Caesar seemed irresistible and godlike, and men were probably beginning to hope for some new and more stable order of things, when he was suddenly struck down, and the world plunged again into confusion and doubt; and it was not till after the final victory of Octavian at Actium, and the destruction of the elements of disunion with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, that men really began to hope for better times.

The literature of those melancholy years shows distinct signs of the general depression, which was perhaps something more than weariness and material discomfort; there was almost what we may call a dim sense of sin, or at least of moral evil, such a feeling, though far less real and intense, as that which their prophets aroused from time to time in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of Hellas.
The most touching expression of this feeling is to be found in the preface which Livy prefixed to his history--a wonderful example of the truth that when a great prose writer is greatly moved, his language reflects his emotion in its beauty and earnestness.

Every student knows the sentence in which he describes the gradual decay of all that was good in the Roman character: "donec ad haec tempora, quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus, perventum est"; but it is not every student who can recognise in it a real sigh of despair, an unmistakable token of the sadness of the age.[582] In the introductory chapters which serve the purpose of prefaces to the _Jugurtha_ and _Catiline_ of Sallust, we find something of the same sad tone, but it does not ring true like Livy's exordium; Sallust was a man of altogether coarser fibre, and seems to be rather assuming than expressing the genuine feeling of a saddened onlooker.

In one of his earliest poems, written perhaps after the Perusian war of 41 B.C.[583] even the lively Horace was moved to voice the prevailing depression, fancifully urging that the Italian people should migrate, like the Phocaeans of old, to the far west, where, as Sertorius had been told in Spain, lay the islands of the blest, where the earth, as in the golden age, yields all her produce untilled: Iuppiter ilia piae secrevit litora genti Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum; Aere, dehinc ferro duravit saecula, quorum Piis secunda vate me datur fuga.
It may be, as has recently been suggested, that the famous fourth Eclogue of Virgil, "the Messianic Eclogue," was in some sense meant as an answer to this poem of Horace.

"There is no need," he seems to say in that poem, written in the year 39, "to seek the better age in a fabled island of the west.