This happy idea
may well have been suggested by table talks with Philodemus or Siro, who
must at times have recalled stories of savior-princes that they had heard
in their youth in the East. The oppressed Orient was full of prophetic
utterances promising the return of independence and prosperity under the
leadership of some long-hoped-for worthy prince of the tediously unworthy
reigning dynasties. Indeed, since Philodemus grew to boyhood at Gadara
under Jewish rule he could hardly have escaped the knowledge of the very
definite Messianic hopes of the Hebrew people. It may well be, therefore,
that a stray image whose ultimate source was none other than Isaiah came
in this indirect fashion into Vergil's poem, and that the monks of the
dark ages guessed better than they knew.
[Footnote 2: Sellar, _Horace and the Elegiac Poets_, p. 123. Ramsay,
quoted by W. Warde Fowler, _Vergil's Messianic Eclogue_, p, 54.]
To attempt to identify Vergil's child with a definite person would be a
futile effort to analyze poetic allegory. Contemporary readers doubtless
supposed that since the Republic was dead, the successor to power after
the death of Octavius and Antony would naturally be a son of one of
these.
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