phase of the question.

We would expect the Garden group, friendly to the memory of Caesar, to
adopt the same point of view as Piso and for the same reasons. They could
hardly have sympathized with the murderers of Caesar. On the other hand,
they had no reason for supporting the usurpations of Antony, and seem to
have enjoyed Cicero's _Philippics_ in so far as these attacked Antony.
Extreme measures were, however, not agreeable to Epicureans, who in
general had nothing but condemnation for civil war. However, Octavian's
strong stand could only have pleased them: Caesar's grand-nephew and heir
would naturally be to them a sympathetic figure.

A fragment of Philodemus, recently deciphered,[1] reveals the teacher
adopting in his lectures the very point of view which we have already
found in Piso. The fragment is brief and mutilated, but so much is clear:
Philodemus criticizes the party of Cicero for carrying the attack upon
Antony to such extremes that through fear of the liberators a reaction
in favor of Antony might set in. We find this position reflected even in
Vergil. He never speaks harshly of the liberators, to be sure; in
fact his indirect reference to Brutus in the _Aeneid_ is remarkably
sympathetic for an Augustan poet, but we have two epigrams of his
attacking partizans of Antony in terms that remind us of passages in
Cicero's _Philippics_. It would almost appear that Vergil now drew his
themes for lampoons from Cicero's unforgettable phrases,[2] as Catullus
had done some fifteen years before. How thoroughly Vergil disliked Antony
may be seen in the familiar line in the _Aeneid_ which Servius recognized
as an allusion to that usurper (_Aen_. VI. 622):

Fixit leges pretio atque refixit.

[Footnote 1: _Hermes_, 1918, p. 382.]

[Footnote 2: Three other epigrams, VI, XII, XIII, have been assumed by
some critics to be direct attacks upon Antony, but the key to them has
been lost and certainty is no longer attainable.]

If Servius is correct, we have here again a reminder of those stormy
years. This, too, is a dagger drawn from Cicero's armory. Again and again
the orator in the _Philippics_ charges Antony with having used Caesar's
seal ring for lucrative forgeries in state documents. It is interesting
to find that Vergil's school friend, Varius, in his poem on Caesar's
death, called _De Morte_[3] first put Cicero's charges into effective
verse:

Vendidit hic Latium populis agrosque Quiritum
Eripuit: fixi