this group would take and whose influence would predominate. It might be
Maecenas, the holder of the purse-strings, a man who could not check his
ambition to express himself whether in prose or verse. This Etruscan,
whose few surviving pages reveal the fact that he never acquired
an understanding of the dignity of Rome's language, that he was
temperamentally un-Roman in his love for meretricious gaudiness and
prettiness, might have worked incalculable harm on this school had his
taste in the least affected it. But whether he withheld his dictum, or it
was disregarded by the others, no influence of his can be detected in the
literature of the epoch.

Apollodorus, Octavian's aged teacher, a man of very great personal
influence, and highly respected, probably counted for more. In his
lectures and his books, one of which, Valgius, a member of the circle,
translated into Latin, he preached the doctrines of a chaste and
dignified classicism. His creed fortunately fell in with the tendencies
of the time, and whether this teaching be called a cause, or whether the
popularity of it be an effect of pre-existing causes, we know that this
man came to represent many of the ideals of the school.

But to trace these ideals in their contact with Vergil's mental
development, we must look back for a moment to the tendencies of the
Catullan age from which he was emerging. In a curious passage written not
many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their
styles and departments,[4] places Vergil in a class apart. He mentions
first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard. Then there are
Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful
directness he does approve. In comedy, his friend, Fundanius, represents
a homely plainness which he commends, while Vergil stands for gentleness
and urbanity (molle atque facetum).