I have recently purchased a copy of Bernard Knox's <i>Essays Ancient and Modern</i>. In the introductory essay, he speaks of shelter in a house during a battle in northern Italy and making his own random probe into a Virgil, finding not a prophecy of the future, but a curiously apropos description of the state of the world, at the end of the first Georgic, which the Perseus project gives as<p>Here where the wrong is right, the right is wrong,/
Where wars abound so many, and myriad-faced/
Is crime; where no meet honour hath the plough;
The fields, their husbandmen led far away,/
Rot in neglect, and curved pruning-hooks/
Into the sword's stiff blade are fused and forged./
Euphrates here, here Germany new strife/
Is stirring; neighbouring cities are in arms,/
The laws that bound them snapped; and godless war/
Rages through all the universe;...<p><a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0058%3Abook%3D1%3Acard%3D466" rel="nofollow">http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...</a>