Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Poets in a Landscape (1957; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2010), p. 63:

Victor Hugo and others have called Vergil a miserable sycophant who accepted a bribe to become the propagandist of a velvet-gloved tyrant. There are two counter-arguments to this. One is that Augustus was in fact a very great man, one of the few foremost builders of peace in the history of the world, who was accomplishing an all but miraculous regeneration of the whole of western civilization: Vergil, like many others, recognized his greatness, and thought himself privileged to expound his ideals. The other is that Vergil felt in himself the rising power which was to make him a supreme poet, knew that to be reduced to destitution and condemned to be a farm labourer for the rest of his life would mean the murder of a genius, and was therefore grateful to the monarch who freed not only his body but his soul from starvation.