The years that followed the publication of the Eclogues seem to have been a season of reading, traveling, observing, and brooding.  Maecenas desired to keep the poet at Rome, and as an inducement provided him with a villa in his own gardens on the Esquiline.  The fame of the digitus praetereuntium awaited his coming and going, his Bucolics had been set to music and sung in the concert halls to vehement applause.[1] He seems even to have made an effort to be socially congenial.  There is intimate knowledge of courtly customs in the staging of his epic; and in Horace’s fourth book a refurbished early poem in Philodemus’ manner pictures a Vergil—­apparently the poet—­as the pet of the fashionable world.  But these things had no attraction for him.  Rome indeed appealed to his imagination, Roma pulcherrima rerum, but it was the invisible Rome rather than the fumum et opes strepitumque, it was the city of pristine ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises’ pageant of heroes.  When he walked through the Forum he saw not only the glistening monuments in their new marble veneer, but beyond these, in the far distant past, the straw hut of Romulus and the sacred grove on the Capitoline where the spirit of Jove had guarded a folk of simpler piety.[2] And down the centuries he beheld the heroes, the law-givers, and the rulers, who had made the Forum the court of a world-wide empire.  The Rome of his own day was too feverish, it soon drove him back to his garden villa near Naples.

[Footnote 1:  Tacitus, Dialogus, 13:  Malo securum et quietum Vergilii secessum, in quo tamen neque apud divum Augustum gratia caruit neque apud populum Romanum notitia.  Testes Augusti epistulae, testis ipse populus, qui auditis in theatro Vergilii versibus surrexit universus et forte praesentem spectantemque Vergilium veneratus est quasi Augustum.]

[Footnote 2:  Aeneid VIII.]

It was well that he possessed such a retreat during those years of petty political squabbles.  The capital still hummed with rumors of civil war.  Antony seemed determined to sever the eastern provinces from the empire and make of them a gift to Cleopatra and her children—­a mad course that could only end in another world war.  Sextus Pompey still held Sicily and the central seas, ready to betray the state at the first mis-step on Octavian’s part.  At Rome itself were many citizens in high position who were at variance with the government, quite prepared to declare for Antony or Pompey if either should appear a match for the young heir of Caesar.  Clearly the great epic of Rome could not have matured in that atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and selfishness.  The convulsions of the dying republic, beheld day by day near at hand, could only have inspired a disgust sufficient to poison a poet’s sensitive hope.  It was indeed fortunate that Vergil could escape all this, that he could retain through the period of transition the memories of Rome’s former greatness and the faith in her destiny that he had imbibed in his youth.  The time came when Octavian, after Actium, reunited the Empire with a firm hand and justified the buoyant optimism which Vergil, almost alone of his generation, had been able to preserve.