-star comes out, as the poet phrases it, “over the unwilling heights of Olympus”--loath yet to lose the fascinating strain. Besides this Pastoral addressed to Varus, there are three inscribed to other friends: one to Cornelius Gallus, and two to Caius Asinius Pollio, who was among the most eminent men of his day alike as a statesman, an orator, and a man of letters, and at that time held the high office of consul at Rome. He had been the friend of the great Julius, as he was afterwards of his nephew Octavianus (Augustus), and was probably the person who preserved or restored to the poet his country estate. The fourth in order of these poems, commonly known as the “Pollio,” is the most celebrated of the whole series, and has given rise to a great amount of speculation. Its exact date is known from the record of Pollio’s consulship--40 before the Christian era. Its subject is the expected birth of a Child, in whom the golden age of innocence and happiness should be restored, and who was to be the moral regenerator of the world. The date of the poem itself, approaching so closely the great Birth at Bethlehem--the reference to the prophecy of the Cumæan Sibyl, long supposed to be a voice from heathendom predictive of the Jewish Messiah--and the remarkable coincidence of the metaphorical terms employed by the poet with the prophetical language of the Old Testament, have led many to the pious belief that the Roman poet did but put into shape those vague expectations of a Great Deliverer which were current in his day, and which were to have a higher fulfilment than he knew. The “Pollio” may be familiar to many English readers who are unacquainted with the original through Pope’s fine imitation of it in his poem of “The Messiah,” first published anonymously in the ‘Spectator.’[6] But as the Latin Eclogue itself is short, it may be well to attempt a translation of it here, before remarking further upon its meaning.