These lines were written in 40 BC, in the very teeth of Italy’s suffering. Their author, P. Vergilius Maro—Virgil—was from the fertile basin of the River Po, an area where the land commissars had been particularly active. In other poems Virgil had hauntingly depicted the miseries of the dispossessed, and his vision of Utopia was not any the less despairing in its inspiration. Such had been the scale of the catastrophe that had overtaken the Roman people that vague prophetic longings of the kind that Greeks or Jews had long indulged in appeared the only consolations left to them. “The Sibyl’s
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