Maiores audire, minori dicere per quae Crescere res posset, minui damnosa libido(407).
It adds to our sense of Virgil's thoroughness as an artist to know that he faithfully performed the office which he undertook; and the fact of his undertaking this office helps to bring home to us the practical, unspeculative genius of those to whom his poem was in the first place addressed.
2. Not only the instruction directly conveyed in the poem, but the frequent illustrations from geography, mythology, and astronomy, have much less meaning to us than they had to the contemporaries of the poet. Yet they help to make us realise the relation in which the Rome and Italy of the Augustan Age stood to the rest of the world and to the culture of the past. By the references to the varied products of other lands we are reminded of the active commercial intercourse between Rome and the East,--a feature of the age of which we are also often reminded in the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace. We see how the success of the Roman arms had made the products of the whole world--the 'saffron dye of Tmolus,' the 'ivory of India,' the 'spices of Arabia,' the 'iron of the Chalybians,' the 'medicinal drugs of Pontus,' the 'brood-mares of Epirus(408)'--part of the possessions of Rome. We are reminded too of the fact that many Romans and Italians were settled as colonists in the provinces of the Empire, and that Virgil had them also in view in the instruction which he imparts(409). The frequent allusions to Greek mythology and to the constellations, on the other hand, help to remind us that the art and science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of intellectual culture.
3. It was seen how assiduously Virgil, in the body of his poem, inculcates the necessity and duty of labour. And though the 'glorification of labour' was found to be rather a derivative and tributary stream than the main current of interest in the poem, yet it is impossible to doubt that to the mind of Virgil this assiduous toil of the husbandman, on a work so congenial and surrounded with such accessories of peaceful happiness, had a special attraction, even independent of its results. This recognition of the dignity of labour owes nothing to a Greek original. A life of intellectual leisure was the ideal of the Greeks. Hesiod indeed does dwell on the necessity of labour, as the ground both of worldly well-being and divine approval,--and this is another point of affinity between him and Virgil,--but the line in which he claims consideration for work,