I have recently purchased a copy of Bernard Knox's Essays Ancient and Modern. 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
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;...
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;...
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...