[Footnote 8: Warde Fowler, _Religious Experience of the Roman
People_. p. 408.]

[Footnote 9: Sergeaunt, _Trees, Shrubs, and Plants of Virgil_.]

This modern habit it is that makes the _Georgics_ read so much like
Fabre's remarkable essays. The study of the bees in the fourth book is,
of course, not free from errors that nothing less than generations of
close scrutiny could remove. But the right kind of observing has begun.
On the other hand the book is not merely a farmer's practical manual
on how to raise bees for profit. The poet's interest is in the amazing
insects themselves, their how and why and wherefore. It is the mystery
of their instincts, habits, and all-compelling energy that leads him to
study the bees, and finally to the half-concealed confession that his
philosophy has failed to solve the problems of animate nature.




XV

THE AENEID


While Caesar Octavian, now grown to full political stature, was reuniting
the East and the West after Actium, Vergil was writing the last pages of
the _Georgics_. The battle that decided Rome's future also determined the
poet's next theme. The Epic of Rome, abandoned at the death of Caesar,
unthinkable during the civil wars which followed, appealed for a hearing