But his responsibilities grew with his greatness. The
scheme of a great Roman epic, which had; always floated
before his own mind, was now =defii*itely and indeed
urgently pressed upon him by authority which it was
difficult to resist. And many elements in his own mind
drew him in the same direction. Too much stress need



96 Latin Literature. PI-

not be laid on the passage in the sixth Eclogue — one of
the rare autobiographic touche&^ his work — in which he
alludes to his early experiments in " singing of kings and
battles." Such early exercises are the common field of
young poets. But the maturing of his mind, which can
be traced in the Georgia, was urging him towards certain
methods of art for which the epic was the only literary
form that gave sufficient scope. More and more he was
turning from nature to man and human life, and to the
contemplation of human destiny. The growth of the
psychological instinct in the Georgics is curiously visible
in the episode of Aristaeus, with which the poem now
ends. According to a well-authenticated tradition, the
last two hundred and fifty lines of the fourth Georgia were
written several years after the rest of the poem, to replace
the original conclusion, which had contained the praises
of his early friend, Cornelius Callus, now dead in disgrace
and proscribed from court poetry. In the story of Orpheus
and Eurydice, in the later version, Virgil shows a new
method and a new power. It stands between the idyl and
the epic, but it is the epic method towards which it tends.
