The time has come to unyoke our steaming horses

"[W]e have come a great long way," a poet told [Roman Emperor] Octavian, shortly after his return from Alexandria in the year 29. "The time has come to unyoke our steaming horses." The poet was Virgil, the poem was the Georgics, and Octavian is said to have listened as the author and a few friends read it aloud, over several days, all 2,118 hexameters. This was no epic - The Aeneid would come later - and the occasion has so puzzled Octavian's recent biographers that they've passed over it. Why would the most powerful man in the world sit still for instruction, at such length, on the rotation of crops, the nurturing of vines, the breeding of cattle, and the keeping of bees? John Buchan, an earlier biographer, suggested that Octavian was ready to slow down, to look around, and to think about how to use power now that he had no rivals. He was shifting from navigation to cultivation.

The rising Octavian had spent a decade and a half fending off, buying out, circumventing, eliminating, or capitalizing on threats posed by Antony, Cicero, Cassius, Brutus, Fulvia, Lucius, Sextus, Lepidus, Cleopatra, and Caesarion, as well as Rome's senate, its mobs, his sicknesses, storms and shipwrecks, even a comet. He did so resourcefully, but he wasn't setting the pace. He kept seizing the initiative, losing it, and having to regain it. He couldn't keep this up. No steaming horse runs forever.

After Actium, Octavian began controlling events, rather than letting them control him. 

- John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, New York, 2018, p.84

See also:
Blog: Roman machines, 16 September 2013
Blog: Hadrian, 20 October 2008
Blog: Napoli, Herculaneum, Pompeii, 3 April 2008