SPLENDOR OF THE HOMERIC POETRY 63 the world! His poems have in them an inexnaustible vitality, and no device of criticism can tear from his brow "his crown of indivisible supremacy." Even now, as we look back upon the past which poetry has peopled with heroic figures, we descry far in the distance, but still towering above the rest, the form of great Achilles, and "through the music of the languid hours we hear, like Ocean on a western beach, the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." A single poet in a narrow sphere has succeeded in catching the ear of all generations, and we learn the lesson that man's influence is not measured by his small surroundings, and that this world and the drama enacted here may be the source of good to all the universe. There is a theory of evolution which provides a place for such a wonder, as it provides for other new beginnings, by the assumption of an immanent and divine Intelligence who works out his plan in varied ways, at times by sudden leaps, though commonly by slow gradations. But God would seem to have given the death-blow to any theory of impersonal and atheistic evolution by ordaining at the very dawn of human history that the greatest of epic poets should also be the first. VIRGIL THE POET OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE ROME had conquered the world and the victors were scrambling for the spoils. Two great civil wars naturally followed the earlier wars of conquest. In the first of these civil wars, Marius and Sulla measured their strength against each other. After seven years of bloodshed, Sulla entered Rome in triumph and was made dictator just eighty-one years before Christ. Then followed thirty-seven years of exhaustion and peace, broken only by Pompey's overthrow of Sulla's constitution in the year 70, and Cæsar's overthrow of Pompey and the republic in 48. The second civil war began just so soon as there arose two new leaders able to continue the fight. Those leaders were Antony and Octavian, the former Cæsar's legal heir, the latter Cæsar's personal heir. As in the first civil war Sulla had represented the aristocratic party against Marius, so in the second civil war Octavian represented the popular party against Antony. The civil wars were in part a contest of principles—the principle of senatorial aristocracy on the one hand and the principle of democratic rule on the other. But they were still more a contest of ambitious men, each bent on making himself the foremost man of all this world. As Sulla defeated the plebeians only to |