await them hereafter; yet justice, piety, patriotism, chastity, self-devotion; fidelity to friend and wife and client; filial and fraternal love: never received advocacy more strenuous and sincere, never were sanctioned by praise more eloquent, or reprehension more terrible, than in those immortal verses which it is an impertinence to praise. The question which presented itself to Augustus, to his ministers and to his poets, was how to re-invigorate and preserve those qualities by her practice of which Rome had become pulcherrima rerum. And we cannot wonder that an important part of their answer to this question lay in the direction of restoring those ancient religious ceremonies and moral practices which had been most conspicuously displayed when Rome was making her noblest efforts to accomplish her great destiny. The sanction of antiquity is the most permanent of all appeals that are ever made to humanity; and, even in times of revolution, its authority has been invoked by those most eager to sweep away existing institutions. Pro magno teste vetustas creditur.[1] But if Augustus and his friends appealed to antiquity, it was not merely to recall the shadows of the ancient forms and customs, but to revivify them with the new life of virtue that was welling up in their time, and which, in its turn, received external grace and strength by its embodiment in the ancestral forms.
The strong chord of moral earnestness struck by Horace and Virgil grows more resonant as the new era
- ↑ Ovid: Fasti, 4, 203; cf. Meta., i. sec. 8.
