of almost constant civil wars. After almost 15 years of political and social upheaval, Octavian, the sole surviving member of the Second Triumvirate, became firmly established as the new leader of the Roman world. Under Octavian, Rome enjoyed a long period of relative peace and prosperity. However, Octavian's victory at Actium also sounded the death knell of the Republic. With Octavian as the sole ruler of the Roman world, the Roman Empire was born. It was during this period, and against this backdrop of civil war, that Virgil composed the Georgics. While not containing any overtly political passages, politics are not absent from the Georgics. Not only is Octavian addressed in the poem both directly and indirectly, but the poem also contains several passages that include references and images that could be interpreted as political, such as the description of the plague in Book 3 and Virgil's famous description of bee society in Book 4. It is impossible to know whether or not these references and images were intended to be seen as political in nature, but it would not be inconceivable that Virgil was in some way influenced by the years of civil war. Whether they were intentional or not, if we believe Suetonius, these references did not seem to trouble Octavian, to whom Virgil is said to have recited the Georgics in 29 BCE. Laudes Galli A comment by the Virgilian commentator Servius, that the middle to the end of the fourth book contained a large series of praises for Cornelius Gallus (laudes Galli means "praises of Gallus" in Latin), has spurred much scholarly debate. Servius tells us that after Gallus had fallen out of favour, Virgil replaced the praises of Gallus with the Orpheus episode. Those supporting Servius see the Orpheus episode as an unpolished, weak episode, and point out that it is unlike anything else in the Georgics in that it radically departs from the didactic mode that we see throughout, rendering it an illogical, awkward insertion. Indeed, the features of the episode are unique; it is an epyllion that engages mythological material. The episode does not further the narrative and has no immediately apparent relevance to Virgil's topic. The difficult, open-ended conclusion seems to confirm this interpretation. In a highly influential article Anderson debunked this view, and it is now generally believed that there were not Laudes Galli and that the Orpheus episode is original.