[Footnote 3:  See Georgics, II, 458-542, and a discussion of it in Classical Philology, 1920, p. 42.]

The composition of the sixteenth epode by Horace—­soon after the second, it would seem—­gave Vergil an opportunity to recognize the new poet, and answer his pessimistic appeal with the cheerful prophecy of the fourth Eclogue, as we have seen.  By this time we may suppose that an intimate friendship had sprung up between the two poets, strengthened of course by friendly intercourse, now that Vergil could spend some of his time at Rome.  Horace himself tells how Vergil and Varius introduced him to Maecenas (Sat. 1. 6), an important event in his career that took place some time before the Brundisian journey (Sat. 1. 5).  Maecenas had hesitated somewhat before accepting the intimacy of the young satirist:  Horace had fought quite recently in the enemy’s army, had criticized the government in his Epodes, and was of a class—­at least technically—­which Octavian had been warned not to recognize socially, unless he was prepared to offend the old nobility.  But Horace’s dignified candor won him the confidence of Maecenas; and that there might be no misunderstanding he included in his first book of Satires a simple account of what he was and hoped to be.  Thus through the efforts of Vergil and Varius he entered the circle whose guiding spirit he was destined to become.

Thus the coterie was formed, which under such powerful patronage was bound to become a sort of unofficial commission for the regulation of literary standards.  It was an important question, not only for the young men themselves but for the future of Roman literature, which direction this group would take and whose influence would predominate.  It might be Maecenas, the holder of the purse-strings, a man who could not check his ambition to express himself whether in prose or verse.  This Etruscan, whose few surviving pages reveal the fact that he never acquired an understanding of the dignity of Rome’s language, that he was temperamentally un-Roman in his love for meretricious gaudiness and prettiness, might have worked incalculable harm on this school had his taste in the least affected it.  But whether he withheld his dictum, or it was disregarded by the others, no influence of his can be detected in the literature of the epoch.

Apollodorus, Octavian’s aged teacher, a man of very great personal influence, and highly respected, probably counted for more.  In his lectures and his books, one of which, Valgius, a member of the circle, translated into Latin, he preached the doctrines of a chaste and dignified classicism.  His creed fortunately fell in with the tendencies of the time, and whether this teaching be called a cause, or whether the popularity of it be an effect of pre-existing causes, we know that this man came to represent many of the ideals of the school.