Note 4 — GEORGICS. BOOK I.
Reading edition
The poetry of this book is more sublime than any part of Virgil, if I have any taste. And if ever I have copied his majestic style, it is here. The compliment he makes Augustus, almost in the beginning, is ill imitated by his successors, Lucan and Statius. They dedicated to tyrants; and their flatteries are gross and fulsome. Virgil's address is both more lofty and more just. In the three last lines of this Georgic, I think I have discovered a secret compliment to the emperor, which none of the commentators have observed. Virgil had just before described the miseries which Rome had undergone betwixt the triumvirs and the commonwealth party: in the close of all, he seems to excuse the crimes committed by his patron Cæsar, as if he were constrained, against his own temper, to those violent proceedings, by the necessity of the times in general, but more particularly by his two partners, Antony and Lepidus,
Fertur equis auriga, neque audit currus habenas.
They were the head-strong horses, who hurried Octavius, the trembling charioteer, along, and were deaf to his reclaiming them. I observe, farther, that the present wars, in which all Europe, and part of Asia, are engaged at present, are waged in the same places here described:
Hinc movet Euphrates, illinc Germania, bellum, &c.
as if Virgil had prophesied of this age.