with a minimum of soldiers.  All this he did; excluding adventurous schemes:  leaving Britain, for example, alone;—­and was able to reduce the army, before he died, to a mere handful of 140,000 men.—­Varus and his lost legions?  Well; there is something to be said about that.  Augustus was old, and the generals of the imperial family, who knew their business, were engaged elsewhere.  And Germany was being governed by a good amiable soul by the name of Quintilius Varus, who persisted in treating the Germans as if they had been civilized Italians.  And there was a young Cheruscan who had become a Roman citizen, spoke Latin fluently, and had always been a good ally of Rome.  His Latin cognomen was Arminius; of which German patriotism has manufactured a highly improbable Hermann. The trustful Varus allowed himself to be lured by this seemingly so good friend into the wilds of the Saltus Teutobergiensis, where the whole power of the Cheruscans fell on and destroyed him.  Then Tiberius came, and put the matter right; but there was an ugly half hour of general panic first.  There had been no thought of adding Germany to the empire but only as to whether the frontier should be on the Elbe or the Rhine.  Varus’ defeat decided Augustus for the Rhine.

Now we come to what he did for Italy:  his second trump card, if we call Spain his first.  Spain belonged to the future, Italy to the present.  Her cycle was half over, and she had done nothing (in B.C. 29) very worthy with it.  First, an effort should be made towards the purificatior of family-life:  a pretty hopeless task, wherein at last he was forced to banish his own daughter for notorious evil-living.  He made laws; and it may be supposed that they had some effect in time. A literary impulse towards high dignified ideals, however, may be much more effective than laws.  He had Maecenas with his circle of poets.

Of course, poetry written to order, or upon imperial suggestion, is not likely to be of the highest creative kind.  But the high creative forces were not flowing in that age; and we need not blame Augustan patronage for the limitations of Augustan literature.  There is no time to argue the question; this much we may say:  the two poets who worked with the emperor, and wrote under his influence and sometimes at his suggestion, left work that endures in world-literature; that is noble and beautiful, and still interesting.  I mean Virgil and Horace, of course.  Ovid, who was not under that influence, but of the faction opposed to it, wrote stuff that it would be much better were lost entirely.

The poet’s was the best of pulpits, in those days:  poets stood much nearer the world then than for all the force of the printing-press they can hope to do now.  So, if they could preach back its sacredness to the soil of Italy; if they could recreate the ideal of the old agricultural life; something might be done towards (among other things) checking the unwholesome crowding to the capital,—­as great an evil then as now.  Through Maecenas and directly Augustus influenced Virgil, the laureate; who responded with his Georgics.