DISCOVERY 



Augustus Crcsar, who had been supreme in Egypt since 

 the defeat of the last Egyptian sovereign, Cleopatra, 

 at the battle of Actium nineteen years before ; the 

 story of her death is, of course, familiar to English 

 readers from the vivid scenes of Shakespeare's Antony 

 and Cleopatra. After Cleopatra's death, Augustus had 

 to decide the question to whom he should depute the 

 government of the country, since it was a vitally im- 

 portant part of his Mediterranean system, and one of 

 the chief sources of the corn-supply of Rome. He 

 chose a young poet named Gaius Cornelius Gallus, who 

 had won distinction also as a commander in the civil 

 wars. Some of Callus' own briUiant but uneven writing 

 has lately become known to us, in a poem called the 



length. But at that point the poem takes a strange 

 turn and relates, in quite a different style, two or three 

 old-world legends, very slightly strung together and 

 still more slightly connected with the keeping of Bees. 

 The chief of them is the famous story of the singer 

 Orpheus, who went down to the World of the Dead 

 to fetch back his beloved Eurydice, and lost her again 

 because he looked back upon her too soon. This 

 short poem, which is really complete in itself, is so 

 beautiful and has seized the imagination of so many 

 poets — not to mention the musicians — of later ages, 

 that people have read it gratefully where it stands, 

 without troubling themselves with the curious question 

 why \'ergil should have tacked it on to a poem about 



PUIL^ AND ITS TEMPLES IX 1900 ; FROm;biGA, LOOKIXG X.E. 



Ciris, now shown, quite certainly as some of us think, 

 to be mainly his work. We know him to hav^e been 

 the school-companion and an intimate friend of a 

 greater writer of his own age, the poet Vergil.' Kow, 

 Vergil was bom and bred a farmer's boy, on the estate 

 of which his father was at first only the steward, though 

 later the owner ; and one of his greatest poems, still 

 read by thousands of boys and girls at school every 

 year, is a description of the v.ork which farmers do and 

 its importance in human life as a whole. This poem 

 Vergil called Georgica, that is, " Farming." His 

 chief purpose in writing it was to describe the country- 

 life he knew and loved ; but incidentally he meant it 

 to support the plans of the Emperor for restoring 

 agriculture in Italy. The simplest and most familiar 

 of its four Books is the last, which sets out to describe 

 the keeping of Bees, and discourses profoundly and j'et 

 playfully on that topic for about three-fifths of its 



> The Italian form Virgilio gave Virgil in English, but most 

 scholars now prefer to follow the Latin form of the name, which 

 was Versilius. 



Farming. Indeed, in the nineteenth century most Latin 

 scholars — especially in Germany, though not only there 

 — were accustomed to pooh-pooh the explanation of 

 it given by the commentator Servius, who lived in 

 the fourth century, though nearly all his positive 

 statements about Vergil are drawn from much earlier 

 writers who knew Vergil himself. But this explanation 

 has now been confirmed, past all dispute, by the dis- 

 covery in 1896 of an inscribed stone built into the 

 paved approach to the temple of Augustus which, as we 

 have seen, was built at Phils ; and few discoveries 

 have thrown more direct light on the critical period in 

 the world's life that just preceded the birth of Christ, 

 or on the inner experience of one of the greatest, if not 

 the greatest, of the world's poets. But though the 

 stone was found in 1896, none of the editions of Vergil 

 printed or reprinted since then, and probably none of 

 aU the teachers concerned in interpreting him to 

 English schoolboys, make any mention of it. 



What, then, does Servius tell us about the end of 

 Book IV of the Georgics ? Originally, he says, the 



