[109] The basis of the work of Augustus, and of the religious reforms inaugurated or developed by him, is laid in the recognition of a fact noted by Balbus in Cic., De Nat. Deorum, lib. ii. 3. “Eorum imperiis rempublicam amplificatam qui religionibus paruissent. Et si conferre volumus nostra cum externis, ceteris rebus aut pares aut etiam inferiores reperiemur; religione, id est, cultu deorum, multo superiores.” Cf. Horace: Od., iii. 6, vv. 1-4; Livy, xlv. 39.
[110] Hor.: Od., iii. 6.
[111] See Boissier: Religion Romaine, vol. i. cap. 5.—Le Sixième Livre de l’Enéide. St. Augustine must surely have felt the religious influence of the Æneid when he experienced the emotion which he describes in the well-known passage in the First Book of the Confessions—plorare Didonem mortuam (cogebar), quia se occidit ob amorem: cum interea meipsum morientem, Deus Vita mea, siccis occulis ferrem miserrimus. (Lib. i. cap. xiii.)
[112] Ovid: Fasti, 4, 203; cf. Meta., i. sec. 8.
[113] See the Life of Persius, included, with the Lives of Terence, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, and Pliny the Elder, in the writings of Suetonius.
[114] Macleane’s Persius.—Introduction.
[115] Persius: Sat., v. 62-64.—At te nocturnis juvat impallescere chartis, Cultor enim juvenum purgatas inseris aures Fruge Cleanthea.
[116] Pharsalia, ix. 554-555.
[117] Pharsalia, ix. 570. We have not been able to refrain from quoting these—as other—well-known verses in the text. They are the highest expression of the Stoic Pantheism. “Virtus” has the appearance of a rhetorical climax; but has it been noticed that the great modern poet of Pantheism—for what else was Wordsworth?—also makes humanity the highest embodiment of that “presence ... Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man?”
[118] Quis labor hic superis, &c., vi. 490, et passim.