It may be, as has recently been suggested, that the famous fourth Eclogue of Virgil, “the Messianic Eclogue,” was in some sense meant as an answer to this poem of Horace.  “There is no need,” he seems to say in that poem, written in the year 39, “to seek the better age in a fabled island of the west.  It is here and now with us.  The period upon which Italy is now entering more than fulfils in real life the dream of a Golden Age.  A marvellous child is even now coming into the world who will see and inaugurate an era of peace and prosperity:  darkness and despair will after a while pass entirely away, and a regenerate Italy,—­regenerate in religion and morals as in fertility and wealth,—­will lead the world in a new era of happiness and good government."[584]

But the Golden Age, so fondly hoped for, so vaguely and poetically conceived, was not to come in the sense in which Virgil, or any other serious thinker of the day, could dream of it.  I may conclude this chapter with a few sentences which express this most truly and eloquently.  “When there is a fervent aspiration after better things, springing from a strong feeling of human brotherhood, and a firm belief in the goodness and righteousness of God, such aspiration carries with it an invincible confidence that some how, some where, some when, it must receive its complete fulfilment, for it is prompted by the Spirit which fills and orders the Universe throughout its whole development.  But if the human organ of inspiration goes on to fix the how, the where, and the when, and attributes to some nearer object the glory of the final blessedness, then it inevitably falls into such mistakes as Virgil’s, and finds its golden age in the rule of the Caesars (which was indeed an essential feature of Christianity), or perhaps, as in later days, in the establishment of socialism or imperialism.  Well for the seer if he remembers that the kingdom of God is within us, and that the true golden age must have its foundation in penitence for misdoing, and be built up in righteousness and loving kindness."[585]

EPILOGUE

These sketches of social life at the close of the Republican period have been written without any intention of proving a point, or any pre-conceived idea of the extent of demoralisation, social, moral, or political, which the Roman people had then reached.  But a perusal of Mr. Balfour’s suggestive lecture on “Decadence” has put me upon making a very succinct diagnosis of the condition of the patient whose life and habits I have been describing.  The Romans, and the Italians, with whom they were now socially and politically amalgamated, were not in the last two centuries B.C. an old or worn-out people.  It is at any rate certain that for a century after the war with Hannibal Rome and her allies, under the guidance of the Roman senate, achieved an amount of work in the way of war and organisation such as has hardly been performed by any people before