Vergil’s position as foremost of these poets was doubtless established by the publication of the Eclogues.  They took Rome by storm, and were even set to music and sung on the stage, according to an Alexandrian fashion then prevailing in the capital.  Octavian was, of course, attracted to them by a personal interest.  The poet was given a house in Maecenas’ gardens on the Esquiline with the hope of enticing him to Rome.  Vergil doubtless spent some time in the city before he turned to the more serious task of the Georgics, but we are told that he preferred the Neapolitan bay and established his home there.  This group, it would seem, was definitely drawn into Octavian’s circle soon after the peace of Brundisium, and formed the nucleus of a kind of literary academy that set the standards for the Augustan age.

The introduction of Horace into this circle makes an interesting story.  He was five years younger than Vergil, and had had his advanced education at Athens.  There Brutus found him in 43, when attending philosophical lectures in order to hide his political intrigues; and though Horace was a freedman’s son, Brutus gave him the high dignity of a military tribuneship.  Brutus as a Republican was, of course, a stickler for all the aristocratic customs.  That he conferred upon Horace a knight’s office probably indicates that the libertinus pater had been a war captive rather than a man of servile stock, and, therefore, only technically a “freedman.”  In practical life the Romans observed this distinction, even though it was not usually feasible to do so in political life.  After Philippi Horace found himself with the defeated remnant and returned to Italy only to discover that his property had been confiscated.  He was eager for a career in literature, but having to earn his bread, he bought a poor clerkship in the treasury office.  Then during spare moments he wrote—­satires, of course.  What else could such a wreckage of enthusiasm and ambitions produce?

His only hope lay in attracting the attention of some kindly disposed literary man, and for some reason he chose Vergil.  The Eclogues were not yet out, but the Culex was in circulation, and he made the pastoral scene of this the basis of an epode—­the second—­written with no little good-natured humor.  Horace imagines a broker of the forum reading that passage, and, quite carried away by the succession of delightful scenes, deciding to quit business for the simple life.  He accordingly draws in all his moneys on the Calends—­on the Ides he lends them out again![2] What Vergil wrote Horace when he received a copy of the Epode, we are not told, but in his next work, the Georgics, he returned the compliment by similarly threading Horace’s phrases into a description of country life—­a passage that is indeed one of the most successful in the book.[3]

[Footnote 2:  Horace’s scenes (his memory is visual rather than auditory) unmistakably reproduce those of the Culex; cf. Culex 148-58 with Epode 26-28; Culex 86-7 with Epode 21-22; Culex 49-50 with Epode 11-12; etc.  A full comparison is made in Classical Philology, 1920, p. 24.  Vergil could, of course, be expected to recognize the allusions to his own poem.]