We would expect the Garden group, friendly to the memory of Caesar, to adopt the same point of view as Piso and for the same reasons.  They could hardly have sympathized with the murderers of Caesar.  On the other hand, they had no reason for supporting the usurpations of Antony, and seem to have enjoyed Cicero’s Philippics in so far as these attacked Antony.  Extreme measures were, however, not agreeable to Epicureans, who in general had nothing but condemnation for civil war.  However, Octavian’s strong stand could only have pleased them:  Caesar’s grand-nephew and heir would naturally be to them a sympathetic figure.

A fragment of Philodemus, recently deciphered,[1] reveals the teacher adopting in his lectures the very point of view which we have already found in Piso.  The fragment is brief and mutilated, but so much is clear:  Philodemus criticizes the party of Cicero for carrying the attack upon Antony to such extremes that through fear of the liberators a reaction in favor of Antony might set in.  We find this position reflected even in Vergil.  He never speaks harshly of the liberators, to be sure; in fact his indirect reference to Brutus in the Aeneid is remarkably sympathetic for an Augustan poet, but we have two epigrams of his attacking partizans of Antony in terms that remind us of passages in Cicero’s Philippics.  It would almost appear that Vergil now drew his themes for lampoons from Cicero’s unforgettable phrases,[2] as Catullus had done some fifteen years before.  How thoroughly Vergil disliked Antony may be seen in the familiar line in the Aeneid which Servius recognized as an allusion to that usurper (Aen.  VI. 622): 

  Fixit leges pretio atque refixit.

[Footnote 1:  Hermes, 1918, p. 382.]

[Footnote 2:  Three other epigrams, VI, XII, XIII, have been assumed by some critics to be direct attacks upon Antony, but the key to them has been lost and certainty is no longer attainable.]

If Servius is correct, we have here again a reminder of those stormy years.  This, too, is a dagger drawn from Cicero’s armory.  Again and again the orator in the Philippics charges Antony with having used Caesar’s seal ring for lucrative forgeries in state documents.  It is interesting to find that Vergil’s school friend, Varius, in his poem on Caesar’s death, called De Morte[3] first put Cicero’s charges into effective verse: 

  Vendidit hic Latium populis agrosque Quiritum
  Eripuit:  fixit leges pretio atque refixit.

[Footnote 3:  Some recent critics have suggested that the poem may have been a general discussion of the fear of death, but Varius is constantly referred to as an epic poet (Horace, Sat.  I. 10, 43; Carm.  I. 6 and Porphyrio ad loc).  His poem was written before Vergil’s eighth Eclogue which we place in 41 B.C. (Macrobius, Sat.  VI. 2. 20) and probably before the ninth (see I.36).]