HORACE

BY

THEODORE MARTIN


From the Series Ancient Classics for English Readers

edited by

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M. A.



CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.   BIRTH.--EDUCATION.--CAMPAIGN WITH BRUTUS AND CASSIUS

CHAPTER II.  RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI.--EARLY POEMS

CHAPTER III. INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS.--THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM

CHAPTER IV.  PUBLICATION OF FIRST BOOK OF SATIRES.--HIS FRIENDS.--
             RECEIVES THE SABINE FARM FROM MAECENAS

CHAPTER V.   LIFE IN ROME.--HORACE'S BORE.--EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE ROMAN
             DINNERS

CHAPTER VI.  HORACE'S LOVE-POETRY

CHAPTER VII. HORACE'S POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS.--HIS PRAISES OF
             CONTENTMENT

CHAPTER VIII. PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY.--HORACE'S VIEWS OF A
              HEREAFTER.--RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS--BELIEF IN THE
              PERMANENCE OF HIS OWN FAME

CHAPTER IX.   HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS--HIS LOVE OF
              INDEPENDENCE

CHAPTER X.    DELICACY OF HORACE'S HEALTH.-HIS CHEERFULNESS--LOVE OF
              BOOKS.--HIS PHILOSOPHY PRACTICAL.--EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS.
              --DEATH



PREFACE.

No writer of antiquity has taken a stronger hold upon the modern mind
than Horace. The causes of this are manifold, but three may be
especially noted: his broad human sympathies, his vigorous common-
sense, and his consummate mastery of expression. The mind must be
either singularly barren or singularly cold to which Horace does not
speak. The scholar, the statesman, the soldier, the man of the world,
the town-bred man, the lover of the country, the thoughtful and the
careless, he who reads much, and he who reads little, all find in his
pages more or less to amuse their fancy, to touch their feelings, to
quicken their observation, to nerve their convictions, to put into
happy phrase the deductions of their experience. His poetical
sentiment is not pitched in too high a key for the unimaginative, but
it is always so genuine that the most imaginative feel its charm. His
wisdom is deeper than it seems, so simple, practical, and direct as it
is in its application; and his moral teaching more spiritual and
penetrating than is apparent on a superficial study. He does not fall
into the common error of didactic writers, of laying upon life more
than it will bear; but he insists that it shall at least bear the
fruits of integrity, truth, honour, justice, self-denial, and
brotherly charity. Over and above the mere literary charm of his
works, too--and herein, perhaps, lies no small part of the secret of
his popularity--the warm heart and thoroughly urbane nature of the man
are felt instinctively by his readers, and draw them to him as to a
friend.

Hence it is that we find he has been a manual with men the most
diverse in their natures, culture, and pursuits. Dante ranks him next
after Homer. Montaigne, as might be expected, knows him by heart.
Fenelon and Bossuet never weary of quoting him. La Fontaine polishes
his own exquisite style upon his model; and Voltaire calls him "the
best of preachers." Hooker escapes with him to the fields to seek
oblivion of a hard life, made harder by a shrewish spouse. Lord
Chesterfield tells us, "When I talked my best I quoted Horace." To
Boileau and to Wordsworth he is equally dear. Condorcet dies in his
dungeon with Horace open by his side; and in Gibbon's militia days,
"on every march," he says, "in every journey, Horace was always in my
pocket, and often in my hand." And as it has been, so it is. In many a
pocket, where this might be least expected, lies a well-thumbed
Horace; and in many a devout Christian heart the maxims of the gentle,
genial pagan find a place near the higher teachings of a greater
master.

Where so much of a writer's charm lies, as with Horace, in exquisite
aptness of language, and in a style perfect for fulness of suggestion
combined with brevity and grace, the task of indicating his
characteristics in translation demands the most liberal allowance from
the reader. In this volume the writer has gladly availed himself,
where he might, of the privilege liberally accorded to him to use the
admirable translations of the late Mr Conington, which are
distinguished in all cases by the addition of his initial. The other
translations are the writer's own. For these it would be superfluous
to claim indulgence. This is sure to be granted by those who know
their Horace well. With those who do not, these translations will not
be wholly useless, if they serve to pique them into cultivating an
acquaintance with the original sufficiently close to justify them in
turning critics of their defects.



QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS.

BORN, A.U.C. 689, B.C. 65. DIED, A.U.C. 746, B.C. 8.



CHAPTER I.

BIRTH.--EDUCATION.--CAMPAIGN WITH BRUTUS AND CASSIUS.


Like the two greatest lyrists of modern times, Burns and Béranger,
Horace sprang from the ranks of the people. His father had been a
slave, and he was himself cradled among "the huts where poor men lie."
Like these great lyrists, too, Horace was proud of his origin. After
he had become the intimate associate of the first men in Rome--nay,
the bosom friend of the generals and statesmen who ruled the world--he
was at pains on more occasions than one to call attention to the fact
of his humble birth, and to let it be known that, had he to begin life
anew, he was so far from desiring a better ancestry that he would,
like Andrew Marvell, have made "his destiny his choice." Nor is this
done with the pretentious affectation of the parvenu, eager to bring
under notice the contrast between what he is and what he has been, and
to insinuate his personal deserts, while pretending to disclaim them.
Horace has no such false humility. He was proud, and he makes no
secret that he was so, of the name he had made,--proud of it for
himself and for the class from which, he had sprung. But it was his
practice, as well as his settled creed, to rate at little the
accidents of birth and fortune. A stronger and higher feeling,
however, more probably dictated the avowal,--gratitude to that slave-
born father whose character and careful training had stamped an
abiding influence upon the life and genius of his son. Neither might
he have been unwilling in this way quietly to protest against the
worship of rank and wealth which he saw everywhere around him, and
which was demoralising society in Rome. The favourite of the Emperor,
the companion of Maecenas, did not himself forget, neither would he
let others forget, that he was a freedman's son; and in his own way
was glad to declare, as Béranger did of himself at the height of his
fame,


  "Je suis vilain, et très vilain."

The Roman poets of the pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlike
Horace, were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his great
predecessors in lyric poetry, were men of old and noble family Virgil,
born five years before Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of good
property. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six,
fourteen, and twenty years his juniors, were all of equestrian rank.
Horace's father was a freed-man of the town of Venusia, the modern
Venosa. It is supposed that he had been a _publicus servus_, or
slave of the community, and took his distinctive name from the
Horatian tribe, to which the community belonged. He had saved a
moderate competency in the vocation of _coactor_, a name applied
both to the collectors of public revenue and of money at sales by
public auction. To which of these classes he belonged is uncertain--
most probably to the latter; and in those days of frequent
confiscations, when property was constantly changing hands, the
profits of his calling, at best a poor one, may have been unusually
large. With the fruits of his industry he had purchased a small farm
near Venusia, upon the banks of the Aufidus, the modern Ofanto, on the
confines of Lucania and Apulia, Here, on the 8th of December, B.C. 65,
the poet was born; and this picturesque region of mountain, forest,
and river, "meet nurse of a poetic child," impressed itself indelibly
on his memory, and imbued him with the love of nature, especially in
her rugged aspect, which remained with him through life. He appears to
have left the locality in early life, and never to have revisited it;
but when he has occasion to describe its features (Odes, III. 4), he
does this with a sharpness and truth of touch, which show how closely
he had even then begun to observe. Acherontia, perched nest-like among
the rocks, the Bantine thickets, the fat meadows of low-lying
Forentum, which his boyish eye had noted, attest to this hour the
vivid accuracy of his description. The passage in question records an
interesting incident in the poet's childhood. Escaping from his nurse,
he has rambled away from the little cottage on the slopes of Mount
Vultur, whither he had probably been taken from the sultry Venusia to
pass his _villeggiatura_ during the heat of summer, and is found
asleep, covered with fresh myrtle and laurel leaves, in which the
wood-pigeons have swathed him.

  "When from my nurse erewhile, on Vultur's steep,
    I stray'd beyond the bound
    Of our small homestead's ground,
  Was I, fatigued with play, beneath a heap
    Of fresh leaves sleeping found,--

  "Strewn by the storied doves; and wonder fell
    On all, their nest who keep
    On Acherontia's steep,
  Or in Forentum's low rich pastures dwell,
    Or Bantine woodlands deep,

  "That safe from bears and adders in such place
    I lay, and slumbering smiled,
    O'erstrewn with myrtle wild,
  And laurel, by the god's peculiar grace
    No craven-hearted child."

The incident thus recorded is not necessarily discredited by the
circumstance of its being closely akin to what is told by Aelian of
Pindar, that a swarm of bees settled upon his lips, and fed him with
honey, when he was left exposed upon the highway. It probably had some
foundation in fact, whatever may be thought of the implied augury of
the special favour of the gods which is said to have been drawn from
it at the time. In any case, the picture of the strayed child,
sleeping unconscious of its danger, with its hands full of wild-
flowers, is pleasant to contemplate.

In his father's house, and in those of the Apulian peasantry around
him, Horace became familiar with the simple virtues of the poor, their
industry and independence, their integrity, chastity, and self-denial,
which he loved to contrast in after years with the luxury and vice of
imperial Rome. His mother he would seem to have lost early. No mention
of her occurs, directly or indirectly, throughout his poems; and
remarkable as Horace is for the warmth of his affections, this could
scarcely have happened had she not died when he was very young. He
appears also to have been an only child. This doubtless drew him
closer to his father, and the want of the early influences of mother
or sister may serve to explain why one misses in his poetry something
of that gracious tenderness towards womanhood, which, looking to the
sweet and loving disposition of the man, one might otherwise have
expected to find in it. That he was no common boy we may be very sure,
even if this were not manifest from the fact that his father resolved
to give him a higher education than was to be obtained under a
provincial schoolmaster. With this view, although little able to
afford the expense, he took his son, when about twelve years old, to
Rome, and gave him the best education the capital could supply. No
money was spared to enable him to keep his position among his fellow-
scholars of the higher ranks. He was waited on by several slaves, as
though he were the heir to a considerable fortune. At the same time,
however, he was not allowed either to feel any shame for his own
order, or to aspire to a position which his patrimony was unable to
maintain. His father taught him to look forward to some situation akin
to that in which his own modest competency had been acquired; and to
feel that, in any sphere, culture, self-respect, and prudent self-
control must command influence, and afford the best guarantee for
happiness. In reading this part of Horace's story, as he tells it
himself, one is reminded of Burns's early lines about his father and
himself:--

  "My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border,
  And carefully he bred me up in decency and order.
  He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing,
  For without an honest manly heart no man was worth regarding."

The parallel might be still further pursued. "My father," says Gilbert
Burns, "was for some time almost the only companion we had. He
conversed familiarly on all subjects with us as if we had been men,
and was at great pains, while we accompanied him in the labours of the
farm, to lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend to
increase our knowledge, or confirm us in virtuous habits." How closely
this resembles the method adopted with Horace by his father will be
seen hereafter. [Footnote: Compare it, too, with what Horace reports
of "Ofellus the hind, Though no scholar, a sage of exceptional kind,"
in the Second Satire of the Second Book, from line 114 to the end.]

Horace's literary master at Rome was Orbilius Pupillus, a grammarian,
who had carried into his school his martinet habits as an old soldier;
and who, thanks to Horace, has become a name (_plagosus Orbilius_,
Orbilius of the birch) eagerly applied by many a suffering urchin to
modern pedagogues who have resorted to the same material means of
inculcating the beauties of the classics. By this Busby of the period
Horace was grounded in Greek, and made familiar, too familiar for his
liking, with Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, Attius, Livius Andronicus, and
other early Latin writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to one
who had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorous
style of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care that
he should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, in
which music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But,
what was of still more importance during this critical period of the
future poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he
enjoyed the advantages of his father's personal superintendence and
of a careful moral training. His father went with him to all his classes,
and, being himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour,
he gave the boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attention
to the follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around
him, showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates of
reason and common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences to
the good name and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions.
The method he pursued is thus described by Horace (Satires, I. 4):--

  "Should then my humorous vein run wild, some latitude allow.
  I learned the habit from the best of fathers, who employed
  Some living type to stamp the vice he wished me to avoid.
  Thus temperate and frugal when exhorting me to be,
  And with the competence content which he had stored for me,
  'Look, boy!' he'd say,' at Albius' son--observe his sorry plight!
  And Barrus, that poor beggar there! Say, are not these a sight,
  To warn a man from squandering his patrimonial means?'
  When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans;
  'Sectanus, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswear
  Intrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere;
  'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught.
  The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be
sought,
  The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold
  The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old,
  And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name.
  When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your
frame,
  You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won
  And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done,
  Hard it might be--'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can
quote'--
  And then as model pointed to some public man of note.
  Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you
  One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too,
  Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?'
  And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread
  Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint,
  So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint
  They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those
  Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes."

Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the
kindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical
and didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved
through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the rugged
maxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly but
echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his own
Ofellus, and the elders of the race--not, let us hope, altogether
bygone--of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as
"Religious men, who give to God and men their dues,"--the Apulian
freedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered from
books, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation
and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace to
his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had
occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this
admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that
father's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as
occurring in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family and
vast wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poet
which was afterwards to ripen into a lifelong friendship.

  "Yet if some trivial faults, and these but few,
  My nature, else not much amiss, imbue
  (Just as you wish away, yet scarcely blame,
  A mole or two upon a comely frame),
  If no man may arraign me of the vice
  Of lewdness, meanness, nor of avarice;
  If pure and innocent I live, and dear
  To those I love (self-praise is venial here),
  All this I owe my father, who, though poor,
  Lord of some few lean acres, and no more,
  Was loath to send me to the village school,
  Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule,--
  Centurions, and the like,--were wont to swarm,
  With slate and satchel on sinister arm,
  And the poor dole of scanty pence to pay
  The starveling teacher on the quarter-day;
  But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome,
  There to be taught all arts that grace the home
  Of knight and senator. To see my dress,
  And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no less
  Than patrimonial fortunes old and great
  Had furnished forth the charges of my state.
  When with my tutors, he would still be by,
  Nor ever let me wander from his eye;
  And, in a word, he kept me chaste (and this
  Is virtue's crown) from all that was amiss,
  Nor such in act alone, but in repute,
  Till even scandal's tattling voice was mute.
  No dread had he that men might taunt or jeer,
  Should I, some future day, as auctioneer,
  Or, like himself, as tax-collector, seek
  With petty fees my humble means to eke.
  Nor should I then have murmured. Now I know,
  More earnest thanks, and loftier praise I owe.
  Reason must fail me, ere I cease to own
  With pride, that I have such a father known;
  Nor shall I stoop my birth to vindicate,
  By charging, like the herd, the wrong on Fate,
  That I was not of noble lineage sprung:
  Far other creed inspires my heart and tongue.
  For now should Nature bid all living men
  Retrace their years, and live them o'er again,
  Each culling, as his inclination bent,
  His parents for himself, with mine content,
  I would not choose whom men endow as great
  With the insignia and seats of state;
  And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes,
  Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise,
  In thus refusing to assume the care
  Of irksome state I was unused to bear."

The education, of which Horace's father had laid the foundation at
Rome, would not have been complete without a course of study at
Athens, then the capital of literature and philosophy, as Rome was of
political power. Thither Horace went somewhere between the age of 17
and 20. "At Rome," he says (Epistles, II. ii. 23),

  "I had my schooling, and was taught
  Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought;
  At classic Athens, where I went ere long,
  I learned to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong,
  And search for truth, if so she might be seen,
  In Academic groves of blissful green." (C.)

At Athens he found many young men of the leading Roman families--
Bibulus, Messalla, Corvinus, the younger Cicero, and others--engaged
in the same pursuits with himself, and he contracted among them many
enduring friendships. In the political lull which ensued between the
battle of Pharsalia (B.C. 48) and the death of Julius Caesar (B.C.
44), he was enabled to devote himself without interruption to the
studies which had drawn him to that home of literature and the arts.
But these were destined before long to be rudely broken. The tidings
of that startling event had been hailed with delight by the youthful
spirits, some of whom saw in the downfall of the great Dictator the
dawn of a new era of liberty, while others hoped from it the return to
power of the aristocratic party to which they belonged. In this mood
Brutus found them when he arrived in Athens along with Cassius, on
their way to take command of the Eastern provinces which had been
assigned to them by the Senate. Cassius hurried on to his post in
Syria, but Brutus lingered behind, ostensibly absorbed in the
philosophical studies of the schools, but at the same time recruiting
a staff of officers for his army from among the young Romans of wealth
and family whom it was important he should attach to his party, and
who were all eagerness to make his cause their own. Horace, infected
by the general enthusiasm, joined his standard; and, though then only
twenty-two, without experience, and with no special aptitude, physical
or mental, for a military life, he was intrusted by Brutus with the
command of a legion. There is no reason to suppose that he owed a
command of such importance to any dearth of men of good family
qualified to act as officers. It is, therefore, only reasonable to
conclude, that even at this early period he was recognised in the
brilliant society around him as a man of mark; and that Brutus, before
selecting him, had thoroughly satisfied himself that he possessed
qualities which justified so great a deviation from ordinary rules, as
the commission of so responsible a charge to a freedman's son. That
Horace gave his commander satisfaction we know from himself. The line
(Epistles, I. xx. 23), "_Me primis urbis belli placuisse
domique_,"--

  "At home, as in the field, I made my way,
  And kept it, with the first men of the day,"--

can be read in no other sense. But while Horace had, beyond all doubt,
made himself a strong party of friends who could appreciate his genius
and attractive qualities, his appointment as military tribune excited
jealousy among some of his brother officers, who considered that the
command of a Roman legion should have been reserved for men of nobler
blood--a jealousy at which he said, with his usual modesty, many years
afterwards (Satires, I. vi. 45), he had no reason either to be
surprised or to complain.

In B.C. 43, Brutus, with his army, passed from Macedonia to join
Cassius in Asia Minor, and Horace took his part in their subsequent
active and brilliant campaign there. Of this we get some slight
incidental glimpses in his works. Thus, for example (Odes, II. 7), we
find him reminding his comrade, Pompeius Varus, how

  "Full oft they sped the lingering day
  Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay,
  With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair."

The Syrian spikenard, _Malobathrum Syrium_, fixes the locality.
Again, in the epistle to his friend Bullatius (Epistles, I. 11), who
is making a tour in Asia, Horace speaks of several places as if from
vivid recollection. In his usual dramatic manner, he makes Bullatius
answer his inquiries as to how he likes the places he has seen:--

  "_You know what Lebedos is like_; so bare,
  With Gabii or Fidenae 'twould compare;
  Yet there, methinks, I would accept my lot,
  My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot,
  Stand on the cliff at distance, and survey
  The stormy sea-god's wild Titanic play." (C.)

Horace himself had manifestly watched the angry surges from the cliffs
of Lebedos. But a more interesting record of the Asiatic campaign,
inasmuch as it is probably the earliest specimen of Horace's writing
which we have, occurs in the Seventh Satire of the First Book.
Persius, a rich trader of Clazomene, has a lawsuit with Rupilius, one
of Brutus's officers, who went by the nickname of "King." Brutus, in
his character of quaestor, has to decide the dispute, which in the
hands of the principals degenerates, as disputes so conducted
generally do, into a personal squabble. Persius leads off with some
oriental flattery of the general and his suite. Brutus is "Asia's
sun," and they the "propitious stars," all but Rupilius, who was

                        "That pest,
  The Dog, whom husbandmen detest."

Rupilius, an old hand at slang, replies with a volley of rough
sarcasms, "such as among the vineyards fly," and

               "Would make the passer-by
  Shout filthy names, but shouting fly"--

a description of vintage slang which is as true to-day as it was then.
The conclusion is curious, as a punning allusion to the hereditary
fame of Brutus as a puller-down of kings, which it must have required
some courage to publish, when Augustus was omnipotent in Rome.

  "But Grecian Persius, after he
  Had been besprinkled plenteously
  With gall Italic, cries, 'By all
  The gods above, on thee I call,
  Oh Brutus, thou of old renown,
  For putting kings completely down,
  To save us! Wherefore do you not
  Despatch this King here on the spot?
  One of the tasks is this, believe,
  Which you are destined to achieve!'"

This is just such a squib as a young fellow might be expected to dash
off for the amusement of his brother officers, while the incident
which led to it was yet fresh in their minds. Slight as it is, one
feels sure its preservation by so severe a critic of his own writings
as Horace was due to some charm of association, or possibly to the
fact that in it he had made his first essay in satire.  The defeat of
Brutus at Philippi (B.C. 42) brought Horace's military career to a
close. Even before this decisive event, his dream of the re-
establishment of liberty and the old Roman constitution had probably
begun to fade away, under his actual experience of the true aims and
motives of the mass of those whom Brutus and Cassius had hitherto been
leading to victory, and satiating with plunder. Young aristocrats, who
sneered at the freedman's son, were not likely to found any system of
liberty worthy of the name, or to use success for nobler purposes than
those of selfish ambition. Fighting was not Horace's vocation, and
with the death of Brutus and those nobler spirits, who fell at
Philippi rather than survive their hopes of freedom, his motive for
fighting was at an end. To prolong a contest which its leaders had
surrendered in despair was hopeless. He did not, therefore, like
Pompeius Varus and others of his friends, join the party which, for a
time, protracted the struggle under the younger Pompey. But, like his
great leader, he had fought for a principle; nor could he have
regarded otherwise than with horror the men who had overthrown Brutus,
reeking as they were with the blood of a thousand proscriptions, and
reckless as they had shown themselves of every civil right and social
obligation. As little, therefore, was he inclined to follow the
example of others of his distinguished friends and companions in arms,
such as Valerius Messalla and Aelius Lamia, who not merely made their
peace with Antony and Octavius, but cemented it by taking service in
their army.



CHAPTER II.

RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI.--EARLY POEMS.


Availing himself of the amnesty proclaimed by the conquerors, Horace
found his way back to Rome. His father was dead; how long before is
not known. If the little property at Venusia had remained unsold, it
was of course confiscated. When the lands of men, like Virgil, who had
taken no active part in the political conflicts of the day, were being
seized to satisfy the rapacity of a mercenary soldiery, Horace's
paternal acres were not likely to escape. In Rome he found himself
penniless. How to live was the question; and, fortunately for
literature, "chill penury" did not repress, but, on the contrary,
stimulated his "noble rage."

  "Bated in spirit, and with pinions clipped,
  Of all the means my father left me stripped,
  Want stared me in the face, so then and there
  I took to scribbling verse in sheer despair."

Despoiled of his means, and smarting with defeat, Horace was just in
the state of mind to strike vigorously at men and manners which he did
not like. Young, ardent, constitutionally hot in temper, eager to
assert, amid the general chaos of morals public and private, the
higher principles of the philosophic schools from which he had so
recently come, irritated by the thousand mortifications to which a man
of cultivated tastes and keenly alive to beauty is exposed in a
luxurious city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yet
scarcely valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to the
besetting temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to write
it in a merciless spirit. As he says of himself (Odes, I. 15),

  "In youth's pleasant spring-time,
  The shafts of my passion at random I flung,
  And, dashing headlong into petulant rhyme,
  I recked neither where nor how fiercely I stung."

Youth is always intolerant, and it is so easy to be severe; so
seductive to say brilliant things, whether they be true or not. But
there came a day, and it came soon, when Horace, saw that triumphs
gained in this way were of little value, and when he was anxious that
his friends should join with him in consigning his smart and scurril
lines (_celeres et criminosos Iambos_) to oblivion. The _amende_ for
some early lampoon which he makes in the Ode just quoted, though
ostensibly addressed to a lady who had been its victim, was probably
intended to cover a wider field.

Personal satire is always popular, but the fame it begets is bought
dearly at the cost of lifelong enmities and many after-regrets. That
Horace in his early writings was personal and abusive is very clear,
both from his own language and from a few of the poems of this class
and period which survive. Some of these have no value, except as
showing how badly even Horace could write, and how sedulously the
better feeling and better taste of his riper years led him to avoid
that most worthless form of satire which attacks where rejoinder is
impossible, and irritates the temper but cannot possibly amend the
heart. In others, the lash is applied with no less justice than
vigour, as in the following invective, the fourth of the Epodes:--

  "Such hate as nature meant to be
  'Twixt lamb and wolf I feel for thee,
  Whose hide by Spanish scourge is tanned,
  And legs still bear the fetter's brand!
  Though of your gold you strut so vain,
  Wealth cannot change the knave in grain.
  How! see you not, when striding down
  The Via Sacra [1]in your gown
  Good six ells wide, the passers there
  Turn on you with indignant stare?
  'This wretch,' such gibes your ear invade,
  'By the Triumvirs' [2] scourges flayed,
  Till even the crier shirked his toil,
  Some thousand acres ploughs of soil
  Falernian, and with his nags
  Wears out the Appian highway's flags;
  Nay, on the foremost seats, despite
  Of Otho, sits and apes the knight.
  What boots it to despatch a fleet
  So large, so heavy, so complete,
  Against a gang of rascal knaves,
  Thieves, corsairs, buccaneers, and slaves,
  If villain of such vulgar breed
  Is in the foremost rank to lead?'"

[1]
   The Sacred Way, leading to the Capitol, a favourite lounge.

[2]
   When a slave was being scourged, under the orders of the
   Triumviri Capitales, a public crier stood by, and proclaimed the
   nature of his crime.

Modern critics may differ as to whom this bitter infective was aimed
at, but there could have been no doubt on that subject in Rome at the
time. And if, as there is every reason to conclude, it was levelled at
Sextus Menas, the lines, when first shown about among Horace's
friends, must have told with great effect, and they were likely to be
remembered long after the infamous career of this double-dyed traitor
had come to a close. Menas was a freedman of Pompey the Great, and a
trusted officer of his son Sextus. [Footnote: Shakespeare has
introduced him in "Antony and Cleopatra," along with Menecrates and
Varrius, as "friends to Sextus Pompeius."] He had recently (B.C. 38)
carried over with him to Augustus a portion of Pompey's fleet which
was under his command, and betrayed into his hands the islands of
Corsica and Sardinia. For this act of treachery he was loaded with
wealth and honours; and when Augustus, next year, fitted out a naval
expedition against Sextus Pompeius, Menas received a command. It was
probably lucky for Horace that this swaggering upstart, who was not
likely to be scrupulous as to his means of revenge, went over the very
next year to his former master, whom he again abandoned within a year
to sell himself once more to Augustus. That astute politician put it
out of his power to play further tricks with the fleet, by giving him
a command in Pannonia, where he was killed, B.C. 36, at the siege of
Siscia, the modern Sissek.

Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as a
writer of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of his
models Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully--
for bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man--he
showed in other compositions signs of the true poetic spirit, which
afterwards found expression in the consummate grace and finish of his
Odes. To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from
internal evidence, appears to have been written B.C. 40, when the
state of Italy, convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fill
him with despair. Horace had frequent occasion between this period and
the battle of Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed the
long struggle for supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to his
countrymen against the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray,
which might have been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, and
spreading the lustre of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose this
poem written when the tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusian
campaign had arrived in Rome,--the reduction of the town of Perusia by
famine, and the massacre of from two to three hundred prisoners,
almost all of equestrian or senatorial rank,--we can well understand
the feeling under which the poem is written.

TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE.

  Another age in civil wars will soon be spent and worn,
  And by her native strength our Rome be wrecked and overborne,
  That Rome, the Marsians could not crush, who border on our lands,
  Nor the shock of threatening Porsena with his Etruscan bands,
  Nor Capua's strength that rivalled ours, nor Spartacus the stern,
  Nor the faithless Allobrogian, who still for change doth yearn.
  Ay, what Gennania's blue-eyed youth quelled not with ruthless sword,
  Nor Hannibal by our great sires detested and abhorred,
  We shall destroy with impious hands imbrued in brother's gore,
  And wild beasts of the wood shall range our native land once more.
  A foreign foe, alas! shall tread The City's ashes down,
  And his horse's ringing hoofs shall smite her places of renown,
  And the bones of great Quirinus, now religiously enshrined,
  Shall be flung by sacrilegious hands to the sunshine and the wind.
  And if ye all from ills so dire ask how yourselves to free,
  Or such at least as would not hold your lives unworthily,
  No better counsel can I urge, than that which erst inspired
  The stout Phocaeans when from their doomed city they retired,
  Their fields, their household gods, their shrines surrendering as a
prey
  To the wild boar and the ravening wolf; [1] so we, in our dismay,
  Where'er our wandering steps may chance to carry us should go,
  Or wheresoe'er across the seas the fitful winds may blow.
  How think ye then? If better course none offer, why should we
  Not seize the happy auspices, and boldly put to sea?
  But let us swear this oath;--"Whene'er, if e'er shall come the time,
  Rocks upwards from the deep shall float, return shall not be crime;
  Nor we be loath to back our sails, the ports of home to seek,
  When the waters of the Po shall lave Matinum's rifted peak.
  Or skyey Apenninus down into the sea be rolled,
  Or wild unnatural desires such monstrous revel hold,
  That in the stag's endearments the tigress shall delight,
  And the turtle-dove adulterate with the falcon and the kite,
  That unsuspicious herds no more shall tawny lions fear,
  And the he-goat, smoothly sleek of skin, through the briny deep
career!"
  This having sworn, and what beside may our returning stay,
  Straight let us all, this City's doomed inhabitants, away,
  Or those that rise above the herd, the few of nobler soul;
  The craven and the hopeless here on their ill-starred beds may loll.
  Ye who can feel and act like men, this woman's wail give o'er,
  And fly to regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore!
  The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles,
  To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles!
  Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with sheaves,
  And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all her
leaves;
  Where the olive buds and burgeons, to its promise ne'er untrue,
  And the russet fig adorns the tree, that graffshoot never knew;
  Where honey from the hollow oaks doth ooze, and crystal rills
  Come dancing down with tinkling feet from the sky-dividing hills;
  There to the pails the she-goats come, without a master's word,
  And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd.
  There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make,
  Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake;
  There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any star
  With fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar.
  Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching rains
  By watery Eurus swept along ne'er devastate the plains,
  Nor are the swelling seeds burnt up within the thirsty clods,
  So kindly blends the seasons there the King of all the Gods.
  That shore the Argonautic bark's stout rowers never gained,
  Nor the wily she of Colchis with step unchaste profaned;
  The sails of Sidon's galleys ne'er were wafted to that strand,
  Nor ever rested on its slopes Ulysses' toilworn band:
  For Jupiter, when he with brass the Golden Age alloyed,
  That blissful region set apart by the good to be enjoyed;
  With brass and then with iron he the ages seared, but ye,
  Good men and true, to that bright home arise and follow me!

[1]
   The story of the Phocaeans is told by Herodotus (Ch. 165). When
   their city was attacked by Harpagus, they retired in a body to make
   way for the Persians, who took possession of it. They subsequently
   returned, and put to the sword the Persian garrison which had been
   left in it by Harpagus. "Afterwards, when this was accomplished,
   they pronounced terrible imprecations on any who should desert the
   fleet; besides this, they sunk a mass of molten iron, and swore
   that they would never return to Phocaea until it should appear
   again."

This poem, Lord Lytton has truly said, "has the character of youth in
its defects and its beauties. The redundance of its descriptive
passages is in marked contrast to the terseness of description which
Horace studies in his Odes; and there is something declamatory in its
general tone which is at variance with the simpler utterance of
lyrical art. On the other hand, it has all the warmth of genuine
passion, and in sheer vigour of composition Horace has rarely excelled
it."

The idea of the Happy Isles, referred to in the poem, was a familiar
one with the Greek poets. They became in time confounded with the
Elysian fields, in which the spirits of the departed good and great
enjoyed perpetual rest. It is as such that Ulysses mentions them in
Tennyson's noble monologue:--

  "It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down,
  It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,
  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."

These islands were supposed to be in the far west, and were probably
the poetical amplification of some voyager's account of the Canaries
or of Madeira. There has always been a region beyond the boundaries of
civilisation to which the poet's fancy has turned for ideal happiness
and peace. The difference between ancient and modern is, that material
comforts, as in this epode, enter largely into the dream of the
ancient, while independence, beauty, and grandeur are the chief
elements in the modern picture:--

  "Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
  Breadth of Tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
  Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
  Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the
crag;
  Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree,
  Summer Isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea."

To the same class of Horace's early poems, though probably a few years
later in date, belongs the following eulogium of a country life and
its innocent enjoyments (Epode 2), the leading idea of which was
embodied by Pope in the familiar lines, wonderful for finish as the
production of a boy of eleven, beginning

  "Happy the man whose wish and care
  A few paternal acres bound."

With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of
Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the
country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his
pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction of
over-excitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely
and uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for him
at least, its quietude does not bring peace. It is not, therefore, at
all out of keeping, although critics have taken exception to the poem
on this ground, that Horace makes Alphius rhapsodise on the charms of
a rural life, and having tried them, creep back within the year to his
moneybags and his ten per cent. It was, besides, a favourite doctrine
with him, which he is constantly enforcing in his later works, that
everybody envies his neighbour's pursuits--until he tries them.

ALPHIUS.

  Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
    Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
  Tills the few acres, which his father tilled,
    Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;

  The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars,
    Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas;
  He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars,
    Nor at a great man's door consents to freeze.

  The tender vine-shoots, budding into life,
    He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed,
  Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife,
    And grafting shoots of promise in their stead;

  Or in some valley, up among the hills,
    Watches his wandering herds of lowing kine,
  Or fragrant jars with liquid honey fills,
    Or shears his silly sheep in sunny shine;

  Or when Autumnus o'er the smiling land
    Lifts up his head with rosy apples crowned,
  Joyful he plucks the pears, which erst his hand
    Graffed on the stem they're weighing to the ground;

  Plucks grapes in noble clusters purple-dyed,
    A gift for thee, Priapus, and for thee,
  Father Sylvanus, where thou dost preside,
    Warding his bounds beneath thy sacred tree.

  Now he may stretch his careless limbs to rest,
    Where some old ilex spreads its sacred roof;
  Now in the sunshine lie, as likes him best,
    On grassy turf of close elastic woof.

  And streams the while glide on with murmurs low,
    And birds are singing 'mong the thickets deep,
  And fountains babble, sparkling as they flow,
    And with their noise invite to gentle sleep.

  But when grim winter comes, and o'er his grounds
    Scatters its biting snows with angry roar,
  He takes the field, and with a cry of hounds
    Hunts down into the toils the foaming boar;

  Or seeks the thrush, poor starveling, to ensnare,
    In filmy net with bait delusive stored,
  Entraps the travelled crane, and timorous hare,
    Rare dainties these to glad his frugal board.

  Who amid joys like these would not forget
    The pangs which love to all its victims bears,
  The fever of the brain, the ceaseless fret,
    And all the heart's lamentings and despairs?

  But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside,
    The cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,
  Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride
    Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills,

  Who piles the hearth with logs well dried and old
    Against the coming of her wearied lord,
  And, when at eve the cattle seek the fold,
    Drains their full udders of the milky hoard;

  And bringing forth from her well-tended store
    A jar of wine, the vintage of the year,
  Spreads an unpurchased feast,--oh then, not more
    Could choicest Lucrine oysters give me cheer,

  Or the rich turbot, or the dainty char,
    If ever to our bays the winter's blast
  Should drive them in its fury from afar;
    Nor were to me a welcomer repast

  The Afric hen or the Ionic snipe,
    Than olives newly gathered from the tree,
  That hangs abroad its clusters rich and ripe,
    Or sorrel, that doth love the pleasant lea,

  Or mallows wholesome for the body's need,
    Or lamb foredoomed upon some festal day
  In offering to the guardian gods to bleed,
    Or kidling which the wolf hath marked for prey.

  What joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep,
    Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come;
  To see the wearied oxen, as they creep,
    Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home!

  Or, ranged around the bright and blazing hearth,
    To see the hinds, a house's surest wealth,
  Beguile the evening with their simple mirth,
    And all the cheerfulness of rosy health!

  Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent
    Upon a country life, called in amain
  The money he at usury had lent;--
    But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again.

In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see that
Horace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaborate
picture of the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Horace had obviously watched
closely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at
a later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of
the most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of
contrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of
their life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city
life of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6),
after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and the
fast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not from
such as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the
seas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and
direful Hannibal," concluding in words which contrast by their
suggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparison
with the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:--

  "But they, of rustic warriors wight
  The manly offspring, learned to smite
    The soil with Sabine spade,
  And faggots they had cut, to bear
  Home from the forest, whensoe'er
    An austere mother bade;

  "What time the sun began to change
  The shadows through the mountain range,
    And took the yoke away
  From the o'erwearied oxen, and
  His parting car proclaimed at hand
    The kindliest hour of day."

Another of Horace's juvenile poems, unique in subject and in treatment
(Epode 5), gives evidence of a picturesque power of the highest kind,
stimulating the imagination, and swaying it with the feelings of pity
and terror in a way to make us regret that he wrote no others in a
similar vein. We find ourselves at midnight in the gardens of the
sorceress Canidia, whither a boy of good family--his rank being
clearly indicated by the reference to his purple _toga_ and
_bulla_--has been carried off from his home. His terrified
exclamations, with which the poem opens, as Canidia and her three
assistants surround him, glaring on him, with looks significant of
their deadly purpose, through lurid flames fed with the usual ghastly
ingredients of a witch's fire, carry us at once into the horrors of
the scene. While one of the hags sprinkles her hell-drops through the
adjoining house, another is casting up earth from a pit, in which the
boy is presently imbedded to the chin, and killed by a frightful
process of slow torture, in order that a love philtre of irresistible
power may be concocted from his liver and spleen. The time, the place,
the actors are brought before us with singular dramatic power.
Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the spells she deemed all-
powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress of skill superior to
her own, gives great reality to the scene; and the curses of the dying
boy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a touch of
beautiful pathos, bring it to an effective close.

The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholars
have run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild and
ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which
the commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the
original of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of
witchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like their
modern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame
Quickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up an
effective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the current
stories of such creatures and their doings presented to his hand? The
popular belief in their power, the picturesque conditions under which
their spells were wrought, the wild passions in which lay the secret
of their hold upon the credulity of their victims, offered to the
Roman poet, just as they did to our own Elizabethan dramatists, a
combination of materials most favourable for poetic treatment. But
that Horace had, as many of his critics contend, a feeling of personal
vanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge, is an assumption
wholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any time or under any
circumstances, to have had any relations of a personal nature with a
woman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have been to use her
and her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not only saw
through the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her miserable
impotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems to be
impossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and not
come to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of a
garden god, set up in the garden which Maecenas had begun to lay out
on the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-
ground of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt of
thieves and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, littered
with skulls and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Sagana
are again introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which they
pour the blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously torn
limb-meal,

  "So to evoke the shade and soul
  Of dead men, and from these to wring
  Responses to their questioning."

They have with them two effigies, one of wax and the other of wool--
the latter the larger of the two, and overbearing the other, which
cowers before it,

               "Like one that stands
  Beseeching in the hangman's hands.
  On Hecate one, Tisiphone
  The other calls; and you might see
  Serpents and hell-hounds thread the dark,
  Whilst, these vile orgies not to mark,
  The moon, all bloody red of hue,
  Behind the massive tombs withdrew."

The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames their
ghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink in
terror to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of the
beldams make the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling up
his horrors with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of some
terrible climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce.
Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a
simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags.
In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their
incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more
comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can
carry them--Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth,
and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:--

                             "While you
  With laughter long and loud might view
  Their herbs, and charmed adders wound
  In mystic coils, bestrew the ground."

And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was an
old mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, and
Horace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as
though he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his
former calumnies about her.

  "My youth has fled, my rosy hue
  Turned to a wan and livid blue;
  Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair;
  No respite have I from despair.
  The days and nights, they wax and wane,
  Yet bring me no release from pain;
  Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp,
  The spasm, which holds me in its grasp."

Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign
magical influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all the
mischief he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name what
penance he will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers will
appease her wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of as
the chaste and good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star,
his lyre is at her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as her
life is pure, but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, the
poet takes care to insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her in
conclusion, thus:--

  "Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wont
  Among the tombs of paupers hunt
  For ashes newly laid in ground,
  Love-charms and philtres to compound,
  Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands."

Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. The
man who,

  "Branding her name with ill renown,
  Made her the talk of all the town,"

is not so lightly to be forgiven.

  "You'd have a speedy doom? But no,
  It shall be lingering, sharp, and slow."

The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types
of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself--his
efforts will be vain:--

  "Then comes my hour of triumph, then
  I'll goad you till you writhe again;
  Then shall you curse the evil hour
  You made a mockery of my power."

She then triumphantly reasserts the powers to which she lays claim.
What! I, she exclaims, who can waste life as the waxen image of my
victim melts before my magic fire [Footnote: Thus Hecate in
Middleton's "Witch" assures to the Duchess of Glo'ster "a sudden and
subtle death" to her victim:--]--I, who can bring down the moon from
her sphere, evoke the dead from their ashes, and turn the affections
by my philtres,--

  "Shall I my potent art bemoan
  As impotent 'gainst thee alone?"

Surely all this is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's
"Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used
Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her
craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons.
His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this
sense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of a
class; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the
8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner-
party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a
certain point,--"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat,
more venomous than that of African vipers, had swept across them."

  "His picture made in wax, and gently molten
  By a blue fire, kindled with dead men's eyes,
  Will waste him by degrees."--

An old delusion. We find it in Theocritus, where a girl, forsaken by
her lover, resorts to the same desperate restorative (Idylls ii. 28)--

  "As this image of wax I melt here by aidance demonic,
  Myndian Delphis shall so melt with love's passion anon."

Again Ovid (Heroides vi. 91) makes Hypsipyle say of Medea:

  "The absent she binds with her spells, and figures of wax she
devises,
  And in their agonised spleen fine-pointed needles she thrusts."



CHAPTER III.

INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS.--THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM.


Horace had not been long in Rome, after his return from Greece, before
he had made himself a name. With what he got from the booksellers, or
possibly by the help of friends, he had purchased a patent place in
the Quaestor's department, a sort of clerkship of the Treasury, which
he continued to hold for many years, if not indeed to the close of his
life. The duties were light, but they demanded, and at all events had,
his occasional attention, even after he was otherwise provided for.
Being his own--bought by his own money--it may have gratified his love
of independence to feel that, if the worst came to the worst, he had
his official salary to fall back upon. Among his friends, men of
letters are at this time, as might have been expected, found to be
most conspicuous. Virgil, who had recently been despoiled, like,
himself, of his paternal property, took occasion to bring his name
before Maecenas, the confidential adviser and minister of Octavius, in
whom he had himself found a helpful friend. This was followed up by
the commendation of Varius, already celebrated as a writer of Epic
poetry, and whose tragedy of "Thyestes," if we are to trust
Quintilian, was not unworthy to rank with the best tragedies of
Greece. Maecenas may not at first have been too well disposed towards
a follower of the republican party, who had not been sparing of his
satire against many of the supporters and favourites of Octavius. He
sent for Horace, however (B.C. 39), and any prejudice on this score,
if prejudice there was, was ultimately got over. Maecenas took time to
form his estimate of the man, and it was not till nine months after
their first interview that he sent for Horace again. When he did so,
however, it was to ask him to consider himself for the future among
the number of his friends. This part of Horace's story is told with
admirable brevity and good feeling in the Satire from which we have
already quoted, addressed to Maecenas (B. I. Sat. 6) a few years
afterwards.

  "Lucky I will not call myself, as though
  Thy friendship I to mere good fortune owe.
  No chance it was secured me thy regards,
  But Virgil first, that best of men and bards,
  And then kind Varius mentioned what I was.
  Before you brought, with many a faltering pause,
  Dropping some few brief words (for bashfulness
  Robbed me of utterance) I did not profess
  That I was sprung of lineage old and great,
  Or used to canter round my own estate
  On Satureian barb, but what and who
  I was as plainly told. As usual, you
  Brief answer make me. I retire, and then,
  Some nine months after, summoning me again,
  You bid me 'mongst your friends assume a place:
  And proud I feel that thus I won your grace,
  Not by an ancestry long known to fame,
  But by my life, and heart devoid of blame."

The name of Maecenas is from this time inseparably associated with
that of Horace. From what little is authentically known of him, this
much may be gathered: He was a man of great general accomplishment,
well versed in the literature both of Greece and Rome, devoted to
literature and the society of men of letters, a lover of the fine arts
and of natural history, a connoisseur of gems and precious stones,
fond of living in a grand style, and of surrounding himself with
people who amused him, without being always very particular as to who
or what they were. For the indulgence of all these tastes, his great
wealth was more than sufficient. He reclaimed the Esquiline hill from
being the public nuisance we have already described, laid it out in
gardens, and in the midst of these built himself a sumptuous palace,
where the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore now stands, from which he
commanded a superb view of the country looking towards Tivoli. To this
palace, salubrious from its spacious size and the elevation of its
site, Augustus, when ill, had himself carried from his own modest
mansion; and from its lofty belvedere tower Nero is said to have
enjoyed the spectacle of Rome in flames beneath him. Voluptuary and
dilettante as Maecenas was, he was nevertheless, like most men of a
sombre and melancholy temperament, capable of great exertions; and he
veiled under a cold exterior and reserved manners a habit of acute
observation, a kind heart, and, in matters of public concern, a
resolute will. This latent energy of character, supported as it was by
a subtle knowledge of mankind and a statesmanlike breadth of view,
contributed in no small degree to the ultimate triumph of Octavius
Caesar over his rivals, and to the successful establishment of the
empire in his hands. When the news of Julius Caesar's assassination
reached the young Octavius, then only nineteen, in Apollonia, it has
been said that Maecenas was in attendance upon him as his governor or
tutor. Be this so or not, as soon as Octavius appears in the political
arena as his uncle's avenger, Maecenas is found by his side. In
several most important negotiations he acted as his representative.
Thus (B.C. 40), the year before Horace was introduced to him, he,
along with Cocceius Nerva, negotiated with Antony the peace of
Brundusium, which resulted in Antony's ill-starred marriage with
Caesar's sister Octavia. Two years later he was again associated with
Cocceius in a similar task, on which occasion Horace and Virgil
accompanied him to Brundusium. He appears to have commanded in various
expeditions, both naval and military, but it was at Rome and in
Council that his services were chiefly sought; and he acted as one of
the chief advisers of Augustus down to about five years before his
death, when, either from ill health or some other unknown cause, he
abandoned political life. More than once he was charged by Augustus
with the administration of the civil affairs of Italy during his own
absence, intrusted with his seal, and empowered to open all his
letters addressed to the Senate, and, if necessary, to alter their
contents, so as to adapt them to the condition of affairs at home. His
aim, like that of Vipsanius Agrippa, who was in himself the Nelson and
Wellington of the age, seems to have been to build up a united and
flourishing empire in the person of Augustus. Whether from temperament
or policy, or both, he set his face against the system of cruelty and
extermination which disgraced the triumvirate. When Octavius was one
day condemning man after man to death, Maecenas, after a vain attempt
to reach him on the tribunal, where he sat surrounded by a dense
crowd, wrote upon his tablets, _Surge tandem, Carnifex_!--
"Butcher, break off!" and flung them across the crowd into the lap of
Caesar, who felt the rebuke, and immediately quitted the judgment-
seat. His policy was that of conciliation; and while bent on the
establishment of a monarchy, from what we must fairly assume to have
been a patriotic conviction that this form of government could alone
meet the exigencies of the time, he endeavoured to combine this with a
due regard to individual liberty, and a free expression of individual
opinion.

At the time of Horace's introduction to him, Maecenas was probably at
his best, in the full vigour of his intellect, and alive with the
generous emotions which must have animated a man bent as he was on
securing tranquillity for the state, and healing the strife of
factions, which were threatening it with ruin. His chief relaxation
from the fatigues of public life was, to all appearance, found in the
society of men of letters, and, judging by what Horace says (Satires,
I. 9), the _vie intime_ of his social circle must have been
charming. To be admitted within it was a privilege eagerly coveted,
and with good reason, for not only was this in itself a stamp of
distinction, but his parties were well known as the pleasantest in
Rome:--

  "No house more free from all that's base,
  In none cabals more out of place.
  It hurts me not, if others be
  More rich, or better read than me;
  Each has his place."

Like many of his contemporaries, who were eminent in political life,
Maecenas devoted himself to active literary work--for he wrote much,
and on a variety of topics. His taste in literature was, however,
better than his execution. His style was diffuse, affected, and
obscure; but Seneca, who tells us this, and gives some examples which
justify the criticism, tells us at the same time that his genius was
massive and masculine (_grande et virile_), and that he would
have been eminent for eloquence, if fortune had not spoiled him.
However vicious his own style may have been, the man who encouraged
three such writers as Virgil, Propertius, and Horace, not to mention
others of great repute, whose works have perished, was clearly a sound
judge of a good style in others.

As years went on, and the cares of public life grew less onerous,
habits of self-indulgence appear to have grown upon Maecenas. It will
probably be well, however, to accept with some reserve what has been
said against him on this head. Then, as now, men of rank and power
were the victims of calumnious gossips and slanderous pamphleteers.
His health became precarious. Incessant sleeplessness spoke of an
overtasked brain and shattered nerves. Life was full of pain; still he
clung to it with a craven-like tenacity. So, at least, Seneca asserts,
quoting in support of his statement some very bad verses by Maecenas,
which may be thus translated:--

  "Lame in feet, and lame in fingers,
    Crooked in back, with every tooth
    Rattling in my head, yet, 'sooth,
  I'm content, so life but lingers.
  Gnaw my withers, rack my bones,
  Life, mere life, for all atones."

In one view these lines may certainly be construed to import the same
sentiment as the speech of the miserable Claudio in "Measure for
Measure,"--

  "The weariest and most loathed worldly life
  That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
  Can lay on nature, is a paradise
  To what we fear of death."

But, on the other hand, they may quite as fairly be regarded as merely
giving expression to the tenet of the Epicurean philosophy, that
however much we may suffer from physical pain or inconvenience, it is
still possible to be happy. "We know what we are; we know not what we
may be!"

Not the least misfortune of Maecenas was his marriage to a woman whom
he could neither live with nor without--separating from and returning
to her so often, that, according to Seneca, he was a thousand times
married, yet never had but one wife. Friends he had many, loyal and
devoted friends, on whose society and sympathy he leant more and more
as the years wore on. He rarely stirred from Rome, loving its smoke,
its thronged and noisy streets, its whirl of human passions, as
Johnson loved Fleet Street, or "the sweet shady side of Pall Mall,"
better than all the verdure of Tivoli, or the soft airs and exquisite
scenery of Baiae. He liked to read of these things, however; and may
have found as keen a pleasure in the scenery of the 'Georgics,' or in
Horace's little landscape-pictures, as most men could have extracted
from the scenes which they describe.

Such was the man, ushered into whose presence, Horace, the reckless
lampooner and satirist, found himself embarrassed, and at a loss for
words. Horace was not of the MacSycophant class, who cannot "keep
their back straight in the presence of a great man;" nor do we think
he had much of the nervous apprehensiveness of the poetic temperament.
Why, then, should he have felt thus abashed? Partly, it may have been,
from natural diffidence at encountering a man to gain whose goodwill
was a matter of no small importance, but whose goodwill, he also knew
by report, was not easily won; and partly, to find himself face to
face with one so conspicuously identified with the cause against which
he had fought, and the men whom he had hitherto had every reason to
detest.

Once admitted by Maecenas to the inner circle of his friends, Horace
made his way there rapidly. Thus we find him, a few months afterwards,
in the spring of B.C. 37, going to Brundusium with Maecenas, who had
been despatched thither on a mission of great public importance
(Satires, I. 6). The first term of the triumvirate of Antony,
Octavius, and Lepidus had expired at the close of the previous year.
No fresh arrangement had been made, and Antony, alarmed at the growing
power of Octavius in Italy, had appeared off Brundusium with a fleet
of 300 sail and a strong body of troops. The Brundusians--on a hint,
probably, from Octavius--forbade his landing, and he had to go on to
Tarentum, where terms were ultimately arranged for a renewal of the
triumvirate. The moment was a critical one, for an open rupture
between Octavius and Antony was imminent, which might well have proved
disastrous to the former, had Antony joined his fleet to that of the
younger Pompey, which, without his aid, had already proved more than a
match for the naval force of Octavius.

To judge by Horace's narrative, all the friends who accompanied
Maecenas on this occasion, except his coadjutor, Cocceius Nerva, who
had three years before been engaged with him on a similar mission to
Brundusium, were men whose thoughts were given more to literature than
to politics. Horace starts from Rome with Heliodorus, a celebrated
rhetorician, and they make their way very leisurely to Anxur
(Terracina), where they are overtaken by Maecenas.

  "'Twas fixed that we should meet with dear
  Maecenas and Cocceius here,
  Who were upon a mission bound,
  Of consequence the most profound;
  For who so skilled the feuds to close
  Of those, once friends, who now were foes?"

This is the only allusion throughout the poem, to the object of the
journey. The previous day, Horace had been baulked of his dinner, the
water being so bad, and his stomach so delicate, that he chose to fast
rather than run the risk of making himself ill with it. And now at
Terracina he found his eyes, which were weak, so troublesome, that he
had to dose them well with a black wash. These are the first
indications we get of habitual delicacy of health, which, if not due
altogether to the fatigues and exposure of his campaign with Brutus,
had probably been increased by them.

    "Meanwhile beloved Maecenas came,
    Cocceius too, and brought with them
    Fonteius Capito, a man
    Endowed with every grace that can
    A perfect gentleman attend,
    And Antony's especial friend."

They push on next day to Formiae, and are amused at Fundi (Fondi) on
the way by the consequential airs of the prefect of the place. It
would seem as if the peacock nature must break out the moment a man
becomes a prefect or a mayor.

  "There having rested for the night,
  With inexpressible delight
  We hail the dawn,--for we that day
  At Sinuessa, on our way
  With Plotius, [1] Virgil, Varius too,
  Have an appointed rendezvous;
  Souls all, than whom the earth ne'er saw
  More noble, more exempt from flaw,
  Nor are there any on its round
  To whom I am more firmly bound.
  Oh! what embracings, and what mirth!
  Nothing, no, nothing, on this earth,
  Whilst I have reason, shall I e'er
  With a true genial friend compare!"

[1]
   Plotius Tucca, himself a poet, and associated by Virgil with Varius
   in editing the Aeneid after the poet's death.

Next day they reach Capua, where, so soon as their mules are unpacked,
away

  "Maecenas hies, at ball to play;
  To sleep myself and Virgil go,
  For tennis-practice is, we know,
  Injurious, quite beyond all question,
  Both to weak eyes and weak digestion."

With these and suchlike details Horace carries us pleasantly on with
his party to Brundusium. They were manifestly in no hurry, for they
took fourteen days, according to Gibbon's careful estimate, to travel
378 Roman miles. That they might have got over the ground much faster,
if necessary, is certain from what is known of other journeys. Caesar
posted 100 miles a-day. Tiberius travelled 200 miles in twenty-four
hours, when he was hastening to close the eyes of his brother Drusus;
and Statius (Sylv. 14, Carm. 3) talks of a man leaving Rome in the
morning, and being at Baiae or Puteoli, 127 miles off, before night.

  "Have but the will, be sure you'll find the way.
  What shall stop him, who starts at break of day
  From sleeping Rome, and on the Lucrine sails
  Before the sunshine into twilight pales?"

Just as, according to Sydney Smith, in his famous allusion to the
triumphs of railway travelling, "the early Scotchman scratches himself
in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly
before the setting sun."

Horace treats the expedition to Brundusium entirely as if it had been
a pleasant tour. Gibbon thinks he may have done so purposely, to
convince those who were jealous of his intimacy with the great
statesman, "that his thoughts and occupations on the event were far
from being of a serious or political nature." But it was a rule with
Horace, in all his writings, never to indicate, by the slightest word,
that he knew any of the political secrets which, as the intimate
friend of Maecenas, he could scarcely have failed to know. He hated
babbling of all kinds. A man who reported the private talk of friends,
even on comparatively indifferent topics,--

  "The churl, who out of doors will spread
  What 'mongst familiar friends is said,"--

(Epistle I. v. 24), was his especial aversion; and he has more than
once said, only not in such formal phrase, what Milton puts into the
mouth of his "Samson Agonistes,"

                            "To have revealed
  Secrets of men, the secrets of a friend,
  How heinous had the fact been! how deserving
  Contempt, and scorn of all, to be excluded
  All friendship, and avoided as a blab,
  The mark of fool set on his front!"

Moreover, reticence, the indispensable quality, not of statesmen
merely, but of their intimates, was not so rare a virtue in these days
as in our own; and as none would have expected Horace, in a poem of
this kind, to make any political confidences, he can scarcely be
supposed to have written it with any view to throwing the gossips of
Rome off the scent. The excursion had been a pleasant one, and he
thought its incidents worth noting. Hence the poem. Happily for us,
who get from it most interesting glimpses of some of the familiar
aspects of Roman life and manners, of which we should otherwise have
known nothing. Here, for example, is a sketch of how people fared in
travelling by canal in those days, near Rome. Overcrowding, we see, is
not an evil peculiar to our own days.

  "Now 'gan the night with gentle hand
  To fold in shadows all the land,
  And stars along the sky to scatter,
  When there arose a hideous clatter,
  Slaves slanging bargemen, bargemen slaves;
  'Ho, haul up here! how now, ye knaves,
  Inside three hundred people stuff?
  Already there are quite enough!'
  Collected were the fares at last,
  The mule that drew our barge made fast,
  But not till a good hour was gone.
  Sleep was not to be thought upon,
  The cursèd gnats were so provoking,
  The bull-frogs set up such a croaking.
  A bargeman, too, a drunken lout,
  And passenger, sang turn about,
  In tones remarkable for strength,
  Their absent sweethearts, till at length
  The passenger began to doze,
  When up the stalwart bargeman rose,
  His fastenings from the stone unwound,
  And left the mule to graze around;
  Then down upon his back he lay,
  And snored in a terrific way."

Neither is the following allusion to the Jews and their creed without
its value, especially when followed, as it is, by Horace's avowal,
almost in the words of Lucretius (B. VI. 56), of what was then his
own. Later in life he came to a very different conclusion. When the
travellers reach Egnatia, their ridicule is excited by being shown or
told, it is not very clear which, of incense kindled in the temple
there miraculously without the application of fire.

  "This may your circumcisèd Jew
  Believe, but never I. For true
  I hold it that the Deities
  Enjoy themselves in careless ease;[1]
  Nor think, when Nature, spurning Law,
  Does something which inspires our awe,
  'Tis sent by the offended gods
  Direct from their august abodes."

[1]
   So Tennyson, in his "Lotus-Eaters:"--

     "Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
     In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined
     On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind."

   See the whole of the passage.

Had Horace known anything of natural science, he might not have gone
so far to seek for the explanation of the seeming miracle.

Gibbon speaks contemptuously of many of the incidents recorded in this
poem, asking, "How could a man of taste reflect on them the day
after?" But the poem has much more than a merely literary interest;
thanks to such passages as these, and to the charming tribute by
Horace to his friends previously cited.

Nothing can better illustrate the footing of easy friendship on which
he soon came to stand with Maecenas than the following poem, which
must have been written before the year B.C. 32; for in that year
Terentia became the mistress of the great palace on the Esquiline, and
the allusion in the last verse is much too familiar to have been
intended for her. Horace, whose delicacy of stomach was probably
notorious, had apparently been the victim of a practical joke--a
species of rough fun to which the Romans of the upper classes appear
to have been particularly prone. It is difficult otherwise to
understand how he could have stumbled at Maecenas's table on a dish so
overdosed with garlic as that which provoked this humorous protest.
From what we know of the abominations of an ordinary Roman banquet,
the vegetable stew in this instance must have reached a climax of
unusual atrocity.

  "If his old father's throat any impious sinner
    Has cut with unnatural hand to the bone,
  Give him garlic, more noxious than hemlock, at dinner.
    Ye gods! the strong stomachs that reapers must own!

  "With what poison is this that my vitals are heated?
    By viper's blood--certes, it cannot be less--
  Stewed into the potherbs; can I have been cheated?
    Or Canidia, did she cook the villainous mess?

  "When Medea was struck by the handsome sea-rover,
    Who in beauty outshone all his Argonaut band,
  This mixture she took to lard Jason all over,
    And so tamed the fire-breathing bulls to his hand.

  "With this her fell presents she dyed and infected,
    On his innocent leman avenging the slight
  Of her terrible beauty, forsaken, neglected,
    And then on her car, dragon-wafted, took flight.

  "Never star on Apulia, the thirsty and arid,
    Exhaled a more baleful or pestilent dew,
  And the gift, which invincible Hercules carried,
    Burned not to his bones more remorselessly through.

  "Should you e'er long again for such relish as this is,
    Devoutly I'll pray, wag Maecenas, I vow,
  With her hand that your mistress arrest all your kisses,
    And lie as far off as the couch will allow."

It is startling to our notions to find so direct a reference as that
in the last verse to the "reigning favourite" of Maecenas; but what
are we to think of the following lines, which point unequivocally to
Maecenas's wife, in the following Ode addressed to her husband (Odes,
II. 12)?

  "Would you, friend, for Phrygia's hoarded gold,
    Or all that Achaemenes' self possesses,
  Or e'en for what Araby's coffers hold,
    Barter one lock of her clustering tresses,

  While she stoops her throat to your burning kiss,
    Or, fondly cruel, the bliss denies you,
  She would have you snatch, or will, snatching this
    Herself, with a sweeter thrill surprise you?"

If Maecenas allowed his friends to write of his wife in this strain,
it is scarcely to be wondered at if that coquettish and capricious
lady gave, as she did, "that worthy man good grounds for uneasiness."



CHAPTER IV.

PUBLICATION OF FIRST BOOK OF SATIRES.--HIS FRIENDS.--RECEIVES THE
SABINE FARM FROM MAECENAS.


In B.C. 34, Horace published the First Book of his Satires, and placed
in front of it one specially addressed to Maecenas--a course which he
adopted in each successive section of his poems, apparently to mark
his sense of obligation to him as the most honoured of his friends.
The name _Satires_ does not truly indicate the nature of this
series. They are rather didactic poems, couched in a more or less
dramatic form, and carried on in an easy conversational tone, without
for the most part any definite purpose, often diverging into such
collateral topics as suggest themselves by the way, with all the ease
and buoyancy of agreeable talk, and getting back or not, as it may
happen, into the main line of idea with which they set out. Some of
them are conceived in a vein of fine irony throughout. Others, like
"The Journey to Brundusium," are mere narratives, relieved by humorous
illustrations. But we do not find in them the epigrammatic force, the
sternness of moral rebuke, or the scathing spirit of sarcasm, which
are commonly associated with the idea of satire. Literary display
appears never to be aimed at. The plainest phrases, the homeliest
illustrations, the most everyday topics--if they come in the way--are
made use of for the purpose of insinuating or enforcing some useful
truth. Point and epigram are the last things thought of; and therefore
it is that Pope's translations, admirable as in themselves they are,
fail to give an idea of the lightness of touch, the shifting lights
and shades, the carelessness alternating with force, the artless
natural manner, which distinguish these charming essays. "The
terseness of Horace's language in his Satires," it has been well said,
"is that of a proverb, neat because homely; while the terseness of
Pope is that of an epigram, which will only become homely in time,
because it is neat."

In writing these Satires, which he calls merely rhythmical prose,
Horace disclaims for himself the title of poet; and at this time it
would appear as if he had not even conceived the idea of "modulating
Aeolic song to the Italian lyre," on which he subsequently rested his
hopes of posthumous fame. The very words of his disclaimer, however,
show how well he appreciated the poet's gifts (Satires, I. 4):--

  "First from the roll I strike myself of those I poets call,
  For merely to compose in verse is not the all-in-all;
  Nor if a man shall write, like me, things nigh to prose akin,
  Shall he, however well he write, the name of poet win?
  To genius, to the man-whose soul is touched with fire divine,
  Whose voice speaks like a trumpet-note, that honoured name assign.
              'Tis not enough that you compose your verse
  In diction irreproachable, pure, scholarly, and terse,
  Which, dislocate its cadence, by anybody may
  Be spoken like the language of the father in the play.
  Divest those things which now I write, and Lucilius wrote of yore,
  Of certain measured cadences, by setting that before
  Which was behind, and that before which I had placed behind,
  Yet by no alchemy will you in the residuum find
  The members still apparent of the dislocated bard,"--

a result which he contends would not ensue, however much you might
disarrange the language of a passage of true poetry, such as one he
quotes from Ennius, the poetic charm of which, by the way, is not very
apparent. Schooled, however, as he had been, in the pure literature of
Greece, Horace aimed at a conciseness and purity of style which had
been hitherto unknown in Roman satire, and studied, not
unsuccessfully, to give to his own work, by great and well-disguised
elaboration of finish, the concentrated force and picturesque
precision which are large elements in all genuine poetry. His own
practice, as we see from its results, is given in the following lines,
and a better description of how didactic or satiric poetry should be
written could scarcely be desired (Satires, I. 10).

  "'Tis not enough, a poet's fame to make,
  That you with bursts of mirth your audience shake;
  And yet to this, as all experience shows,
  No small amount of skill and talent goes.
  Your style must he concise, that what you say
  May flow on clear and smooth, nor lose its way,
  Stumbling and halting through a chaos drear
  Of cumbrous words, that load the weary ear;
  And you must pass from grave to gay,--now, like
  The rhetorician, vehemently strike,
  Now, like the poet, deal a lighter hit
  With easy playfulness and polished wit,--
  Veil the stern vigour of a soul robust,
  And flash your fancies, while like death you thrust;
  For men are more impervious, as a rule,
  To slashing censure than to ridicule.
  Here lay the merit of those writers, who
  In the Old Comedy our fathers drew;
  Here should we struggle in their steps to tread
  Whom fop Hermogenes has never read,
  Nor that mere ape of his, who all day long
  Makes Calvus and Catullus all his song."

The concluding hit at Hermogenes Tigellius and his double is very
characteristic of Horace's manner. When he has worked up his
description of a vice to be avoided or a virtue to be pursued, he
generally drives home his lesson by the mention of some well-known
person's name, thus importing into his literary practice the method
taken by his father, as we have seen, to impress his ethical teachings
upon himself in his youth. The allusion to Calvus and Catullus, the
only one anywhere made to these poets by Horace, is curious; but it
would be wrong to infer from it, that Horace meant to disparage these
fine poets. Calvus had a great reputation both as an orator and poet.
But, except some insignificant fragments, nothing of what he wrote is
left. How Catullus wrote we do, however, know; and although it is
conceivable that Horace had no great sympathy with some of his love
verses, which were probably of too sentimental a strain for his taste,
we may be sure that he admired the brilliant genius as well as the
fine workmanship of many of his other poems. At all events, he had too
much good sense to launch a sneer at so great a poet recently dead,
which would not only have been in the worst taste, but might justly
have been ascribed to jealousy. When he talks, therefore, of a pair of
fribbles who can sing nothing but Calvus and Catullus, it is, as
Macleane has said in his note on the passage, "as if a man were to say
of a modern English coxcomb, that he could sing Moore's ballads from
beginning to end, but could not understand a line of Shakespeare,"--no
disparagement to Moore, whatever it might be to the vocalist.
Hermogenes and his ape (whom we may identify with one Demetrius, who
is subsequently coupled with him in the same satire) were musicians
and vocalists, idolised, after the manner of modern Italian singers,
by the young misses of Rome. Pampered favourites of fashion, the
Farinellis of the hour, their opinion on all matters of taste was sure
to be as freely given as it was worthless. They had been, moreover, so
indiscreet as to provoke Horace's sarcasm by running down his verses.
Leave criticism, he rejoins, to men who have a right to judge. Stick
to your proper vocation, and

  "To puling girls, that listen and adore,
  Your love-lorn chants and woeful wailings pour!"

In the same Satire we have proof how warmly Horace thought and spoke
of living poets. Thus:--

  "In grave Iambic measures Pollio sings
  For our delight the deeds of mighty kings.
  The stately Epic Varius leads along,
  And where is voice so resonant, so strong?
  The Muses of the woods and plains have shed
  Their every grace and charm on Virgil's head."

With none of those will he compete. Satire is his element, and there
he proclaims himself to be an humble follower of his great
predecessor. But while he bows to Lucilius as his master, and owns him
superior in polish and scholarly grace to the satirists who preceded
him, still, he continues--

  "Still, were he living now--had only such
  Been Fate's decree--he would have blotted much,
  Cut everything away that could be called
  Crude or superfluous, or tame, or bald;
  Oft scratched his head, the labouring poet's trick,
  And bitten all his nails down to the quick."

And then he lays down the canon for all high-class composition, which
can never be too often enforced:--

  "Oh yes, believe me, you must draw your pen
  Not once or twice, but o'er and o'er again,
  Through what you've written, if you would entice
  The man who reads you once to read you twice,
  Not making popular applause your cue,
  But looking to find audience fit though few." (C.)

He had himself followed the rule, and found the reward. With natural
exultation he appeals against the judgment of men of the Hermogenes
type to an array of critics of whose good opinion he might well be
proud:--

  "Maecenas, Virgil, Varius,--if I please
  In my poor writings these and such as these,--
  If Plotius, Valgius, Fuscus will commend,
  And good Octavius, I've achieved my end.
  You, noble Pollio (let your friend disclaim
  All thoughts of flattery, when he names your name),
  Messala and his brother, Servius too,
  And Bibulus, and Furnius kind and true,
  With others, whom, despite their sense and wit,
  And friendly hearts, I purposely omit;
  Such I would have my critics; men to gain
  Whose smiles were pleasure, to forget them pain." (C.)

It is not strange that Horace, even in these early days, numbered so
many distinguished men among his friends, for, the question of genius
apart, there must have been something particularly engaging in his
kindly and affectionate nature. He was a good hater, as all warm-
hearted men are; and when his blood was up, he could, like Diggory,
"remember his swashing blow." He would fain, as he says himself
(Satires, II. 1), be at peace with all men:--

  "But he who shall my temper try--
  'Twere best to touch me not, say I--
  Shall rue it, and through all the town
  My verse shall damn him with renown."

But with his friends he was forbearing, devoted, lenient to their
foibles, not boring them with his own, liberal in construing their
motives, and as trustful in their loyalty to himself as he was assured
of his own to them; clearly a man to be loved--a man pleasant to meet
and pleasant to remember, constant, and to be relied on in sunshine or
in gloom. Friendship with him was not a thing to be given by halves.
He could see a friend's faults-no man quicker-but it did not lie in
his mouth to babble about them. He was not one of those who "whisper
faults and hesitate dislikes." Love me, love my friend, was his rule.
Neither would he sit quietly by, while his friends were being
disparaged. And if he has occasion himself to rally their foibles in
his poems, he does so openly, and does it with such an implied
sympathy and avowal of kindred weakness in himself, that offence was
impossible. Above all, he possessed in perfection what Mr Disraeli
happily calls "the rare gift of raillery, which flatters the self-love
of those whom it seems not to spare." These characteristics are
admirably indicated by Persius (I. 116) in speaking of his Satires--

         "Arch Horace, while he strove to mend,
  Probed all the foibles of his smiling friend;
  Played lightly round and round each peccant part,
  And won, unfelt, an entrance to his heart." (Gifford.)

And we may be sure the same qualities were even more conspicuous in
his personal intercourse with his friends. Satirist though he was, he
is continually inculcating the duty of charitable judgments towards
all men.

  "What's done we partly may compute,
    But know not what's resisted,"

is a thought often suggested by his works. The best need large grains
of allowance, and to whom should these be given if not to friends?
Here is his creed on this subject (Satires, I. 3):--

  "True love, we know, is blind; defects, that blight
  The loved one's charms, escape the lover's sight,
  Nay, pass for beauties; as Balbinus shows
  A passion for the wen on Agna's nose.
  Oh, with our friendships that we did the same,
  And screened our blindness under virtue's name!
  For we are bound to treat a friend's defect
  With touch most tender, and a fond respect;
  Even as a father treats a child's, who hints,
  The urchin's eyes are roguish, if he squints:
  Or if he be as stunted, short, and thick,
  As Sisyphus the dwarf, will call him 'chick!'
  If crooked all ways, in back, in legs, and thighs,
  With softening phrases will the flaw disguise.
  So, if one friend too close a fist betrays,
  Let us ascribe it to his frugal ways;
  Or is another--such we often find--
  To flippant jest and braggart talk inclined,
  'Tis only from a kindly wish to try
  To make the time 'mongst friends go lightly by;
  Another's tongue is rough and over-free,
  Let's call it bluntness and sincerity;
  Another's choleric; him we must screen,
  As cursed with feelings for his peace too keen.
  This is the course, methinks, that makes a friend,
  And, having made, secures him to the end."

What wonder, such being his practice--for Horace in this as in other
things acted up to his professions--that he was so dear, as we see he
was, to so many of the best men of his time? The very contrast which
his life presented to that of most of his associates must have helped
to attract them to him. Most of them were absorbed in either political
or military pursuits. Wealth, power, dignity, the splendid prizes of
ambition, were the dream of their lives. And even those whose tastes
inclined mainly towards literature and art were not exempt from the
prevailing passion for riches and display. Rich, they were eager to be
more rich; well placed in society, they were covetous of higher social
distinction. Now at Rome, gay, luxurious, dissipated; anon in Spain,
Parthia, Syria, Africa, or wherever duty, interest, or pleasure called
them, encountering perils by land and sea with reckless indifference
to fatigue and danger, always with a hunger at their hearts for
something, which, when found, did not appease it; they must have felt
a peculiar interest in a man who, without apparent effort, seemed to
get so much more out of life than they were able to do, with all their
struggles, and all their much larger apparent means of enjoyment. They
must have seen that wealth and honour were both within his grasp, and
they must have known, too, that it was from no lack of appreciation of
either that he deliberately declined to seek them. Wealth would have
purchased for him many a refined pleasure which he could heartily
appreciate, and honours might have saved him from some of the social
slights which must have tested his philosophy. But he told them, in
every variety of phrase and illustration--in ode, in satire, and
epistle--that without self-control and temperance in all things, there
would be no joy without remorse, no pleasure without fatigue--that it
is from within that happiness must come, if it come at all, and that
unless the mind has schooled itself to peace by the renunciation of
covetous desires,

  "We may be wise, or rich, or great,
    But never can be blest."

And as he spoke, so they must have seen he lived. Wealth and honours
would manifestly have been bought too dearly at the sacrifice of the
tranquillity and independence which he early set before him as the
objects of his life.

  "The content, surpassing wealth,
  The sage in meditation found;"

the content which springs from living in consonance with the dictates
of nature, from healthful pursuits, from a conscience void of offence;
the content which is incompatible with the gnawing disquietudes of
avarice, of ambition, of social envy,--with that in his heart, he knew
he could be true to his genius, and make life worth living for. A man
of this character must always be rare; least of all was he likely to
be common in Horace's day, when the men in whose circle he was moving
were engaged in the great task of crushing the civil strife which had
shaken the stability of the Roman power, and of consolidating an
empire greater and more powerful than her greatest statesmen had
previously dreamed of. But all the more delightful to these men must
it have been to come into intimate contact with a man who, while
perfectly appreciating their special gifts and aims, could bring them
back from the stir and excitement of their habitual life to think of
other things than social or political successes,--to look into their
own hearts, and to live for a time for something better and more
enduring than the triumphs of vanity or ambition.

Horace from the first seems to have wisely determined to keep himself
free from those shackles which most men are so eager to forge for
themselves, by setting their heart on wealth and social distinction.
With perfect sincerity he had told Maecenas, as we have seen, that he
coveted neither, and he gives his reasons thus (Satires, I. 6):--

  "For then a larger income must be made,
  Men's favour courted, and their whims obeyed;
  Nor could I then indulge a lonely mood,
  Away from town, in country solitude,
  For the false retinue of pseudo-friends,
  That all my movements servilely attends.
  More slaves must then be fed, more horses too,
  And chariots bought. Now have I nought to do,
  If I would even to Tarentum ride,
  But mount my bobtailed mule, my wallets tied
  Across his flanks, which, napping as we go,
  With my ungainly ankles to and fro,
  Work his unhappy sides a world of weary woe."

From this wise resolution he never swerved, and so through life he
maintained an attitude of independence in thought and action which
would otherwise have been impossible. He does not say it in so many
words, but the sentiment meets us all through his pages, which Burns,
whose mode of thinking so often reminds us of Horace, puts into the
line,

  "My freedom's a lairdship nae monarch may touch."

And we shall hereafter have occasion to see that, when put to the
proof, he acted upon this creed. "Well might the overworked statesman
have envied the poet the ease and freedom of his life, and longed to
be able to spend a day as Horace, in the same Satire, tells us his
days were passed!--

  "I walk alone, by mine own fancy led,
  Inquire the price of potherbs and of bread,
  The circus cross, to see its tricks and fun,
  The forum, too, at times, near set of sun;
  With other fools there do I stand and gape
  Bound fortune-tellers' stalls, thence home escape
  To a plain meal of pancakes, pulse, and pease;
  Three young boy-slaves attend on me with these.
  Upon a slab of snow-white marble stand
  A goblet and two beakers; near at hand,
  A common ewer, patera, and bowl;
  Campania's potteries produced the whole.
  To sleep then I....
  I keep my couch till ten, then walk awhile,
  Or having read or writ what may beguile
  A quiet after-hour, anoint my limbs
  With oil, not such as filthy Natta skims
  From lamps defrauded of their unctuous fare.
  And when the sunbeams, grown too hot to bear,
  Warn me to quit the field, and hand-ball play,
  The bath takes all my weariness away.
  Then, having lightly dined, just to appease
  The sense of emptiness, I take mine ease,
  Enjoying all home's simple luxury.
  This is the life of bard unclogged, like me,
  By stern ambition's miserable weight.
  So placed, I own with gratitude, my state
  Is sweeter, ay, than though a quaestor's power
  From sire and grandsire's sires had been my dower."

It would not have been easy to bribe a man of these simple habits and
tastes, as some critics have contended that Horace was bribed, to
become the laureate of a party to which he had once been opposed, even
had Maecenas wished to do so. His very indifference to those favours
which were within the disposal of a great minister of state, placed
him on a vantage-ground in his relations with Maecenas which he could
in no other way have secured. Nor, we may well believe, would that
distinguished man have wished it otherwise. Surrounded as he was by
servility and selfish baseness, he must have felt himself irresistibly
drawn towards a nature so respectful, yet perfectly manly and
independent, as that of the poet. Nor can we doubt that intimacy had
grown into friendship, warm and sincere, before he gratified his own
feelings, while he made Horace happy for life, by presenting him with
a small estate in the Sabine country--a gift which, we may be sure, he
knew well would be of all gifts the most welcome. It is demonstrable
that it was not given earlier than B.C. 33, or after upwards of four
years of intimate acquaintance. That Horace had longed for such a
possession, he tells us himself (Satires, II. 6). He had probably
expressed his longing in the hearing of his friend, and to such a
friend the opportunity of turning the poet's dream into a reality must
have been especially delightful.

The gift was a slight one for Maecenas to bestow; but, with Horace's
fondness for the country, it had a value for him beyond all price. It
gave him a competency--_satis superque_--enough and more than he
wanted for his needs. It gave him leisure, health, amusement; and,
more precious than all, it secured him undisturbed freedom of thought,
and opportunities for that calm intercourse with nature which he
"needed for his spirit's health." Never was gift better bestowed, or
more worthily requited. To it we are indebted for much of that poetry
which has linked the name of Maecenas with that of the poet in
associations the most engaging, and has afforded, and will afford,
ever-new delight to successive generations. The Sabine farm was
situated in the Valley of Ustica, thirty miles from Rome, and twelve
miles from Tivoli. It possessed the attraction, no small one to
Horace, of being very secluded--Varia (Vico Varo), the nearest town,
being four miles off--yet, at the same time, within an easy distance
of Rome. When his spirits wanted the stimulus of society or the bustle
of the capital, which they often did, his ambling mule could speedily
convey him thither; and when jaded, on the other hand, by the noise
and racket and dissipations of Rome, he could, in the same homely way,
bury himself within a few hours among the hills, and there, under the
shadow of his favourite Lucretilis, or by the banks of the clear-
flowing and ice-cold Digentia, either stretch himself to dream upon
the grass, lulled by the murmurs of the stream, or do a little fanning
in the way of clearing his fields of stones, or turning over a furrow
here and there with the hoe. There was a rough wildness in the scenery
and a sharpness in the air, both of which Horace liked, although, as
years advanced and his health grew more delicate, he had to leave it
in the colder months for Tivoli or Baiae. He built a villa upon it, or
added to one already there, the traces of which still exist. The farm
gave employment to five families of free _coloni_, who were under
the superintendence of a bailiff; and the poet's domestic
establishment was composed of eight slaves. The site of the farm is at
the present day a favourite resort of travellers, of Englishmen
especially, who visit it in such numbers, and trace its features with
such enthusiasm, that the resident peasantry, "who cannot conceive of
any other source of interest in one so long dead and unsainted than
that of co-patriotism or consanguinity," believe Horace to have been
an Englishman [Footnote: Letter by Mr Dennis: Milman's 'Horace.'
London, 1849. P. 109.]. What aspect it presented in Horace's time we
gather from one of his Epistles (I. 16):--

  "About my farm, dear Quinctius: You would know
  What sort of produce for its lord 'twill grow;
  Plough-land is it, or meadow-land, or soil
  For apples, vine-clad elms, or olive-oil?
  So (but you'll think me garrulous) I'll write
  A full description of its form and site.
  In long continuous lines the mountains run,
  Cleft by a valley, which twice feels the sun--
  Once on the right, when first he lifts his beams;
  Once on the left, when he descends in steams.
  You'd praise the climate; well, and what d'ye say
  To sloes and cornels hanging from the spray?
  What to the oak and ilex, that afford
  Fruit to the cattle, shelter to their lord?
  What, but that rich Tarentum must have been
  Transplanted nearer Rome, with all its green?
  Then there's a fountain, of sufficient size
  To name the river that takes thence its rise--
  Not Thracian Hebrus colder or more pure,
  Of power the head's and stomach's ills to cure.
  This sweet retirement--nay, 'tis more than sweet--
  Insures my health even in September's heat." (C.)

Here is what a last year's tourist found it:--('Pall Mall Gazette,'
August 16, 1869.)

"Following a path along the brink of the torrent Digentia, we passed a
towering rock, on which once stood Vacuna's shrine, and entered a
pastoral region of well-watered meadow-lands, enamelled with flowers
and studded with chestnut and fruit trees. Beneath their sheltering
shade peasants were whiling away the noontide hours. Here sat Daphnis
piping sweet witching melodies on a reed to his rustic Phidyle, whilst
Lydia and she wove wreaths of wild-flowers, and Lyce sped down to the
edge of the stream and brought us cooling drink in a bulging conca
borne on her head. Its waters were as deliciously refreshing as they
could have been when the poet himself gratefully recorded how often
they revived his strength; and one longed to think, and hence half
believed, that our homely Hebe, like her fellows, was sprung from the
coloni who tilled his fields and dwelt in the five homesteads of which
he sings. ... Near the little village of Licenza, standing like its
loftier neighbour, Civitella, on a steep hill at the foot of
Lucretilis, we turned off the path, crossed a thickly-wooded knoll,
and came to an orchard, in which two young labourers were at work. We
asked where the remains of Horace's farm were. '_A pie tui!_'
answered the nearest of them, in a dialect more like Latin than
Italian. So saying, he began with a shovel to uncover a massive floor
in very fair preservation; a little farther on was another, crumbling
to pieces. Chaupy has luckily saved one all doubt as to the site of
the farm, establishing to our minds convincingly that it could
scarcely have stood on ground other than that on which at this moment
we were. As the shovel was clearing the floors, we thought how
applicable to Horace himself were the lines he addressed to Fuscus
Aristius, 'Naturam expelles,' &c.--

  'Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout
  The false refinements that would keep her out;' (C.)

For here was just enough of his home left to show how nature, creeping
on step by step, had overwhelmed his handiwork and reasserted her
sway. Again, pure and Augustan in design as was the pavement before
us, how little could it vie with the hues and odours of the grasses
that bloomed around it!--'Deterius Libycis' &c.--

  'Is springing grass less sweet to nose and eyes
  Than Libyan marble's tesselated dyes?' (C.)

"Indeed, so striking were these coincidences that we were as nearly as
possible going off on the wrong tack, and singing 'Io Paean' to Dame
Nature herself at the expense of the bard; but we were soon brought
back to our allegiance by a sense of the way in which all we saw
tallied with the description of him who sang of nature so surpassingly
well, who challenges posterity in charmed accents, and could shape the
sternest and most concise of tongues into those melodious cadences
that invest his undying verse with all the magic of music and all the
freshness of youth. For this was clearly the 'angulus iste,' the nook
which 'restored him to himself'--this the lovely spot which his
steward longed to exchange for the slums of Rome. Below lay the
greensward by the river, where it was sweet to recline in slumber.
Here grew the vines, still trained, like his own, on the trunks and
branches of trees. Yonder the brook which the rain would swell till it
overflowed its margin, and his lazy steward and slaves were fain to
bank it up; and above, among a wild jumble of hills, lay the woods
where, on the Calends of March, Faunus interposed to save him from the
falling tree, and where another miracle preserved him from the attack
of the wolf as he strolled along unarmed, singing of the soft voice
and sweet smiles of his Lalage! The brook is now nearly dammed up; a
wall of close-fitting rough-hewn stones gathers its waters into a
still, dark pool; its overflow gushes out in a tiny rill that rushed
down beside our path, mingling its murmur with the hum of myriads of
insects that swarmed in the air."

On this farm lovers of Horace have been fain to place the fountain of
Bandusia, which the poet loved so well, and to which he prophesied,
and truly, as the issue has proved, immortality from his song (Odes,
III. 13). Charming as the poem is, there could be no stronger proof of
the poet's hold upon the hearts of men of all ages than the enthusiasm
with which the very site of the spring has been contested.

  "Bandusia's fount, in clearness crystalline,
    O worthy of the wine, the flowers we vow!
  To-morrow shall be thine
    A kid, whose crescent brow

  "Is sprouting, all for love and victory,
    In vain; his warm red blood, so early stirred,
  Thy gelid stream shall dye,
    Child of the wanton herd.

  "Thee the fierce Sirian star, to madness fired,
    Forbears to touch; sweet cool thy waters yield
  To ox with ploughing tired,
    And flocks that range afield.

  "Thou too one day shall win proud eminence
    'Mid honoured founts, while I the ilex sing
  Crowning the cavern, whence
    Thy babbling wavelets spring." (C.)

Several commentators maintain, on what appears to be very inconclusive
grounds, that the fountain was at Palazzo, six miles from Venusia. But
the poem is obviously inspired by a fountain whose babble had often
soothed the ear of Horace, long after he had ceased to visit Venusia.
On his farm, therefore, let us believe it to exist, whichever of the
springs that are still there we may choose to identify with his
description. For there are several, and the local guides are by no
means dogmatic as to the "_vero fonte_." That known as the "Fonte
della Corte" seems to make out the strongest case for itself. It is
within a few hundred yards of the villa, most abundant, and in this
respect "fit" to name the river that there takes its rise, which the
others--at present, at least--certainly are not.

Horace is never weary of singing the praises of his mountain home--
"_Satis beatus unicis Sabinis_,"

  "With what I have completely blest,
  My happy little Sabine nest"--
                             Odes, II. 18.

are the words in which he contrasts his own entire happiness with the
restless misery of a millionaire in the midst of his splendour. Again,
in one of his Odes to Maecenas (III. 16) he takes up and expands the
same theme.

  "In my crystal stream, my woodland, though its acres are but few,
  And the trust that I shall gather home my crops in season due,
  Lies a joy, which he may never grasp, who rules in gorgeous state
  Fertile Africa's dominions. Happier, happier far my fate!
  Though for me no bees Calabrian store their honey, nor doth wine
  Sickening in the Laestrygonian amphora for me refine;
  Though for me no flocks unnumbered, browsing Gallia's pastures fair,
  Pant beneath their swelling fleeces, I at least am free from care;
  Haggard want with direful clamour ravins never at my door,
  Nor wouldst thou, if more I wanted, oh my friend, deny me more.
  Appetites subdued will make me richer with my scanty gains,
  Than the realms of Alyattes wedded to Mygdonia's plains.
  Much will evermore be wanting unto those who much demand;
  Blest, whom Jove with what sufficeth dowers, but dowers with sparing
hand."

It is the nook of earth which, beyond all others, has a charm for
him,--the one spot where he is all his own. Here, as Wordsworth
beautifully says, he

  "Exults in freedom, can with rapture vouch
  For the dear blessings of a lowly couch,
  A natural meal, days, months from Nature's hand,
  Time, place, and business all at his command,"

It is in this delightful retreat that, in one of his most graceful
Odes, he thus invites the fair Tyndaris to pay him a visit (I. 17):--

  "My own sweet Lucretilis ofttime can lure
From his native Lycaeus kind Faunus the fleet,
  To watch o'er my flocks, and to keep them secure
    From summer's fierce winds, and its rains, and its heat.

  "There the mates of a lord of too pungent a fragrance
    Securely through brake and o'er precipice climb,
  And crop, as they wander in happiest vagrance,
    The arbutus green, and the sweet-scented thyme.

  "Nor murderous wolf nor green snake may assail
    My innocent kidlings, dear Tyndaris, when
  His pipings resound through Ustica's low vale,
    Till each mossed rock in music makes answer again.

  "The muse is still dear to the gods, and they shield
    Me, their dutiful bard; with a bounty divine
  They have blessed me with all that the country can yield;
    Then come, and whatever I have shall be thine!

  "Here screened from the dog-star, in valley retired,
    Shalt thou sing that old song thou canst warble so well,
  Which tells how one passion Penelope fired,
    And charmed fickle Circe herself by its spell.

  "Here cups shalt thou sip, 'neath the broad-spreading shade
    Of the innocent vintage of Lesbos at ease;
  No fumes of hot ire shall our banquet invade,
    Or mar that sweet festival under the trees.

  "And fear not, lest Cyrus, that jealous young bear,
    On thy poor little self his rude fingers should set--
  Should pluck from thy bright locks the chaplet, and tear
    Thy dress, that ne'er harmed him nor any one yet."

Had Milton this Ode in his thought, when he invited his friend Lawes
to a repast,

                            "Light and choice,
  Of Attic taste with wine, whence we may rise,
  To hear the lute well touched, and artful voice
  Warble immortal notes, and Tuscan air"?

The reference in the last verse to the violence of the lady's lover--a
violence of which ladies of her class were constantly the victims--
rather suggests that this Ode, if addressed to a real personage at
all, was meant less as an invitation to the Sabine farm than as a balm
to the lady's wounded spirit.

In none of his poems is the poet's deep delight in the country life of
his Sabine home more apparent than in the following (Satires, II. 6),
which, both for its biographical interest and as a specimen of his
best manner in his Satires, we give entire:--

  "My prayers with this I used to charge,--
  A piece of land not very large,
  Wherein there should a garden be,
  A clear spring flowing ceaselessly,
  And where, to crown the whole, there should
  A patch be found of growing wood.
    All this, and more, the gods have sent,
  And I am heartily content.
  Oh son of Maia, that I may
  These bounties keep is all I pray.
  If ne'er by craft or base design
  I've swelled what little store is mine,
  Nor mean, it ever shall be wrecked
  By profligacy or neglect;
  If never from my lips a word
  Shall drop of wishes so absurd
  As,--'Had I but that little nook
  Next to my land, that spoils its look!
  Or--'Would some lucky chance unfold
  A crock to me of hidden gold,
  As to the man whom Hercules
  Enriched and settled at his ease,
  Who,--with, the treasure he had found,
  Bought for himself the very ground
  Which he before for hire had tilled!'
  If I with gratitude am filled
  For what I have--by this I dare
  Adjure you to fulfil my prayer,
  That you with fatness will endow
  My little herd of cattle now,
  And all things else their lord may own,
  Except his sorry wits alone,
  And be, as heretofore, my chief
  Protector, guardian, and relief!
  So, when from town and all its ills
  I to my perch among the hills
  Retreat, what better theme to choose
  Than satire for my homely Muse?
  No fell ambition wastes me there,
  No, nor the south wind's leaden air,
  Nor Autumn's pestilential breath,
  With victims feeding hungry death.
    Sire of the morn, or if more dear
  The name of Janus to thine ear,
  Through whom whate'er by man is done,
  From life's first dawning, is begun
  (So willed the gods for man's estate),
  Do thou my verse initiate!
  At Rome you hurry me away
  To bail my friend; 'Quick, no delay,
  Or some one--could worse luck befall you?--
  Will in the kindly task forestall you.'
  So go I must, although the wind
  Is north and killingly unkind,
  Or snow, in thickly-falling flakes,
  The wintry day more wintry makes.
  And when, articulate and clear,
  I've spoken what may cost me dear,
  Elbowing the crowd that round me close,
  I'm sure to crush somebody's toes.
  'I say, where are you pushing to?
  What would you have, you madman, you?'
  So flies he at poor me, 'tis odds,
  And curses me by all his gods.
  'You think that you, now, I daresay,
  May push whatever stops your way,
  When you are to Maecenas bound!'
  Sweet, sweet, as honey is the sound,
  I won't deny, of that last speech,
  But then no sooner do I reach
  The dusky Esquiline, than straight
  Buzz, buzz around me runs the prate
  Of people pestering me with cares,
  All about other men's affairs.
  'To-morrow, Roscius bade me state,
  He trusts you'll be in court by eight!'
  'The scriveners, worthy Quintus, pray,
  You'll not forget they meet to-day,
  Upon a point both grave and new,
  One touching the whole body, too.'
  'Do get Maecenas, do, to sign
  This application here of mine!'
  'Well, well, I'll try.' 'You can with ease
  Arrange it, if you only please.'
    Close on eight years it now must be,
  Since first Maecenas numbered me
  Among his friends, as one to take
  Out driving with him, and to make
  The confidant of trifles, say,
  Like this, 'What is the time of day?'
  'The Thracian gladiator, can
  One match him with the Syrian?'
  'These chilly mornings will do harm,
  If one don't mind to wrap up warm;'
  Such nothings as without a fear
  One drops into the chinkiest ear.
  Yet all this tune hath envy's glance
  On me looked more and more askance.
  From mouth to mouth such comments run:
  'Our friend indeed is Fortune's son.
  Why, there he was, the other day,
  Beside Maecenas at the play;
  And at the Campus, just before,
  They had a bout at battledore.'
  Some chilling news through lane and street
  Spreads from the Forum. All I meet
  Accost me thus--'Dear friend, you're so
  Close to the gods, that you must know:
  About the Dacians, have you heard
  Any fresh tidings? Not a word!'
  'You're always jesting!' 'Now may all
  The gods confound me, great and small,
  If I have heard one word!' 'Well, well,
  But you at any rate can tell,
  If Caesar means the lands, which he
  Has promised to his troops, shall be
  Selected from Italian ground,
  Or in Trinacria be found?'
  And when I swear, as well I can,
  That I know nothing, for a man
   Of silence rare and most discreet
  They cry me up to all the street.
    Thus do my wasted days slip by,
  Not without many a wish and sigh,
  When, when shall I the country see,
  Its woodlands green,--oh, when be free,
  With books of great old men, and sleep,
  And hours of dreamy ease, to creep
  Into oblivion sweet of life,
  Its agitations and its strife? [1]
  When on my table shall be seen
  Pythagoras's kinsman bean,
  And bacon, not too fat, embellish
  My dish of greens, and give it relish!
  Oh happy nights, oh feasts divine,
  When, with the friends I love, I dine
  At mine own hearth-fire, and the meat
  We leave gives my bluff hinds a treat!
  No stupid laws our feasts control,
  But each guest drains or leaves the bowl,
  Precisely as he feels inclined.
  If he be strong, and have a mind
  For bumpers, good! if not, he's free
  To sip his liquor leisurely.
  And then the talk our banquet rouses!
  But not about our neighbours' houses,
  Or if 'tis generally thought
  That Lepos dances well or not?
  But what concerns us nearer, and
  Is harmful not to understand,
  By what we're led to choose our friends,--
  Regard for them, or our own ends?
  In what does good consist, and what
  Is the supremest form of that?
  And then friend Cervius will strike in
  With some old grandam's tale, akin
  To what we are discussing. Thus,
  If some one have cried up to us
  Arellius' wealth, forgetting how
  Much care it costs him, 'Look you now,
  Once on a time,' he will begin,
  'A country mouse received within
  His rugged cave a city brother,
  As one old comrade would another.
  "A frugal mouse upon the whole,
  But loved his friend, and had a soul,"
  And could be free and open-handed,
  When hospitality demanded.
  In brief, he did not spare his hoard
  Of corn and pease, long coyly stored;
  Raisins he brought, and scraps, to boot,
  Half-gnawed, of bacon, which he put
  With his own mouth before his guest,
  In hopes, by offering his best
  In such variety, he might
  Persuade him to an appetite.
  But still the cit, with languid eye,
  Just picked a bit, then put it by;
  Which with dismay the rustic saw,
  As, stretched upon some stubbly straw,
  He munched at bran and common grits,
  Not venturing on the dainty bits.
  At length the town mouse; "What," says he,
  "My good friend, can the pleasure be,
  Of grubbing here, on the backbone
  Of a great crag with trees o'ergrown?
  Who'd not to these wild woods prefer
  The city, with its crowds and stir?
  Then come with me to town; you'll ne'er
  Regret the hour that took you there.
  All earthly things draw mortal breath;
  Nor great nor little can from death
  Escape, and therefore, friend, be gay,
  Enjoy life's good things while you may,
  Remembering how brief the space
  Allowed to you in any case."
  His words strike home; and, light of heart,
  Behold with him our rustic start,
  Timing their journey so, they might
  Reach town beneath the cloud of night,
  Which was at its high noon, when they
  To a rich mansion found their way,
  Where shining ivory couches vied
  With coverlets in purple dyed,
  And where in baskets were amassed
  The wrecks of a superb repast,
  Which some few hours before had closed.
  There, having first his friend disposed
  Upon a purple tissue, straight
  The city mouse begins to wait
  With scraps upon his country brother,
  Each scrap more dainty than another,
  And all a servant's duty proffers,
  First tasting everything he offers.
  The guest, reclining there in state,
  Rejoices in his altered fate,
  O'er each fresh tidbit smacks his lips,
  And breaks into the merriest quips,
  When suddenly a banging door
  Shakes host and guest into the floor.
  Prom room to room they rush aghast,
  And almost drop down dead at last,
  When loud through all the house resounds
  The deep bay of Molossian hounds.
  "Ho!" cries the country mouse, "this kind
  Of life is not for me, I find.
  Give me my woods and cavern! There
  At least I'm safe! And though both spare
  And poor my food may be, rebel
  I never will; so, fare ye well!"'"

[1]
   Many have imitated this passage--none better than Cowley.

      "Oh fountains! when in you shall I
    Myself, eased of unpeaceful thoughts, espy?
    Oh fields! oh woods! when, when shall I be made
      The happy tenant of your shade?
      Here's the spring-head of pleasure's flood,
    Where all the riches be, that she
      Has coined and stamped for good."

   How like is this to Tennyson's--

    "You'll have no scandal while you dine,
    But honest talk and wholesome wine,
      And only hear the magpie gossip
    Garrulous, under a roof of pine."

It is characteristic of Horace that in the very next satire he makes
his own servant Davus tell him that his rhapsodies about the country
and its charms are mere humbug, and that, for all his ridicule of the
shortcomings of his neighbours, he is just as inconstant as they are
in his likings and dislikings. The poet in this way lets us see into
his own little vanities, and secures the right by doing so to rally
his friends for theirs. To his valet, at all events, by his own
showing, he is no hero.

  "You're praising up incessantly
  The habits, manners, likings, ways,
  Of people hi the good old days;
  Yet should some god this moment give
  To you the power, like them to live,
  You're just the man to say,' I won't!'
  Because in them you either don't
  Believe, or else the courage lack,
  The truth through thick and thin to back,
  And, rather than its heights aspire,
  Will go on sticking in the mire.
  At Rome you for the country sigh;
  When in the country to the sky
  You, flighty as the thistle's down,
  Are always crying up the town.
  If no one asks you out to dine,
  Oh, then the _pot-au-feu's_ divine!
  'You go out on compulsion only--
  'Tis so delightful to be lonely;
  And drinking bumpers is a bore
  You shrink from daily more and more.'
  But only let Maecenas send
  Command for you to meet a friend;
  Although the message comes so late,
  The lamps are being lighted, straight,
  'Where's my pommade? Look sharp!' you shout,
  'Heavens! is there nobody about?
  Are you all deaf?' and, storming high
  At all the household, off you fly.
  When Milvius, and that set, anon
  Arrive to dine, and find you gone,
  With vigorous curses they retreat,
  Which I had rather not repeat."

Who could take amiss the rebuke of the kindly satirist, who was so
ready to show up his own weaknesses? In this respect our own great
satirist Thackeray is very like him. Nor is this strange. They had
many points in common--the same keen eye for human folly, the same
tolerance for the human weaknesses of which they were so conscious in
themselves, the same genuine kindness of heart. Thackeray's terse and
vivid style, too, is probably in some measure due to this, that to
him, as to Malherbe, Horace was a kind of breviary.



CHAPTER V.

LIFE IN ROME.--HORACE'S BORE.--EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE ROMAN DINNERS.


It is one of the many charms of Horace's didactic writings, that he
takes us into the very heart of the life of Rome. We lounge with its
loungers along the Via Sacra; we stroll into the Campus Martius, where
young Hebrus with his noble horsemanship is witching the blushing
Neobule, already too much enamoured of the handsome Liparian; and the
men of the old school are getting up an appetite by games of tennis,
bowls, or quoits; while the young Grecianised fops--lisping feeble
jokes--saunter by with a listless contempt for such vulgar gymnastics.
We are in the Via Appia. Bariné sweeps along in her chariot in superb
toilette, shooting glances from her sleepy cruel eyes. The young
fellows are all agaze. What is this? Young Pompilius, not three months
married, bows to her, with a visible spasm at the heart, as she
hurries by, full in view of his young wife, who hides her
mortification within the curtains of her litter, and hastens home to
solitude and tears. Here comes Barrus--as ugly a dog as any in Rome--
dressed to death; and smiling Malvolio--smiles of self-complacency.
The girls titter and exchange glances as he passes; Barrus swaggers
on, feeling himself an inch taller in the conviction that he is
slaughtering the hearts of the dear creatures by the score. A mule,
with a dead boar thrown across it, now winds its way among the
chariots and litters. A little ahead of it stalks Gargilius, attended
by a strong force of retainers armed with spears and nets, enough to
thin the game of the Hercynian forest. Little does the mighty hunter
dream, that all his friends, who congratulate him on his success, are
asking themselves and each other, where he bought the boar, and for
how much? Have we never encountered a piscatory Gargilius near the
Spey or the Tweed? We wander back into the city and its narrow
streets. In one we are jammed into a doorway by a train of builders'
waggons laden with huge blocks of stone, or massive logs of timber.
Escaping these, we run against a line of undertakers' men,
"performing" a voluminous and expensive funeral, to the discomfort of
everybody and the impoverishment of the dead man's kindred. In the
next street we run the risk of being crushed by some huge piece of
masonry in the act of being swung by a crane into its place; and while
calculating the chances of its fall with upturned eye, we find
ourselves landed in the gutter by an unclean pig, which has darted
between our legs at some attractive garbage beyond. This peril over,
we encounter at the next turning a mad dog, who makes a passing snap
at our toga as he darts into a neighbouring blind alley, whither we do
not care to follow his vagaries among a covey of young Roman street
Arabs. Before we reach home a mumping beggar drops before us as we
turn the corner, in a well-simulated fit of epilepsy or of helpless
lameness. _'Quoere peregrinum'_--"Try that game on country
cousins,"--we mutter in our beard, and retreat to our lodgings on the
third floor, encountering probably on the stair some half-tipsy
artisan or slave, who is descending from the attics for another cup of
fiery wine at the nearest wine-shop. We go to the theatre. The play is
"Ilione," by Pacuvius; the scene a highly sensational one, where the
ghost of Deiphobus, her son, appearing to Ilione, beseeches her to
give his body burial. "Oh mother, mother," he cries, in tones most
raucously tragic, "hear me call!" But the Kynaston of the day who
plays Ilione has been soothing his maternal sorrow with too potent
Falernian. He slumbers on. The populace, like the gods of our gallery,
surmise the truth, and, "Oh! mother, mother, hear me call!" is
bellowed from a thousand lungs. We are enjoying a comedy, when our
friends the people, "the many-headed monster of the pit," begin to
think it slow, and stop the performance with shouts for a show of
bears or boxers. Or, hoping to hear a good play, we find the
entertainment offered consists of pure spectacle, "inexplicable
dumbshow and noise"--

  "Whole fleets of ships in long procession pass,
   And captive ivory follows captive brass." (C.)

A milk-white elephant or a camelopard is considered more than a
substitute for character, incident, or wit. And if an actor presents
himself in a dress of unusual splendour, the house is in ecstasies,
and a roar of applause, loud as a tempest in the Garganian forest, or
as the surges on the Tuscan strand, makes the velarium vibrate above
their heads. Human nature is perpetually repeating itself. So when
Pope is paraphrasing Horace, he has no occasion to alter the facts,
which were the same in his pseudo, as in the real, Augustan age, but
only to modernise the names:--

  "Loud as the waves on Orcas' stormy steep
  Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep,
  Such is the shout, the long-applauding note,
  At Quin's high plume, or Oldfield's petticoat.
  Booth enters--hark! the universal peal.
  'But has he spoken?' Not a syllable.
  'What shook the stage, and made the people stare?'
  'Cato's long wig, flowered gown, and lackered chair.'"

We dine out. Maecenas is of the party, and comes in leaning heavily on
the two umbrae (guests of his own inviting) whom he has brought with
him,--habitués of what Augustus called his "parasitical table," who
make talk and find buffoonery for him. He is out of spirits to-day,
and more reserved than usual, for a messenger has just come in with
bad news from Spain, or he has heard of a conspiracy against Augustus,
which must be crushed before it grows more dangerous. Varius is there,
and being a writer of tragedies, keeps up, as your tragic author is
sure to do, a ceaseless fire of puns and pleasantry. At these young
Sybaris smiles faintly, for his thoughts are away with his ladylove,
the too fascinating Lydia. Horace--who, from the other side of the
table, with an amused smile in his eyes, watches him, as he "sighs
like furnace," while Neaera, to the accompaniment of her lyre, sings
one of Sappho's most passionate odes--whispers something in the ear of
the brilliant vocalist, which visibly provokes a witty repartee, with
a special sting in it for Horace himself, at which the little man
winces--for have there not been certain love-passages of old between
Neaera and himself? The wine circulates freely. Maecenas warms, and
drops, with the deliberation of a rich sonorous voice, now some sharp
sarcasm, now some aphorism heavy with meaning, which sticks to the
memory, like a saying of Talleyrand's. His _umbrae_, who have put
but little of allaying Tiber in their cups, grow boisterous and
abusive, and having insulted nearly everybody at the table by coarse
personal banter, the party breaks up, and we are glad to get out with
flushed cheeks and dizzy head into the cool air of an early summer
night--all the more, that for the last half-hour young Piso at our
elbow has been importuning us with whispered specimens of his very
rickety elegiacs, and trying to settle an early appointment for us to
hear him read the first six books of the great Epic with which he
means to electrify the literary circles. We reach the Fabrician
bridge, meditating as we go the repartees with which we might have
turned the tables on those scurrilous followers of the great man, but
did not. Suddenly we run up against a gentleman, who, raising his
cloak over his head, is on the point of jumping into the Tiber. We
seize him by his mantle, and discover in the intended suicide an old
acquaintance, equally well known to the Jews and the bric-a-brac
shops, whose tastes for speculation and articles of _vertu_ have
first brought him to the money-lenders, next to the dogs, and finally
to the brink of the yellow Tiber. We give him all the sesterces we
have about us, along with a few sustaining aphorisms from our
commonplace book upon the folly, if not the wickedness, of suicide,
and see him safely home. When we next encounter the decayed
_virtuoso_, he has grown a beard (very badly kept), and set up as
a philosopher of the hyper-virtuous Jaques school. Of course he
lectures us upon every vice which we have not, and every little
frailty which we have, with a pointed asperity that upsets our temper
for the day, and causes us long afterwards to bewail the evil hour in
which we rescued such an ill-conditioned grumbler from the kindly
waters of the river.

These hints of life and manners, all drawn from the pages of Horace,
might be infinitely extended, and a ramble in the streets of Rome in
the present day is consequently fuller of vivid interest to a man who
has these pages at his fingers' ends than it can possibly be to any
other person. Horace is so associated with all the localities, that
one would think it the most natural thing in the world to come upon
him at any turning. His old familiar haunts rise up about us out of
the dust of centuries. We see a short thick-set man come sauntering
along, "more fat than bard beseems." As he passes, lost in reverie,
many turn round and look at him. Some point him out to their
companions, and by what they say, we learn that this is Horace, the
favourite of Maecenas, the frequent visitor at the unpretending palace
of Augustus, the self-made man and famous poet. He is still within
sight, when his progress is arrested. He is in the hands of a bore of
the first magnitude. But what ensued, let us hear from his own lips
(Satires, I. 9):--

  THE BORE.

  It chanced that I, the other day,
  Was sauntering up the Sacred Way,
  And musing, as my habit is,
  Some trivial random fantasies,
  That for the time absorbed me quite,
  When there comes running up a wight,
  Whom only by his name I knew;
  "Ha! my dear fellow, how d'ye do?"
  Grasping my hand, he shouted. "Why,
  As times go, pretty well," said I;
  "And you, I trust, can say the same."
  But after me as still he came,
  "Sir, is there anything," I cried,
  "You want of me?" "Oh," he replied,
  "I'm just the man you ought to know;--
  A scholar, author!" "Is it so?
  For this I'll like you all the more!"
  Then, writhing to evade the bore,
  I quicken now my pace, now stop,
  And in my servant's ear let drop
  Some words, and all the while I feel
  Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel.
  "Oh, for a touch," I moaned, in pain,
  "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein,
  To put this incubus to rout!"
  As he went chattering on about
  Whatever he descries or meets,
  The crowds, the beauty of the streets,
  The city's growth, its splendour, size,
  "You're dying to be off," he cries;
  For all the while I'd been stock dumb.
  "I've seen it this half-hour. But come,
  Let's clearly understand each other;
  It's no use making all this pother.
  My mind's made up, to stick by you;
  So where you go, there I go, too."
  "Don't put yourself," I answered, "pray,
  So very far out of your way.
  I'm on the road to see a friend,
  Whom you don't know, that's near his end,
  Away beyond the Tiber far,
  Close by where Caesar's gardens are."
  "I've nothing in the world to do,
  And what's a paltry mile or two?
  I like it, so I'll follow you!"
  Down dropped my ears on hearing this,
  Just like a vicious jackass's,
  That's loaded heavier than he likes;
  But off anew my torment strikes.
  "If well I know myself, you'll end
  With making of me more a friend
  Than Viscus, ay, or Varius; for
  Of verses who can run off more,
  Or run them off at such a pace?
  Who dance with such distinguished grace?
  And as for singing, zounds!" said he,
  "Hermogenes might envy me!"
  Here was an opening to break in.
  "Have you a mother, father, kin,
  To whom your life is precious?" "None;--
  I've closed the eyes of every one."
  Oh, happy they, I inly groan.
  Now I am left, and I alone.
  Quick, quick, despatch me where I stand;
  Now is the direful doom at hand,
  Which erst the Sabine beldam old,
  Shaking her magic urn, foretold
  In days when I was yet a boy:
  "Him shall no poisons fell destroy,
  Nor hostile sword in shock of war,
  Nor gout, nor colic, nor catarrh.
  In fulness of the time his thread
  Shall by a prate-apace be shred;
  So let him, when he's twenty-one,
  If he be wise, all babblers shun."
    Now we were close to Vesta's fane,
  'Twas hard on ten, and he, my bane,
  Was bound to answer to his bail,
  Or lose his cause if he should fail.
  "Do, if you love me, step aside
  One moment with me here!" he cried.
  "Upon my life, indeed, I can't,
  Of law I'm wholly ignorant;
  And you know where I'm hurrying to."
  "I'm fairly puzzled what to do.
  Give you up, or my cause?" "Oh, me,
  Me, by all means!" "I won't!" quoth he;
  And stalks on, holding by me tight.
  As with your conqueror to fight
  Is hard, I follow. "How,"--anon
  He rambles off,--"how get you on,
  You and Maecenas? To so few
  He keeps himself. So clever, too!
  No man more dexterous to seize
  And use his opportunities.
  Just introduce me, and you'll see,
  We'd pull together famously;
  And, hang me then, if, with my backing,
  You don't send all your rivals packing!"
  "Things in that quarter, sir, proceed
  In very different style, indeed.
  No house more free from all that's base;
  In none cabals more out of place.
  It hurts me not if others be
  More rich, or better read than me.
  Each has his place!" "Amazing tact!
  Scarce credible!" "But 'tis the fact."
  "You quicken my desire to get
  An introduction to his set."
  "With merit such as yours, you need
  But wish it, and you must succeed.
  He's to be won, and that is why
  Of strangers he's so very shy."
  "I'll spare no pains, no arts, no shifts!
  His servants I'll corrupt with gifts.
  To-day though driven from his gate,
  What matter? I will lie in wait,
  To catch some lucky chance; I'll meet
  Or overtake him in the street;
  I'll haunt him like his shadow. Nought
  In life without much toil is bought."
    Just at this moment who but my
  Dear friend Aristius should come by?
  My rattlebrain right well he knew.
  We stop. "Whence, friends, and whither to?"
  He asks and answers. Whilst we ran
  The usual courtesies, I began
  To pluck him by the sleeve, to pinch
  His arms, that feel but will not flinch,
  By nods and winks most plain to see
  Imploring him to rescue me.
  He, wickedly obtuse the while,
  Meets all my signals with a smile.
  I, choked with rage, said, "Was there not
  Some business, I've forgotten what,
  You mentioned, that you wished with me
  To talk about, and privately?"
  "Oh, I remember! Never mind!
  Some more convenient time I'll find.
  The Thirtieth Sabbath this! Would you
  Affront the circumcised Jew?"
  "Religious scruples I have none."
  "Ah, but I have. I am but one
  Of the _canaille_--a feeble brother.
  Your pardon. Some fine day or other
  I'll tell you what it was." Oh, day
  Of woeful doom to me! Away
  The rascal bolted like an arrow,
  And left me underneath the harrow;
  When, by the rarest luck, we ran
  At the next turn against the man,
  Who had the lawsuit with my bore.
  "Ha, knave!" he cried with loud uproar,
  "Where are you off to? Will you here
  Stand witness?" I present my ear.
  To court he hustles him along;
  High words are bandied, high and strong.
  A mob collects, the fray to see:
  So did Apollo rescue me.

The Satires appear to have been completed when Horace was about
thirty-five years old, and published collectively, B.C. 29. By this
time his position in society was well assured. He numbered among his
friends, as we have seen, the most eminent men in Rome,--

  "Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place"--

men who were not merely ripe scholars, but who had borne and were
bearing a leading part in the great actions of that memorable epoch.
Among such men he would be most at home, for there his wit, his
shrewdness, his genial spirits, and high breeding would be best
appreciated. But his own keen relish of life, and his delight in
watching the lights and shades of human character, took him into that
wider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly sought
after to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the rich
and the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animal
spirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capital
endurable even in spite of its pleasures. What Victor Hugo calls

  "Le banquet des amis, et quelquefois les soirs,
  Le baiser jeune et frais d'une blanche aux yeux noirs,"

never quite lost their charm for him; but during this period they must
often have tempted him into the elaborate dinners, the late hours, and
the high-strung excitement, which made a retreat to the keen air and
plain diet of his Sabine home scarcely less necessary for his body's
than it was for his spirit's health. For, much as he prized moderation
in all things, and extolled "the mirth that after no repenting draws,"
good wine, good company, and fair and witty women would be sure to
work their spell on a temperament so bright and sympathetic, and to
quicken his spirits into a brilliancy and force, dazzling for the
hour, but to be paid for next day in headache and depression.

He was all the more likely to suffer in this way from the very fact
that, as a rule, he was simple and frugal in his tastes and habits. We
have seen him (p. 66), in the early days of his stay in Rome, at his
"plain meal of pancakes, pulse, and pease," served on homely
earthenware. At his farm, again, beans and bacon (p. 80) form his
staple dish. True to the old Roman taste, he was a great vegetarian,
and in his charming ode, written for the opening of the temple of
Apollo erected by Augustus on Mount Palatine (B.C. 28), he thinks it
not out of place to mingle with his prayer for poetic power an
entreaty that he may never be without wholesome vegetables and fruit.

  "Let olives, endive, mallows light,
    Be all my fare; and health
  Give thou, Apollo, so I might
    Enjoy my present wealth!
  Give me but these, I ask no more,
    These, and a mind entire--
  An old age, not unhonoured, nor
    Unsolaced by the lyre!"

Maecenas himself is promised (Odes, III. 28), if he will visit the
poet at the Sabine farm, "simple dinners neatly dressed;" and when
Horace invites down his friend Torquatus (Epistles, II. 5), he does it
on the footing that this wealthy lawyer shall be content to put up
with plain vegetables and homely crockery (_modica olus omne
patella_). The wine, he promises, shall be good, though not of any
of the crack growths. If Torquatus wants better, he must send it down
himself. The appointments of the table, too, though of the simplest
kind, shall be admirably kept--

  "The coverlets of faultless sheen,
  The napkins scrupulously clean,
  Your cup and salver such that they
  Unto yourself yourself display."

Table-service neat to a nicety was obviously a great point with
Horace. "What plate he had was made to look its best." "_Ridet
argento domus_"--"My plate, newly-burnished, enlivens my rooms"--is
one of the attractions held out in his invitation to the fair Phyllis
to grace his table on Maecenas's birthday (Odes, IV. 11). And we may
be very sure that his little dinners were served and waited on with
the studied care and quiet finish of a refined simplicity. His rule on
these matters is indicated by himself (Satires, II. 2):--

  "The proper thing is to be cleanly and nice,
  And yet so as not to be over precise;
  To neither be constantly scolding your slaves,
  Like that old prig Albutus, as losels and knaves,
  Nor, like Naevius, in such things who's rather too easy,
  To the guests at your board present water that's greasy."

To a man of these simple tastes the elaborate banquets, borrowed from
the Asiatic Greeks, which were then in fashion, must have been
intolerable. He has introduced us to one of them in describing a
dinner-party of nine given by one Nasidienus, a wealthy snob, to
Maecenas and others of Horace's friends. The dinner breaks down in a
very amusing way, between the giver's love of display and his
parsimony, which prompted him, on the one hand, to present his guests
with, the fashionable dainties, but, on the other, would not let him
pay a price sufficient to secure their being good. The first course
consists of a Lucanian wild boar, served with a garnish of turnips,
radishes, and lettuce, in a sauce of anchovy-brine and wine-lees. Next
comes an incongruous medley of dishes, including one

  "Of sparrows' gall and turbots' liver,
  At the mere thought of which I shiver."

A lamprey succeeds, "floating vast and free, by shrimps surrounded in
a sea of sauce," and this is followed up by a crane soused in salt and
flour, the liver of a snow-white goose fattened on figs, leverets'
shoulders, and roasted blackbirds. This _menu_ is clearly meant
for a caricature, but it was a caricature of a prevailing folly, which
had probably cost the poet many an indigestion.

Against this folly, and the ruin to health and purse which it
entailed, some of his most vigorous satire is directed. It furnishes
the themes of the second and fourth Satires of the Second Book, both
of which, with slight modifications, might with equal truth be
addressed to the dinner-givers and diners-out of our own day. In the
former of these the speaker is the Apulian yeoman Ofellus, who
undertakes to show

  "What the virtue consists in, and why it is great,
  To live on a little, whatever your state."

Before entering on his task, however, he insists that his hearers
shall cut themselves adrift from their luxuries, and come to him
fasting, and with appetites whetted by a sharp run with the hounds, a
stiff bout at tennis, or some other vigorous gymnastics;--

  "And when the hard work has your squeamishness routed,
  When you're parched up with thirst, and your hunger's undoubted,
  Then spurn simple food if you can, or plain wine,
  Which no honied gums from Hymettus refine."

His homily then proceeds in terms which would not be out of place if
addressed to a _gourmet_ of modern London or Paris:--

  "When your butler's away, and the weather's so bad
  That there is not a morsel of fish to be had,
  A crust with some salt will soothe not amiss
  The ravening stomach. You ask, how is this?
  Because for delight, at the best, you must look
  To yourself, and not to your wealth or your cook [1]
  Work till you perspire. Of all sauces 'tis best.
  The man that's with over-indulgence oppressed,
  White-livered and pursy, can relish no dish,
  Be it ortolans, oysters, or finest of fish.
  Still I scarcely can hope, if before you there were
  A peacock and capon, you would not prefer
  With the peacock to tickle your palate, you're so
  Completely the dupes of mere semblance and show.
  For to buy the rare bird only gold will avail,
  And he makes a grand show with his fine painted tail.
  As if this had to do with the matter the least!
  Can you make of the feathers you prize so a feast?
  And, when the bird's cooked, what becomes of its splendour?
  Is his flesh than the capon's more juicy or tender?
  Mere appearance, not substance, then, clearly it is,
  Which bamboozles your judgment. So much, then, for this."

[1]
   "Pour l'amour de Dieu, un sou pour acheter un petit pain. J'ai si
   faim!" "Comment!" responded the cloyed sensualist, in search of an
   appetite, who was thus accosted; "tu as faim, petit drôle! Tu es
   bien heureux!" The readers of Pope will also remember his lines on
   the man who
      "Called 'happy dog' the beggar at his door,
      And envied thirst and hunger to the poor."

Don't talk to me of taste, Ofellus continues--

                        "Will it give you a notion
  If this pike in the Tiber was caught, or the ocean?
  If it used 'twixt the bridges to glide and to quiver,
  Or was tossed to and fro at the mouth of the river?"

Just as our epicures profess to distinguish, by flavour a salmon
fresh, run from the sea from one that has been degenerating for four-
and-twenty hours in the fresh water of the river--with this
difference, however, that, unlike the salmon with us, the above-bridge
pike was considered at Rome to be more delicate than his sea-bred and
leaner brother.

Ofellus next proceeds to ridicule the taste which prizes what is set
before it for mere size or rarity or cost. It is this, he contends,
and not any excellence in the things themselves, which makes people
load their tables with the sturgeon or the stork. Fashion, not
flavour, prescribes the rule; indeed, the more perverted her ways, the
more sure they are to be followed.

  "So were any one now to assure us a treat
  In cormorants roasted, as tender and sweet,
  The young men of Rome are so prone to what's wrong,
  They'd eat cormorants all to a man, before long."

But, continues Ofellus, though I would have you frugal, I would not
have you mean--

  "One vicious extreme it is idle to shun,
  If into its opposite straightway you run;"

illustrating his proposition by one of those graphic sketches which
give a distinctive life to Horace's Satires.

  "There is Avidienus, to whom, like a burr,
  Sticks the name he was righteously dubbed by, of 'Cur,'
  Eats beechmast and olives five years old, at least,
  And even when he's robed all in white for a feast
  On his marriage or birth day, or some other very
  High festival day, when one likes to be merry,
  What wine from the chill of his cellar emerges--
  'Tis a drop at the best--has the flavour of verjuice;
  While from a huge cruet his own sparing hand
  On his coleworts drops oil which no mortal can stand,
  So utterly loathsome and rancid in smell, it
  Defies his stale vinegar even to quell it."

Let what you have he simple, the best of its kind, whatever that may
be, and served in the best style. And now learn, continues the rustic
sage,

  "In what way and how greatly you'll gain
  By using a diet both sparing and plain.
  First, your health will be good; for you readily can
  Believe how much mischief is done to a man
  By a great mass of dishes,--remembering that
  Plain fare of old times, and how lightly it sat.
  But the moment you mingle up boiled with roast meat,
  And shellfish with thrushes, what tasted so sweet
  Will be turned into bile, and ferment, not digest, in
  Your stomach exciting a tumult intestine.
  Mark, from a bewildering dinner how pale
  Every man rises up! Nor is this all they ail,
  For the body, weighed down by its last night's excesses,
  To its own wretched level the mind, too, depresses,
  And to earth chains that spark of the essence divine;
  While he, that's content on plain viands to dine,
  Sleeps off his fatigues without effort, then gay
  As a lark rises up to the tasks of the day.
  Yet he on occasion will find himself able
  To enjoy without hurt a more liberal table,
  Say, on festival days, that come round with the year,
  Or when his strength's low, and cries out for good cheer,
  Or when, as years gather, his age must be nursed
  With more delicate care than he wanted at first.
  But for you, when ill health or old age shall befall,
  Where's the luxury left, the relief within call,
  Which has not been forestalled in the days of your prime,
  When you scoffed, in your strength, at the inroads of time?
  "'Keep your boar till it's rank!' said our sires; which arose,
  I am confident, not from their having no nose,
  But more from the notion that some of their best
  Should be kept in reserve for the chance of a guest:
  And though, ere he came, it grew stale on the shelf,
  This was better than eating all up by one's self.
  Oh, would I had only on earth found a place
  In the days of that noble heroic old race!"

So much as a question of mere health and good feeling. But now our
moralist appeals to higher considerations:--

  "Do you set any store by good name, which we find
  Is more welcome than song to the ears of mankind?
  Magnificent turbot, plate richly embossed,
  Will bring infinite shame with an infinite cost.
  Add kinsmen and neighbours all furious, your own
  Disgust with yourself, when you find yourself groan
  For death, which has shut itself off from your hope,
  With not even a sou left to buy you a rope.
    "'Most excellent doctrine!' you answer, 'and would,
  For people like Trausius, be all very good;
  But I have great wealth, and an income that brings
  In enough to provide for the wants of three kings.'
  But is this any reason you should not apply
  Your superfluous wealth to ends nobler, more high?
  You so rich, why should any good honest man lack?
  Our temples, why should they be tumbling to wrack?
  Wretch, of all this great heap have you nothing to spare
  For our dear native land? Or why should you dare
  To think that misfortune will never o'ertake you?
  Oh, then, what a butt would your enemies make you!
  Who will best meet reverses? The man who, you find,
  Has by luxuries pampered both body and mind?
  Or he who, contented with little, and still
  Looking on to the future, and fearful of ill,
  Long, long ere a murmur is heard from afar,
  In peace has laid up the munitions of war?"

Alas for the wisdom, of Ofellus the sage! Nineteen centuries have come
and gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the same
selfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and so
vainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused,
enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section of
society, and helping to inspire another section, and that a dangerous
one, with angry disgust at the hideous contrast between the opposite
extremes of wretchedness and luxury which everywhere meets the eye in
the great cities of the civilised world.

In the fourth Satire of the Second Book, Horace ridicules, in a vein
of exquisite irony, the _gourmets_ of his day, who made a
philosophy of flavours, with whom sauces were a science, and who had
condensed into aphorisms the merits of the poultry, game, or fish of
the different and often distant regions from which they were brought
to Rome. Catius has been listening to a dissertation by some Brillât-
Savarin of this class, and is hurrying home to commit to his tablets
the precepts by which he professes himself to have been immensely
struck, when he is met by Horace, and prevailed upon to repeat some of
them in the very words of this philosopher of the dinner-table.
Exceedingly curious they are, throwing no small light both upon the
materials of the Roman cuisine and upon the treatment by the Romans of
their wines. Being delivered, moreover, with the epigrammatic
precision of philosophical axioms, their effect is infinitely amusing.
Thus:--

  "Honey Aufidius mixed with strong
  Falernian; he was very wrong."

  "The flesh of kid is rarely fine,
  That has been chiefly fed on vine."

  "To meadow mushrooms give the prize,
  And trust no others, if you're wise."

  "Till I had the example shown,
  The art was utterly unknown
  Of telling, when you taste a dish,
  The age and kind of bird or fish."

Horace professes to be enraptured at the depth of sagacity and beauty
of expression in what he hears, and exclaims,--

  "Oh, learned Catius, prithee, by
  Our friendship, by the gods on high,
  Take me along with you, to hear
  Such wisdom, be it far or near!
  For though you tell me all--in fact,
  Your memory is most exact--
  Still there must be some grace of speech,
  Which no interpreter can reach.
  The look, too, of the man, the mien!
  Which you, what fortune! having seen,
  May for that very reason deem
  Of no account; but to the stream,
  Even at its very fountain-head,
  I fain would have my footsteps led,
  That, stooping, I may drink my fill,
  Where such life-giving saws distil."

Manifestly the poet was no gastronome, or he would not have dealt thus
sarcastically with matters so solemn and serious as the gusts, and
flavours, and "sacred rage" of a highly-educated appetite. At the same
time, there is no reason to suppose him to have been insensible to the
attractions of the "_haute cuisine_," as developed by the genius
of the Vattel or Francatelli of Maecenas, and others of his wealthy
friends. Indeed, he appears to have been prone, rather than otherwise,
to attack these with a relish, which his feeble digestion had frequent
reason to repent. His servant Davus more than hints as much in the
passage above quoted (p. 83); and the consciousness of his own frailty
may have given additional vigour to his assaults on the ever-
increasing indulgence in the pleasures of the table, which he saw
gaining ground so rapidly around him.



CHAPTER VI.

HORACE'S LOVE POETRY.


When young, Horace threw himself ardently into the pleasures of youth;
and his friends being, for the most part, young and rich, their
banquets were sure to be sumptuous, and carried far into the night.
Nor in these days did the "_blanche aux yeux noirs_," whose
beauty and accomplishments formed the crowning grace of most
bachelors' parties, fail to engage a liberal share of his attention.
He tells us as much himself (Epistles, I. 14), when contrasting to the
steward of his farm the tastes of his maturer years with the habits of
his youth.

    "He, whom fine clothes became, and glistering hair,
    Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair,
    As well you know, for his own simple sake,
    Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take,
    Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream
    And drowse upon the grass beside a stream,"

adding, with a sententious brevity which it is hopeless to imitate,
"_Nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum_,"--

  "Nor blushes that of sport he took his fill;
  He'd blush, indeed, to be tomfooling still."

Again, when lamenting how little the rolling years have left him of
his past (Epistles, II. 2), his regrets are for the "_Venerem,
convivia, ludum_," to which he no longer finds himself equal--

  "Years following years steal something every day,
  Love, feasting, frolic, fun, they've swept away;"--

and to the first of these, life "in his hot youth" manifestly owed
much of its charm.

To beauty he would appear to have been always susceptible, but his was
the lightly-stirred susceptibility which is an affair of the senses
rather than of the soul. "There is in truth," says Rochefoucauld,
"only one kind of love; but there are a thousand different copies of
it." Horace, so far at least as we can judge from his poetry, was no
stranger to the spurious form of the passion, but his whole being had
never been penetrated by the genuine fire. The goddess of his worship
is not Venus Urania, pale, dreamy, spiritual, but _Erycina ridens,
quam Jocus circum volat et Cupido,_ who comes

  "With laughter in her eyes, and Love
  And Glee around her flying."

Accordingly, of all those infinitely varied chords of deep emotion and
imaginative tenderness, of which occasional traces are to be found in
the literature of antiquity, and with which modern poetry, from Dante
to Tennyson, is familiar, no hint is to be found in his pages. His
deepest feeling is at best but a ferment of the blood; it is never the
all-absorbing devotion of the heart. He had learned by his own
experience just enough of the tender passion to enable him to write
pretty verses about it, and to rally, not unsympathetically, such of
his friends as had not escaped so lightly from the flame. Therefore it
is that, as has been truly said, "his love-ditties are, as it were,
like flowers, beautiful in form and rich in hues, but without the
scent that breathes to the heart." We seek in them in vain for the
tenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, which
are the soul of all true love-poetry.

At the same time, Horace had a subtle appreciation of the beauty and
grace, the sweetness and the fascination, of womanhood. Poet as he
was, he must have delighted to contemplate the ideal elevation and
purity of woman, as occasionally depicted in the poetry of Greece, and
of which he could scarcely fail to have had some glimpses in real
life. Nay, he paints (Odes, III. 11) the devotion of Hypermnestra for
her husband's sake "magnificently false" (_splendide mendax_) to
the promise which, with her sister Danaids, she had given to her
father, in a way that proves he was not incapable of appreciating, and
even of depicting, the purer and higher forms of female worth. But
this exquisite portrait stands out in solitary splendour among the
Lydes and Lalages, the Myrtales, Phrynes, and Glyceras of his other
poems. These ladies were types of the class with which, probably, he
was most familiar, those brilliant and accomplished _hetairae_,
generally Greeks, who were trained up in slavery with every art and
accomplishment which could heighten their beauty or lend a charm to
their society. Always beautiful, and by force of their very position
framed to make themselves attractive, these "weeds of glorious
feature," naturally enough, took the chief place in the regards of men
of fortune, in a state of society where marriage was not an affair of
the heart but of money or connection, and where the wife so chosen
seems to have been at pains to make herself more attractive to
everybody rather than to her husband. Here and there these Aspasias
made themselves a distinguished position, and occupied a place with
their protector nearly akin to that of wife. But in the ordinary way
their reign over any one heart was shortlived, and their career,
though splendid, was brief,--a youth of folly, a premature old age of
squalor and neglect. Their habits were luxurious and extravagant. In
dress they outvied the splendour, not insignificant, of the Roman
matrons; and they might be seen courting the admiration of the wealthy
loungers of Rome by dashing along the Appian Way behind a team of
spirited ponies driven by themselves. These things were often paid for
out of the ruin of their admirers. Their society, while in the bloom
and freshness of their charms, was greatly sought after, for wit and
song came with them to the feast. Even Cicero, then well up in years,
finds a pleasant excuse (Familiar Letters, IX. 26) for enjoying till a
late hour the society of one Cytheris, a lady of the class, at the
house of Volumnius Eutrapelus, her protector. His friend Atticus was
with him; and although Cicero finds some excuse necessary, it is still
obvious that even grave and sober citizens might dine in such
equivocal company without any serious compromise of character.

It was perhaps little to be wondered at that Horace did not squander
his heart upon women of this class. His passions were too well
controlled, and his love of ease too strong, to admit of his being
carried away by the headlong impulses of a deeply-seated devotion.
This would probably have been the case even had the object of his
passion been worthy of an unalloyed regard. As it was,

  "His loves were like most other loves,
  A little glow, a little shiver;"

and if he sometimes had, like the rest of mankind, to pay his homage
to the universal passion by "sighing upon his midnight pillow" for the
regards of a mistress whom he could not win, or who had played him
false, he was never at a loss to find a balm for his wounds elsewhere.
He was not the man to nurse the bitter-sweet sorrows of the heart--to
write, and to feel, like Burns--

  "'Tis sweeter for thee despairing,
  Than aught in the world beside."

_Parabilem amo Venerem facilemque_, "Give me the beauty that is
not too coy," is the Alpha and Omega of his personal creed. How should
it have been otherwise? Knowing woman chiefly, as he obviously did,
only in the ranks of the _demi-monde_, he was not likely to
regard the fairest face, after the first heyday of his youth was past,
as worth the pain its owner's caprices could inflict. For, as seen
under that phase, woman was apt to be both mercenary and capricious;
and if the poet suffered, as he did, from the fickleness of more than
one mistress, the probability is--and this he was too honest not to
feel--that they had only forestalled him in inconstancy.

If Horace ever had a feeling which deserved the name of love, it was
for the Cinara mentioned in the lines above quoted. She belonged to
the class of hetairae, but seems to have preferred him, from a genuine
feeling of affection, to her wealthier lovers. Holding him as she did
completely under her thraldom, it was no more than natural that she
should have played with his emotions, keeping him between ecstasy and
torture, as such a woman, especially if her own heart were also
somewhat engaged, would delight to do with a man in whose love she
must have rejoiced as something to lean upon amid the sad frivolities
of her life. The exquisite pain to which her caprices occasionally
subjected him was more than he could bear in silence, and drove him,
despite his quick sense of the ridiculous, into lachrymose avowals to
Maecenas of his misery over his wine, which were, doubtless, no small
source of amusement to the easy-going statesman, before his wife
Terentia had taught him by experience what infinite torture a charming
and coquettish woman has it in her power to inflict. Long years
afterwards, when he is well on to fifty, Horace reminds his friend
(Epistles, I. 7) of

  "The woes blabbed o'er our wine, when Cinara chose
  To tease me, cruel flirt--ah, happy woes!"--

words in which lurks a subtle undercurrent of pathos, like that in
Sophie Arnould's exclamation in Le Brun's Epigram,--

  "Oh, le bon temps! J'etais bien malheureuse!"

Twice also in his later odes (IV. 1 and 13), Horace recurs with
tenderness to the "gentle Cinara" as having held the paramount place
in his heart. She was his one bit of romance, and this all the more
that she died young. _Cinarae breves annos fata dederunt_--"Few
years the fates to Cinara allowed;" and in his meditative rambles by
the Digentia, the lonely poet, we may well believe, often found
himself sighing "for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a
voice that is still."

In none of his love-poems is the ring of personal feeling more
perceptible than in the following. It is one of his earliest, and if
we are to identify the Neaera to whom it is addressed with the Neaera
referred to in Ode 14, Book III., it must have been written _Consule
Planco_, that is, in the year of Horace's return to Rome after the
battle of Philippi.--

  "'Twas night!--let me recall to thee that night!
    The silver moon in the unclouded sky
  Amid the lesser stars was shining bright,
    When, in the words I did adjure thee by,
  Thou with thy clinging arms, more tightly knit
    Around me than the ivy clasps the oak,
  Didst breathe a vow--mocking the gods with it--
    A vow which, false one, thou hast foully broke;
  That while the ravening wolf should hunt the flocks,
    The shipman's foe, Orion, vex the sea,
  And zephyrs waft the unshorn Apollo's locks,
    So long wouldst thou be fond, be true to me!

  "Yet shall thy heart, Neaera, bleed for this,
    For if in Flaccus aught of man remain,
  Give thou another joys that once were his,
    Some other maid more true shall soothe his pain;
  Nor think again to lure him to thy heart!
    The pang once felt, his love is past recall;
  And thou, more favoured youth, whoe'er thou art,
    Who revell'st now in triumph o'er his fall,
  Though thou be rich in land and golden store,
    In lore a sage, with shape framed to beguile,
  Thy heart shall ache when, this brief fancy o'er,
    She seeks a new love, and I calmly smile."

This is the poetry of youth, the passion of wounded vanity; but it is
clearly the product of a strong personal feeling--a feeling which has
more often found expression in poetry than the higher emotions of
those with whom "love is love for evermore," and who have infinite
pity, but no rebuke, for faithlessness. The lines have been often
imitated; and in Sir Robert Aytoun's poem on "Woman's Inconstancy,"
the imitation has a charm not inferior to the original.

  "Yet do thou glory in thy choice,
    Thy choice of his good fortune boast;
  I'll neither grieve nor yet rejoice
    To see him gain what I have lost;

  The height of my disdain shall be
   To laugh at him, to blush for thee;
  To love thee still, yet go no more
   A-begging to a beggar's door."

Note how Horace deals with the same theme in his Ode to Pyrrha, famous
in Milton's overrated translation, and the difference between the
young man writing under the smart of wounded feeling and the poet,
calmly though intensely elaborating his subject as a work of art,
becomes at once apparent.

  "Pyrrha, what slender boy, in perfume steeped,
    Doth in the shade of some delightful grot
  Caress thee now on couch with roses heaped?
    For whom dost thou thine amber tresses knot

  "With all thy seeming-artless grace? Ah me,
    How oft will he thy perfidy bewail,
  And joys all flown, and shudder at the sea
    Rough with the chafing of the blust'rous gale,

  "Who now, fond dreamer, revels in thy charms;
    Who, all unweeting how the breezes veer,
  Hopes still to find a welcome in thine arms
    As warm as now, and thee as loving-dear!

  "Ah, woe for those on whom thy spell is flung!
    My votive tablet, in the temple set,
  Proclaims that I to ocean's god have hung
    The vestments in my shipwreck smirched and wet."

It may be that among Horace's odes some were directly inspired by the
ladies to whom they are addressed; but it is time that modern
criticism should brush away all the elaborate nonsense which has been
written to demonstrate that Pyrrha, Chloe, Lalage, Lydia, Lyde,
Leuconoë, Tyndaris, Glycera, and Barine, not to mention others, were
real personages to whom the poet was attached. At this rate his
occupations must have rather been those of a Don Giovanni than of a
man of studious habits and feeble health, who found it hard enough to
keep pace with the milder dissipations of the social circle. We are
absolutely without any information as to these ladies, whose liquid
and beautiful names are almost poems in themselves; nevertheless the
most wonderful romances have been spun about them out of the inner
consciousness of the commentators. Who would venture to deal in this
way with the Eleanore, and "rare pale Margaret," and Cousin Amy, of Mr
Tennyson? And yet to do so would be quite as reasonable as to
conclude, as some critics have done, that such a poem as the following
(Odes, I. 23) was not a graceful poetical exercise merely, but a
serious appeal to the object of a serious passion:--

  "Nay, hear me, dearest Chloe, pray!
    You shun me like a timid fawn,
  That seeks its mother all the day
    By forest brake and upland, lawn,
  Of every passing breeze afraid,
  And leaf that twitters in the glade.

  "Let but the wind with sudden rush
    The whispers of the wood awake,
  Or lizard green disturb the hush,
    Quick-darting through the grassy brake,
  The foolish frightened thing will start,
  With trembling knees and beating heart.[1]

  "But I am neither lion fell
    Nor tiger grim to work you woe;
  I love you, sweet one, much too well,
    Then cling not to your mother so,
  But to a lover's fonder arms
  Confide your ripe and rosy charms."

[1]
   The same idea has been beautifully worked out by Spenser, in whom,
   and in Milton, the influence of Horace's poetry is perhaps more
   frequently traceable than in any of our poets:--

      "Like as an hynde forth singled from the herde,
      That hath escaped from a ravenous beast,
      Yet flies away, of her own feet afearde;
      And every leaf, that shaketh with the least
      Murmure of winde, her terror hath encreast;
      So fled fayre Florimel from her vaine feare,
      Long after she from perill was releast;
      Each shade she saw, and each noyse she did heare,
      Did seeme to be the same, which she escaypt whileare."
      Fairy Queen, III. vii. 1.

Such a poem as this, one should have supposed, might have escaped the
imputation of being dictated by mere personal desire. But no; even so
acute a critic as Walckenaer will have it that Chloe was one of
Horace's many mistresses, to whom he fled for consolation when Lydia,
another of them, played him false, "et qu'il l'a recherchée avec
empressement." And his sole ground for this conclusion is the
circumstance that a Chloe is mentioned in this sense in the famous
Dialogue, in which Horace and Lydia have quite gratuitously been
assumed to be the speakers. That is to say, he first assumes that the
dialogue is not a mere exercise of fancy, but a serious fact, and,
having got so far, concludes as a matter of course that the Chloe of
the one ode is the Chloe of the other! "The ancients," as Buttmann has
well said, "had the skill to construct such poems so that each speech
tells us by whom it is spoken; but we let the editors treat us all our
lives as schoolboys, and interline such dialogues, as we do our plays,
with the names. Even in an English poem we should be offended at
seeing Collins by the side of Phyllis." Read without the prepossession
which the constant mention of it as a dialogue between Horace and
Lydia makes it difficult to avoid, the Ode commends itself merely as a
piece of graceful fancy. Real feeling is the last thing one looks for
in two such excessively well-bred and fickle personages as the
speakers. Their pouting and reconciliation make very pretty fooling,
such as might be appropriate in the wonderful beings who people the
garden landscapes of Watteau. But where are the fever and the strong
pulse of passion which, in less ethereal mortals, would be proper to
such a theme? Had there been a real lady in the case, the tone would
have been less measured, and the strophes less skilfully balanced.

  "HE.--Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind,
         And I, and I alone, might lie
       Upon thy snowy breast reclined,
         Not Persia's king so blest as I.

  SHE.--Whilst I to thee was all in all,
         Nor Chloë might with Lydia vie,
       Renowned in ode or madrigal,
         Not Roman Ilia famed as I.

  HE.--I now am Thracian Chloë's slave,
         With hand and voice that charms the air,
       For whom even death itself I'd brave,
         So fate the darling girl would spare!

  SHE.--I dote on Calaïs--and I
          Am all his passion, all his care,
        For whom a double death I'd die,
          So fate the darling boy would spare!

  HE.--What, if our ancient love return,
          And bind us with a closer tie,
        If I the fair-haired Chloë spurn,
          And as of old, for Lydia sigh?

  SHE.--Though lovelier than yon star is he,
          And lighter thou than cork--ah why?
        More churlish, too, than Adria's sea,
          With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die!"

In this graceful trifle Horace is simply dealing with one of the
commonplaces of poetry, most probably only transplanting a Greek
flower into the Latin soil. There is more of the vigour of originality
and of living truth in the following ode to Bariné (II. 8), where he
gives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that
_beauté de diable_, "dallying and dangerous," as Charles Lamb
called Peg Woffington's, and, what hers was not, heartless, which
never dies out of the world. A real person, Lord Lytton thinks, "was
certainly addressed, and in a tone which, to such a person, would have
been the most exquisite flattery; and as certainly the person is not
so addressed by a lover"--a criticism which, coming from such an
observer, outweighs the opposite conclusions of a score of pedantic
scholars:--

  "If for thy perjuries and broken truth,
     Bariné, thou hadst ever come to harm,
   Hadst lost, but in a nail or blackened tooth,
      One single charm,

  "I'd trust thee; but when thou art most forsworn,
    Thou blazest forth with beauty most supreme,
  And of our young men art, noon, night, and morn,
      The thought, the dream.

  "To thee 'tis gain thy mother's dust to mock,
    To mock the silent watchfires of the night,
  All heaven, the gods, on whom death's icy shock
      Can never light.

  "Smiles Venus' self, I vow, to see thy arts,
    The guileless Nymphs and cruel Cupid smile,
  And, smiling, whets on bloody stone his darts
      Of fire the while.

  "Nay more, our youth grow up to be thy prey,
    New slaves throng round, and those who crouched at first,
  Though oft they threaten, leave not for a day
      Thy roof accurst.

  "Thee mothers for their unfledged younglings dread;
    Thee niggard old men dread, and brides new-made,
  In misery, lest their lords neglect their bed,
      By thee delayed."

Horace is more at home in playful raillery of the bewildering effects
of love upon others, than in giving expression to its emotions as felt
by himself. In the fourteenth Epode, it is true, he begs Maecenas to
excuse his failure to execute some promised poem, because he is so
completely upset by his love for a certain naughty Phryne that he
cannot put a couple of lines together. Again, he tells us (Odes, I.
19) into what a ferment his whole being has been thrown, long after he
had thought himself safe from such emotions, by the marble-like sheen
of Glycera's beauty--her _grata protervitas, et voltus nimium
lubricus adspici_--

  "Her pretty, pert, provoking ways,
    And face too fatal-fair to see."

The first Ode of the Fourth Book is a beautiful fantasia on a similar
theme. He paints, too, the tortures of jealousy with the vigour (Odes,
I. 13) of a man who knew something of them:--

  "Then reels my brain, then on my cheek
    The shifting colour comes and goes,
  And tears, that flow unbidden, speak
    The torture of my inward throes,
  The fierce unrest, the deathless flame,
  That slowly macerates my frame."

And when rallying his friend Tibullus (Odes, I. 23) about his doleful
ditties on the fickleness of his mistress Glycera, he owns to having
himself suffered terribly in the same way. But despite all this, it is
very obvious that if love has, in Rosalind's phrase, "clapped him on
the shoulder," the little god left him "heart-whole." Being, as it is,
the source of the deepest and strongest emotions, love presents many
aspects for the humorist, and perhaps to no one more than to him who
has felt it intensely. Horace may or may not have sounded the depths
of the passion in his own person; but, in any case, a fellow-feeling
for the lover's pleasures and pains served to infuse a tone of
kindliness into his ridicule. How charming in this way is the Ode to
Lydia (I. 8), of which the late Henry Luttrel's once popular and still
delightful 'Letters to Julia' is an elaborate paraphrase!--

    "Why, Lydia, why,
  I pray, by all the gods above,
    Art so resolved that Sybaris should die,
  And all for love?

   "Why doth he shun
  The Campus Martius' sultry glare?
    He that once recked of neither dust nor sun,
  Why rides he there,

   "First of the brave,
  Taming the Gallic steed no more?
    Why doth he shrink from Tiber's yellow wave?
  Why thus abhor

   "The wrestlers' oil,
  As 'twere from viper's tongue distilled?
    Why do his arms no livid bruises soil,
  He, once so skilled,

   "The disc or dart
  Far, far beyond the mark to hurl?
    And tell me, tell me, in what nook apart,
  Like baby-girl,

   "Lurks the poor boy,
  Veiling his manhood, as did Thetis' son,
    To 'scape war's bloody clang, while fated Troy
  Was yet undone?"

In the same class with this poem may be ranked the following ode (I.
27). Just as the poet has made us as familiar with the lovelorn
Sybaris as if we knew him, so does he here transport us into the
middle of a wine-party of young Romans, with that vivid dramatic force
which constitutes one great source of the excellence of his lyrics.

  "Hold! hold! 'Tis for Thracian madmen to fight
  With wine-cups, that only were made for delight.
  'Tis barbarous-brutal! I beg of you all,
  Disgrace not our banquet with bloodshed and brawl!

  "Sure, Median scimitars strangely accord
  With lamps and with wine at the festival board!
  'Tis out of all rule! Friends, your places resume,
  And let us have order once more in the room!

  "If I am to join you in pledging a beaker
  Of this stout Falernian, choicest of liquor,
  Megilla's fair brother must say, from what eyes
  Flew the shaft, sweetly fatal, that causes his sighs.

  "How--dumb! Then I drink not a drop. Never blush,
  Whoever the fair one may be, man! Tush, tush!
  She'll do your taste credit, I'm certain--for yours
  Was always select in its little amours.

  "Don't be frightened! We're all upon honour, you know,
  So out with your tale!--Gracious powers! Is it so?
  Poor fellow! Your lot has gone sadly amiss,
  When you fell into such a Charybdis as this!

  "What witch, what magician, with drinks and with charms,
  What god can effect your release from her harms?
  So fettered, scarce Pegasus' self, were he near you,
  From the fangs of this triple Chimaera would clear you."

In this poem, which has all the effect of an impromptu, we have a
_genre_ picture of Roman life, as vivid as though painted by the
pencil of Couture or Gerôme.

Serenades were as common an expedient among the Roman gallants of the
days of Augustus as among their modern successors. In the fine climate
of Greece, Italy, and Spain, they were a natural growth, and involved
no great strain upon a wooer's endurance. They assume a very different
aspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his Lydia
Languish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like a
dripping statue," presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace
(Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asteriè, during the absence of her
husband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes of a
certain Enipeus:--

  "At nightfall shut your doors, nor then.
  Look down into the street again,
    When quavering fifes complain;"

using almost the words of Shylock to his daughter Jessica:--

  "Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
  _And the vile squeaking of the wrynecked fife_,
  Clamber not you up to the casement then,
  Nor thrust your head into the public street."

The name given to such a serenade, adopted probably, with the
serenades themselves, from Greece, was _paraclausithyron_--
literally, an out-of-door lament. Here is a specimen of what they were
(Odes, III. 10), in which, under the guise of imitating their form,
Horace quietly makes a mock of the absurdity of the practice. His
serenader has none of the insensibility to the elements of the lover
in the Scotch song:--

  "Wi' the sleet in my hair, I'd gang ten miles and mair,
    For a word o' that sweet lip o' thine, o' thine,
    For ae glance o' thy dark e'e divine."

Neither is there in his pleading the tone of earnest entreaty which
marks the wooer, in a similar plight, of Burns's "Let me in this ae
nicht"--

  "Thou hear'st the winter wind and weet,
  Nae star blinks through the driving sleet;
  Tak pity on my weary feet,
    And shield me frae the rain, jo."

There can be no mistake as to the seriousness of this appeal. Horace's
is a mere _jeu-d'esprit_:--

  "Though your drink were Tanais, chillest of rivers,
    And your lot with some conjugal savage were cast,
  You would pity, sweet Lycè, the poor soul that shivers
    Out here at your door in the merciless blast.

  "Only hark how the doorway goes straining and creaking,
    And the piercing wind pipes through the trees that surround
  The court of your villa, while Hack frost is streaking
    With ice the crisp snow that lies thick on the ground!

  "In your pride--Venus hates it--no longer envelop ye,
    Or haply you'll find yourself laid on the shelf;
  You never were made for a prudish Penelope,
    'Tis not in the blood of your sires or yourself.

  "Though nor gifts nor entreaties can win a soft answer,
    Nor the violet pale of my love-ravaged cheek,
  To your husband's intrigue with a Greek ballet-dancer,
    Though you still are blind, and forgiving and meek;

  "Yet be not as cruel--forgive my upbraiding--
    As snakes, nor as hard as the toughest of oak;
  To stand out here, drenched to the skin, serenading
    All night may in time prove too much of a joke."

It is not often that Horace's poetry is vitiated by bad taste.
Strangely enough, almost the only instances of it occur where he is
writing of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce
(Book IV. 13). Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites of
his, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay of
their charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of the
prevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man
"so singularly susceptible," as Lord Lytton has truly described him,
"to amiable, graceful, gentle, and noble impressions of man and of
life," could write of a woman whom he had once loved in a strain like
this:--

  "The gods have heard, the gods have heard my prayer;
    Yes, Lyce! you are growing old, and still
      You struggle to look fair;
        You drink, and dance, and trill
  Your songs to youthful love, in accents weak
    With wine, and age, and passion. Youthful Love!
      He dwells in Chia's cheek,
        And hears her harp-strings move.
  Rude boy, he flies like lightning o'er the heath
    Past withered trees like you; you're wrinkled now;
      The white has left your teeth,
        And settled on your brow.
  Your Coan silks, your jewels bright as stars--
    Ah no! they bring not back the days of old,
      In public calendars
        By flying time enrolled.
  Where now that beauty? Where those movements? Where
    That colour? What of her, of her is left,
      Who, breathing Love's own air,
        Me of myself bereft,
  Who reigned in Cinara's stead, a fair, fair face,
    Queen of sweet arts? But Fate to Cinara gave
      A life of little space;
        And now she cheats the grave
  Of Lyce, spared to raven's length of days,
    That youth may see, with laughter and disgust,
      A firebrand, once ablaze,
        Now smouldering in grey dust."

What had this wretched Lyce done that Horace should have prayed the
gods to strip her of her charms, and to degrade her from a haughty
beauty into a maudlin hag, disgusting and ridiculous? Why cast such
very merciless stones at one who, by his own avowal, had erewhile
witched his very soul from him? Why rejoice to see this once beautiful
creature the scoff of all the heartless young fops of Rome? If she had
injured him, what of that? Was it so very strange that a woman
trained, like all the class to which she belonged, to be the plaything
of man's caprice, should have been fickle, mercenary, or even
heartless? Poor Lyce might at least have claimed his silence, if he
could not do, what Thackeray says every honest fellow should do,
"think well of the woman he has once thought well of, and remember her
with kindness and tenderness, as a man remembers a place where he has
been very happy."

Horace's better self comes out in his playful appeal to his friend
Xanthias (Odes, II. 4) not to be ashamed of having fallen in love with
his handmaiden Phyllis. That she is a slave is a matter of no account.
A girl of such admirable qualities must surely come of a good stock,
and is well worth any man's love. Did not Achilles succumb to Briseis,
Ajax to Tecmessa, Agamemnon himself to Cassandra? Moreover,

  "For aught that you know, the fair Phyllis may be
    The shoot of some highly respectable stem;
  Nay, she counts, never doubt it, some kings in her tree,
    And laments the lost acres once lorded by them.
  Never think that a creature so exquisite grew
    In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known,
  Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true,
    Had a mother 'twould shame thee to take for thine own."

Here we have the true Horace; and after all these fascinating but
doubtful Lydés, Neaeras, and Pyrrhas, it is pleasant to come across a
young beauty like this Phyllis, _sic fidelem, sic lucro aversam_.
She, at least, is a fresh and fragrant violet among the languorous
hothouse splendours of the Horatian garden.

Domestic love, which plays so large a part in modern poetry, is a
theme rarely touched on in Roman verse. Hence we know but little of
the Romans in their homes--for such a topic used to be thought beneath
the dignity of history--and especially little of the women, who
presided over what have been called "the tender and temperate honours
of the hearth." The ladies who flourish in the poetry and also in the
history of those times, however conspicuous for beauty or attraction,
are not generally of the kind that make home happy. Such matrons as we
chiefly read of there would in the present day he apt to figure in the
divorce court. Nor is the explanation of this difficult. The
prevalence of marriage for mere wealth or connection, and the facility
of divorce, which made the marriage-tie almost a farce among the upper
classes, had resulted, as it could not fail to do, in a great
debasement of morals. A lady did not lose caste either by being
divorced, or by seeking divorce, from husband after husband. And as
wives in the higher ranks often held the purse-strings, they made
themselves pretty frequently more dreaded than beloved by their lords,
through being tyrannical, if not unchaste, or both. So at least Horace
plainly indicates (Odes, III. 24), when contrasting the vices of Rome
with the simpler virtues of some of the nations that were under its
sway. In those happier lands, he says, "_Nec dotata regit virum
conjux, nec nitido fidit adultero_"--

    "No dowried dame her spouse
  O'erbears, nor trusts the sleek seducer's vows."

But it would be as wrong to infer from this that the taint was
universal, as it would be to gauge our own social morality by the
erratic matrons and fast young ladies with whom satirical essayists
delight to point their periods. The human heart is stronger than the
corruptions of luxury, even among the luxurious and the rich; and the
life of struggle and privation which is the life of the mass of every
nation would have been intolerable but for the security and peace of
well-ordered and happy households. Sweet honest love, cemented by
years of sympathy and mutual endurance, was then, as ever, the salt of
human life. Many a monumental inscription, steeped in the tenderest
pathos, assures us of the fact. What, for example, must have been the
home of the man who wrote on his wife's tomb, "She never caused me a
pang but when she died!" And Catullus, mere man of pleasure as he was,
must have had strongly in his heart the thought of what a tender and
pure-souled woman had been in his friend's home, when he wrote his
exquisite lines to Calvus on the death of Quinctilia:--

  "Calvus, if those now silent in the tomb
    Can feel the touch of pleasure in our tears
  For those we loved, that perished in their bloom,
    And the departed friends of former years--
  Oh, then, full surely thy Quinctilia's woe
    For the untimely fate, that bids thee part,
  Will fade before the bliss she feels to know
    How very dear she is unto thy heart!"

Horace, the bachelor, revered the marriage-tie, and did his best, by
his verses, to forward the policy of Augustus in his effort to arrest
the decay of morals by enforcing the duty of marriage, which the well-
to-do Romans of that day were inclined to shirk whenever they could.
Nay, the charm of constancy and conjugal sympathy inspired a few of
his very finest lines (Odes, I. l3)--"_Felices ter et amplius, quos
irrupta tenet copula_," &c.,--the feeling of which is better
preserved in Moore's well-known paraphrase than is possible in mere
translation:--

  "There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
    When two that are linked in one heavenly tie,
  With heart never changing, and brow never cold,
    Love on through all ills, and love on till they die!
  One hour of a passion so sacred is worth
    Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss;
  And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth,
    It is this, it is this!"

To leave the _placens uxor_--"the winsome wife"--behind, is one
of the saddest regrets, Horace tells his friend Posthumus (Odes, II.
14), which death can baring. Still Horace only sang the praises of
marriage, contenting himself with painting the Eden within which, for
reasons unknown to us, he never sought to enter. He was well up in
life, probably, before these sager views dawned upon him. Was it then
too late to reduce his precepts to practice, or was he unable to
overcome his dread of the _dotata conjux_, and thought his
comfort would be safer in the hands of some less exacting fair, such
as the Phyllis to whom the following Ode, one of his latest (IV. 11),
is addressed?--

  "I have laid in a cask of Albanian wine,
    Which nine mellow summers have ripened and more;
  In my garden, dear Phyllis, thy brows to entwine,
    Grows the brightest of parsley in plentiful store.
  There is ivy to gleam on thy dark glossy hair;
    My plate, newly burnished, enlivens my rooms;
  And the altar, athirst for its victim, is there,
    Enwreathed with chaste vervain and choicest of blooms.

  "Every hand in the household is busily toiling,
    And hither and thither boys bustle and girls;
  Whilst, up from the hearth-fires careering and coiling,
    The smoke round the rafter-beams languidly curls.
  Let the joys of the revel be parted between us!
    'Tis the Ides of young April, the day which divides
  The month, dearest Phyllis, of ocean-sprung Venus,
    A day to me dearer than any besides.

  "And well may I prize it, and hail its returning--
    My own natal-day not more hallowed nor dear;
  For Maecenas, my friend, dates from this happy morning
    The life which has swelled to a lustrous career.
  You sigh for young Telephus: better forget him!
    His rank is not yours, and the gaudier charms
  Of a girl that's both wealthy and wanton benet him,
    And hold him the fondest of slaves in her arms.

  "Remember fond Phaëthon's fiery sequel,
    And heavenward-aspiring Bellerophon's fate;
  And pine not for one who would ne'er be your equal,
    But level your hopes to a lowlier mate.
  So, come, my own Phyllis, my heart's latest treasure--
    For ne'er for another this bosom shall long--
  And I'll teach, while your loved voice re-echoes the measure,
    How to charm away care with the magic of song."

This is very pretty and picturesque; and Maecenas was sure to be
charmed with it as a birthday Ode, for such it certainly was, whether
there was any real Phyllis in the case or not. Most probably there was
not,--the allusion to Telephus, the lady-killer, is so very like many
other allusions of the same kind in other Odes, which are plainly mere
exercises of fancy, and the protestation that the lady is the very,
very last of his loves, so precisely what all middle-aged gentlemen
think it right to say, whose "_jeunesse_," like the poet's, has
teen notoriously "_orageuse_."

It was probably not within the circle of his city friends that Horace
saw the women for whom he entertained the deepest respect, but by the
hearth-fire in the farmhouse, "the homely house, that harbours quiet
rest," with which he was no less familiar, where people lived in a
simple and natural way, and where, if anywhere, good wives and mothers
were certain to be found. It was manifestly by some woman of this
class that the following poem (Odes, III. 23) was inspired:--

  "If thou, at each new moon, thine upturned palms,
    My rustic Phidyle, to heaven shalt lift,
  The Lares soothe with steam of fragrant balms,
    A sow, and fruits new-plucked, thy simple gift,

  "Nor venomed blast shall nip thy fertile vine,
    Nor mildew blight thy harvest in the ear;
  Nor shall thy flocks, sweet nurslings, peak and pine,
    When apple-bearing Autumn chills the year.

  "The victim marked for sacrifice, that feeds
    On snow-capped Algidus, in leafy lane
  Of oak and ilex, or on Alba's meads,
    With its rich blood the pontiff's axe may stain;

  "Thy little gods for humbler tribute call
    Than blood of many victims; twine for them
  Of rosemary a simple coronal,
    And the lush myrtle's frail and fragrant stem.

  "The costliest sacrifice that wealth can make
    From the incensed Penates less commands
  A soft response, than doth the poorest cake,
    If on the altar laid with spotless hands."

When this was written, Horace had got far beyond the Epicurean creed
of his youth. He had come to believe in the active intervention of a
Supreme Disposer of events in the government of the world,--
"_insignem attenuans, obscura promens_" (Odes, I. 34):--

  "The mighty ones of earth o'erthrowing,
      Advancing the obscure;"--

and to whose "pure eyes and perfect witness" a blameless life and a
conscience void of offence were not indifferent.



CHAPTER VII.

HORACE'S POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS.--HIS PRAISES OF CONTENTMENT.


If it be merely the poet, and not the lover, who speaks in most of
Horace's love verses, there can never be any doubt that the poems to
his friends come direct from his heart. They glow with feeling. To
whatever chord they are attuned, sad, or solemn, or joyous, they are
always delightful; consummate in their grace of expression, while they
have all the warmth and easy flow of spontaneous emotion. Take, for
example, the following (Odes, II. 7). Pompeius Varus, a fellow-student
with Horace at Athens, and a brother in arms under Brutus, who, after
the defeat of Philippi, had joined the party of the younger Pompey,
has returned to Rome, profiting probably by the general amnesty
granted by Octavius to his adversaries after the battle of Actium. How
his heart must have leapt at such a welcome from his poet-friend as
this!--

  "Dear comrade in the days when thou and I
    With Brutus took the field, his perils bore,
    Who hath restored thee, freely as of yore,
  To thy home gods, and loved Italian sky,

  "Pompey, who wert the first my heart to share,
    With whom full oft I've sped the lingering day,
    Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay,
  With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair?

  "With thee I shared Philippi's headlong flight,
    My shield behind me left, which was not well,
    When all that brave array was broke, and fell
  In the vile dust full many a towering wight.

  "But me, poor trembler, swift Mercurius bore,
    Wrapped in a cloud, through all the hostile din,
    Whilst war's tumultuous eddies, closing in,
  Swept thee away into the strife once more.

  "Then pay to Jove the feasts that are his fee,
    And stretch at ease these war-worn limbs of thine
    Beneath my laurel's shade; nor spare the wine
  Which I have treasured through long years for thee.

  "Pour till it touch the shining goblet's rim,
    Care-drowning Massic; let rich ointments flow
    From amplest conchs! No measure we shall know!
  What! shall we wreaths of oozy parsley trim,

  "Or simple myrtle? Whom will Venus[1] send
    To rule our revel? Wild my draughts shall be
    As Thracian Bacchanals', for 'tis sweet to me
  To lose my wits, when I regain my friend."

[1]
   Venus was the highest cast of the dice. The meaning here is, Who
   shall be the master of our feast?--that office falling to the
   member of the wine-party who threw sixes.

When Horace penned the playful allusion here made to having left his
shield on the field of battle (_parmula non bene relicta_), he
could never have thought that his commentators--professed admirers,
too--would extract from it an admission of personal cowardice. As if
any man, much more a Roman to Romans, would make such a confession!
Horace could obviously afford to put in this way the fact of his
having given up a desperate cause, for this very reason, that he had
done his duty on the field of Philippi, and that it was known he had
done it. Commentators will be so cruelly prosaic! The poet was quite
as serious in saying that Mercury carried him out of the _melée_
in a cloud, like one of Homer's heroes, as that he had left his shield
discreditably (_non bene_) on the battle-field. But it requires a
poetic sympathy, which in classical editors is rare, to understand
that, as Lessing and others have urged, the very way he speaks of his
own retreat was by implication a compliment, not ungraceful, to his
friend, who had continued the struggle against the triumvirate, and
come home at last, war-worn and weary, to find the more politic
comrade of his youth one of the celebrities of Rome, and on the best
of terms with the very men against whom they had once fought side by
side.

Not less beautiful is the following Ode to Septimius, another of the
poet's old companions in arms (Odes, II. 6). His speaking of himself
in it as "with war and travel worn" has puzzled the commentators, as
it is plain from the rest of the poem that it must have been written
long after his campaigning days were past. But the fatigues of those
days may have left their traces for many years; and the difficulty is
at once got over if we suppose the poem to have been written under
some little depression from languid health due to this cause.
Tarentum, where his friend lived, and whose praises are so warmly
sung, was a favourite resort of the poet's. He used to ride there on his
mule, very possibly to visit Septimius, before he had his own Sabine
villa; and all his love for that villa never chilled his admiration for
Tibur, with its "silvan shades, and orchards moist with wimpling rills,"--
the "_Tiburni lucus, et uda mobilibus pomaria rivis_,"-and its milder
climate, so genial to his sun-loving temperament:--

  "Septimius, thou who wouldst, I know,
  With me to distant Gades go,
  And visit the Cantabrian fell,
  Whom all our triumphs cannot quell,
  And even the sands barbarian brave,
  Where ceaseless seethes the Moorish wave;

  "May Tibur, that delightful haunt,
  Reared by an Argive emigrant,
  The tranquil haven be, I pray,
  For my old age to wear away;
  Oh, may it be the final bourne
  To one with war and travel worn!

  "But should the cruel fates decree
  That this, my friend, shall never be,
Then to Galaesus, river sweet
  To skin-clad flocks, will I retreat,
  And those rich meads, where sway of yore
  Laconian Phalanthus bore.

  "In all the world no spot there is,
  That wears for me a smile like this,
  The honey of whose thymy fields
  May vie with what Hymettus yields,
  Where berries clustering every slope
  May with Venafrum's greenest cope.

  "There Jove accords a lengthened spring,
  And winters wanting winter's sting,
And sunny Aulon's[1] broad incline
  Such mettle puts into the vine,
  Its clusters need not envy those
  Which fiery Falernum grows.

  "Thyself and me that spot invites,
  Those pleasant fields, those sunny heights;
  And there, to life's last moments true,
  Wilt thou with some fond tears bedew--
  The last sad tribute love can lend--
  The ashes of thy poet-friend."

[1]
   Galaesus (Galaso), a river; Aulon, a hill near Tarentum.

Septimius was himself a poet, or thought himself one, who,

  "Holding vulgar ponds and runnels cheap,
  At Pindar's fount drank valiantly and deep,"

as Horace says of him in an Epistle (I. 3) to Julius Florus; adding,
with a sly touch of humour, which throws more than a doubt on the
poetic powers of their common friend,--

  "Thinks he of me? And does he still aspire
  To marry Theban strains to Latium's lyre,
  Thanks to the favouring muse? Or haply rage
  And mouth in bombast for the tragic stage?"

When this was written Septimius was in Armenia along with Florus, on
the staff of Tiberius Claudius Nero, the future emperor. For this
appointment he was probably indebted to Horace, who applied for it, at
his request, in the following Epistle to Tiberius (I. 9), which
Addison ('Spectator,' 493) cites as a fine specimen of what a letter
of introduction should be. Horace was, on principle, wisely chary of
giving such introductions.

  "Look round and round the man you recommend,
  For yours will be the shame if he offend," (C.)

is his maxim on this subject (Epistles, I. 18, 76); and he was sure to
be especially scrupulous in writing to Tiberius, who, even in his
youth--and he was at this time about twenty-two--was so morose and
unpleasant in his manners, to say nothing of his ample share of the
hereditary pride of the Claudian family, that even Augustus felt under
constraint in his company:--

  "Septimius only understands, 'twould seem,
  How high I stand in, Claudius, your esteem:
  For when he begs and prays me, day by day,
  Before you his good qualities to lay,
  As not unfit the heart and home to share
  Of Nero, who selects his friends with care;
  When he supposes you to me extend
  The rights and place of a familiar friend,
  Far better than myself he sees and knows,
  How far with you my commendation goes.
  Pleas without number I protest I've used,
  In hope he'd hold me from the task excused,
  Yet feared the while it might be thought I feigned
  Too low the influence I perchance have gained,
  Dissembling it as nothing with my friends,
  To keep it for my own peculiar ends.
  So, to escape such dread reproach, I put
  My blushes by, and boldly urge my suit.
  If then you hold it as a grace, though small,
  To doff one's bashfulness at friendship's call,
  Enrol him in your suite, assured you'll find
  A man of heart in him, as well as mind."

We may be very sure that, among the many pleas urged by Horace for not
giving Septimius the introduction he desired, was the folly of leaving
his delightful retreat at Tarentum to go once more abroad in search of
wealth or promotion. Let others "cross, to plunder provinces, the
main," surely this was no ambition for an embryo Pindar or half-
developed Aeschylus. Horace had tried similar remonstrances before,
and with just as little success, upon Iccius, another of his scholarly
friends, who sold off his fine library and joined an expedition into
Arabia Felix, expecting to find it an El Dorado. He playfully asks
this studious friend (Odes, I. 29), from whom he expected better
things--"_pollicitus meliora_"--if it be true that he grudges the
Arabs their wealth, and is actually forging fetters for the hitherto
invincible Sabaean monarchs, and those terrible Medians? To which of
the royal damsels does he intend to throw the handkerchief, having
first cut down her princely betrothed in single combat? Or what young
"oiled and curled" Oriental prince is for the future to pour out his
wine for him? Iccius, like many another Raleigh, went out to gather
wool, and came back shorn. The expedition proved disastrous, and he
was lucky in being one of the few who survived it. Some years
afterwards we meet with him again as the steward of Agrippa's great
estates in Sicily. He has resumed his studies,--

  "On themes sublime alone intent,--
  What causes the wild ocean sway,
  The seasons what from June to May,
  If free the constellations roll,
  Or moved by some supreme control;
  What makes the moon obscure her light,
  What pours her splendour on the night."

Absorbed in these and similar inquiries, and living happily on "herbs
and frugal fare," Iccius realises the noble promise of his youth; and
Horace, in writing to him (Epist., I. 12), encourages him in his
disregard of wealth by some of those hints for contentment which the
poet never tires of reproducing:--

  "Let no care trouble you; for poor
  That man is not, who can insure
  Whate'er for life is needful found.
  Let your digestion be but sound,
  Your side unwrung by spasm or stitch,
  Your foot unconscious of a twitch;
  And could you be more truly blest,
  Though of the wealth of kings possessed?"

It must have been pleasant to Horace to find even one among his
friends illustrating in his life this modest Socratic creed; for he is
so constantly enforcing it, in every variety of phrase and metaphor,
that while we must conclude that he regarded it as the one doctrine
most needful for his time, we must equally conclude that he found it
utterly disregarded. All round him wealth, wealth, wealth, was the
universal aim: wealth, to build fine houses in town, and villas at
Praeneste or Baiae; wealth, to stock them with statues, old bronzes
(mostly fabrications from the Wardour Streets of Athens or Rome),
ivories, pictures, gold plate, pottery, tapestry, stuffs from the
looms of Tyre, and other _articles de luxe_; wealth, to give
gorgeous dinners, and wash them down with the costliest wines; wealth,
to provide splendid equipages, to forestall the front seats in the
theatre, as we do opera-boxes on the grand tier, and so get a few
yards nearer to the Emperor's chair, or gain a closer view of the
favourite actor or dancer of the day; wealth, to secure a wife with a
fortune and a pedigree; wealth, to attract gadfly friends, who will
consume your time, eat your dinners, drink your wines, and then abuse
them, and who will with amiable candour regale their circle by
quizzing your foibles, or slandering your taste, if they are even so
kind as to spare your character. "A dowried wife," he says (Epistles,
I. 6),

      "Friends, beauty, birth, fair fame,
  These are the gifts of money, heavenly dame;
  Be but a moneyed man, persuasion tips
  Your tongue, and Venus settles on your lips." (C.)

And to achieve this wealth, no sacrifice was to be spared--time,
happiness, health, honour itself. "_Rem facias, rem! Si possis
recte, si non, quocunque modo rem:_"--

               "Get money, money still,
  And then let Virtue follow, if she will."

Wealth sought in this spirit, and for such ends, of course brought no
more enjoyment to the contemporaries of Horace than we see it doing to
our own. And not the least evil of the prevailing mania, then as now,
was, that it robbed life of its simplicity, and of the homely
friendliness on which so much of its pleasure depends. People lived
for show--to propitiate others, not to satisfy their own better
instincts or their genuine convictions; and straining after the shadow
of enjoyment, they let the reality slip from their grasp. They never
"were, but always to be, blest." It was the old story, which the world
is continually re-enacting, while the sage stands by, and marvels at
its folly, and preaches what we call commonplaces, in a vain endeavour
to modify or to prevent it. But the wisdom of life consists of
commonplaces, which we should all be much the better for working into
our practice, instead of complacently sneering at them as platitudes.
Horace abounds in commonplaces, and on no theme more than this. He has
no divine law of duty to appeal to, as we have--no assured hereafter
to which he may point the minds of men; but he presses strongly home
their folly, in so far as this world is concerned. To what good, he
asks, all this turmoil and disquiet? No man truly possesses more than
he is able thoroughly to enjoy. Grant that you roll in gold, or, by
accumulating land, become, in Hamlet's phrase, "spacious in the
possession of dirt." What pleasure will you extract from these, which
a moderate estate will not yield in equal, if not greater, measure?
You fret yourself to acquire your wealth--you fret yourself lest you
should lose it. It robs you of your health, your ease of mind, your
freedom of thought and action. Riches will not bribe inexorable death
to spare you. At any hour that great leveller may sweep you away into
darkness and dust, and what will it then avail you, that you have
wasted all your hours, and foregone all wholesome pleasure, in adding
ingot to ingot, or acre to acre, for your heirs to squander? Set a
bound, then, to your desires: think not of how much others have, but
of how much which they have you can do perfectly well without. Be not
the slave of show or circumstance, "but in yourself possess your own
desire." Do not lose the present in vain perplexities about the
future. If fortune lours to-day, she may smile to-morrow; and when she
lavishes her gifts upon you, cherish an humble heart, and so fortify
yourself against her caprice. Keep a rein upon all your passions--upon
covetousness, above all; for once that has you within its clutch,
farewell for ever to the light heart and the sleep that comes
unbidden, to the open eye that drinks in delight from the beauty and
freshness and infinite variety of nature, to the unclouded mind that
judges justly and serenely of men and things. Enjoy wisely, for then
only you enjoy thoroughly. Live each day as though it were your last.
Mar not your life by a hopeless quarrel with destiny. It will be only
too brief at the best, and the day is at hand when its inequalities
will be redressed, and king and peasant, pauper and millionaire, be
huddled, poor shivering phantoms, in one undistinguishable crowd,
across the melancholy Styx, to the judgment-hall of Minos. To this
theme many of Horace's finest Odes are strung. Of these, not the least
graceful is that addressed to Dellius (II. 3):--

  "Let not the frowns of fate
  Disquiet thee, my friend,
  Nor, when she smiles on thee, do thou, elate
  With vaunting thoughts, ascend
  Beyond the limits of becoming mirth;
  For, Dellius, thou must die, become a clod of earth!

  "Whether thy days go down
  In gloom, and dull regrets,
  Or, shunning life's vain struggle for renown,
  Its fever and its frets,
  Stretch'd on the grass, with old Falernian wine,
  Thou giv'st the thoughtless hours a rapture all divine.

  "Where the tall spreading pine
  And white-leaved poplar grow,
  And, mingling their broad boughs in leafy twine,
  A grateful shadow throw,
  Where down its broken bed the wimpling stream
  Writhes on its sinuous way with many a quivering gleam,

  "There wine, there perfumes bring,
  Bring garlands of the rose,
  Fair and too shortlived daughter of the spring,
  While youth's bright current flows
  Within thy veins,--ere yet hath come the hour
  When the dread Sisters Three shall clutch thee in their power.

  "Thy woods, thy treasured pride,
  Thy mansion's pleasant seat,
  Thy lawns washed by the Tiber's yellow tide,
  Each favourite retreat,
  Thou must leave all--all, and thine heir shall run
  In riot through the wealth thy years of toil have won.

  "It recks not whether thou
  Be opulent, and trace
  Thy birth from kings, or bear upon thy brow
  Stamp of a beggar's race;
  In rags or splendour, death at thee alike,
  That no compassion hath for aught of earth, will strike.

  "One road, and to one bourne
  We all are goaded. Late
  Or soon will issue from the urn
  Of unrelenting Fate
  The lot, that in yon bark exiles us all
  To undiscovered shores, from which is no recall."

In a still higher strain he sings (Odes, III. 1) the ultimate equality
of all human souls, and the vanity of encumbering life with the
anxieties of ambition or wealth:--

    "Whate'er our rank may be,
  We all partake one common destiny!
    In fair expanse of soil,
  Teeming with rich returns of wine and oil,
    His neighbour one outvies;
    Another claims to rise
    To civic dignities,
  Because of ancestry and noble birth,
  Or fame, or proved pre-eminence of worth,
  Or troops of clients, clamorous in his cause;
    Still Fate doth grimly stand,
    And with impartial hand
  The lots of lofty and of lowly draws
    From that capacious urn
  Whence every name that lives is shaken in its turn.

  "To him, above whose guilty head,
    Suspended by a thread,
  The naked sword is hung for evermore,
    Not feasts Sicilian shall
    With all their cates recall
  That zest the simplest fare could once inspire;
  Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre
    Shall his lost sleep restore:
    But gentle sleep shuns not
    The rustic's lowly cot,
  Nor mossy bank o'ercanopied with trees,
  Nor Tempe's leafy vale stirred by the western breeze.

  "The man who lives content with whatsoe'er
    Sufficeth for his needs,
  The storm-tossed ocean vexeth not with care,
  Nor the fierce tempest which Arcturus breeds,
    When in the sky he sets,
  Nor that which Hoedus, at his rise, begets:
    Nor will he grieve, although
    His vines be all laid low
      Beneath the driving hail,
  Nor though, by reason of the drenching rain,
    Or heat, that shrivels up his fields like fire,
    Or fierce extremities of winter's ire,
  Blight shall o'erwhelm his fruit-trees and his grain,
    And all his farm's delusive promise fail.

  "The fish are conscious that a narrower bound
    Is drawn the seas around
  By masses huge hurled down into the deep.
    There, at the bidding of a lord, for whom
    Not all the land he owns is ample room,
  Do the contractor and his labourers heap
  Vast piles of stone, the ocean back to sweep.
  But let him climb in pride,
    That lord of halls unblest,
    Up to their topmost crest,
  Yet ever by his side
    Climb Terror and Unrest;
  Within the brazen galley's sides
    Care, ever wakeful, flits,
  And at his back, when forth in state he rides.
    Her withering shadow sits.

      "If thus it fare with all,
  If neither marbles from the Phrygian mine,
    Nor star-bright robes of purple and of pall,
      Nor the Falernian vine,
  Nor costliest balsams, fetched from farthest Ind,
      Can soothe the restless mind,
        Why should I choose
  To rear on high, as modern spendthrifts use,
    A lofty hall, might be the home for kings,
  With portals vast, for Malice to abuse,
  Or Envy make her theme to point a tale;
    Or why for wealth, which new-born trouble brings,
      Exchange my Sabine vale?"



CHAPTER VIII.

PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY.--HORACE'S VIEWS OF A HEREAFTER.--
RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS.--BELIEF IN THE PERMANENCE OF HIS OWN FAME.


"When all looks fair about," says Sir Thomas Browne, "and thou seest
not a cloud so big as a hand to threaten thee, forget not the wheel of
things; think of sudden, vicissitudes, but beat not thy brains to
foreknow them." It was characteristic of an age of luxury that it
should be one of superstition and mental disquietude, eager to
penetrate the future, and credulous in its belief of those who
pretended to unveil its secrets. In such an age astrology naturally
found many dupes. Rome was infested with professors of that so-called
science, who had flocked thither from the East, and were always ready,
like other oracles, to supply responses acceptable to their votaries.
In what contempt Horace held their prognostications the following Ode
(I. 11) very clearly indicates. The women of Rome, according to
Juvenal, were great believers in astrology, and carried manuals of it
on their persons, which they consulted before they took an airing or
broke their fast. Possibly on this account Horace addressed the ode to
a lady. But in such things, and not under the Roman Empire only, there
have always been, as La Fontaine says, "_bon nombre d'hommes qui
sont femmes_." If Augustus, and his great general and statesman
Agrippa, had a Theogenes to forecast their fortunes, so the first
Napoleon had his Madame Lenormand.

       "Ask not--such lore's forbidden--
        What destined term may be
      Within the future hidden
        For us, Leuconöe.
          Both thou and I
          Must quickly die!
  Content thee, then, nor madly hope
  To wrest a false assurance from Chaldean horoscope.

      "Far nobler, better were it,
        Whate'er may be in store,
      With soul serene to bear it,
        If winters many more
          Jove spare for thee,
          Or this shall be
  The last, that now with sullen roar
  Scatters the Tuscan surge in foam upon the rock-bound shore.

      "Be wise, your spirit firing
        With cups of tempered wine,
      And hopes afar aspiring
        In compass brief confine,
          Use all life's powers;
          The envious hours
  Fly as we talk; then live to-day,
  Nor fondly to to-morrow trust more than you must or may."

In the verses of Horace we are perpetually reminded that our life is
compassed round with darkness, but he will not suffer this darkness to
overshadow his cheerfulness. On the contrary, the beautiful world, and
the delights it offers, are made to stand out, as it were, in brighter
relief against the gloom of Orcus. Thus, for example, this very gloom
is made the background in the following Ode (I. 4) for the brilliant
pictures which crowd on the poet's fancy with the first burst of
Spring. Here, he says, oh Sestius, all is fresh and joyous, luxuriant
and lovely! Be happy, drink in "at every pore the spirit of the
season," while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup
flashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed
mansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to
swell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas!
too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain it of its sweets.

  "As biting Winter flies, lo! Spring with sunny skies,
    And balmy airs; and barks long dry put out again from shore;
  Now the ox forsakes his byre, and the husbandman his fire,
    And daisy-dappled meadows bloom where winter frosts lay hoar.

  "By Cytherea led, while the moon shines overhead,
    The Nymphs and Graces, hand-in-hand, with alternating feet
  Shake the ground, while swinking Vulcan strikes the sparkles fierce
and red
    From the forges of the Cyclops, with reiterated beat.

  "'Tis the time with myrtle green to bind our glistening locks,
    Or with flowers, wherein the loosened earth herself hath newly
dressed,
  And to sacrifice to Faunus in some glade amidst the rocks
    A yearling lamb, or else a kid, if such delight him best.

  "Death comes alike to all--to the monarch's lordly hall,
    Or the hovel of the beggar, and his summons none shall stay.
  Oh, Sestius, happy Sestius! use the moments as they pass;
    Far-reaching hopes are not for us, the creatures of a day.

  "Thee soon shall night enshroud; and the Manes' phantom crowd,
    And the starveling house unbeautiful of Pluto shut thee in;
  And thou shalt not banish care by the ruddy wine-cup there,
    Nor woo the gentle Lycidas, whom all are mad to win."

A modern would no more think of using such images as those of the last
two verses to stimulate the festivity of his friends than he would of
placing, like the old Egyptians, a skull upon his dinner-table, or of
decorating his ball-room with Holbein's "Dance of Death." We rebuke
our pride or keep our vanities in check by the thought of death, and
our poets use it to remind us that

  "The glories of our blood and state
    Are shadows, not substantial things."

Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality he
seems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of the
flying hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life on
this side the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more noble,
than the life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly the
general belief. _"Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit,
Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos,_"--

  "The Manes are no dream; death closes not
  Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade
  Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires,"

says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be
no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades--in the "_domus
exilis Plutonia_;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead
across the Styx; in the "_judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretas
piorum_"--the "Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields
serene" (Odes, II. 13). But this after-life was a cold, sunless,
unsubstantial thing, lower in quality and degree than the full,
vigorous, passionate life of this world. The nobler spirits of
antiquity, it hardly need be said, had higher dreams of a future state
than this. For them, no more than for us, was it possible to rest in
the conviction that their brief and troubled career on earth was to be
the "be all and the end all" of existence, or that those whom they had
loved and lost in death became thenceforth as though they had never
been. It is idle to draw, as is often done, a different conclusion
from such phrases as that after death we are a shadow and mere dust,
"_pulvis et umbra sumus_!" or from Horace's bewildered cry (Odes,
I. 24), when a friend of signal nobleness and purity is suddenly
struck down--"_Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor urget_?"--"And is
Quinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that knows no waking?" We
might as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not believe in a life
after death because he makes Prospero say--

          "We are such stuff
  As dreams are made of, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep."

Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was an
immortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed,--who, as a rule, is
wisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, however
much it may have engaged his speculations,--has gleams not unlike
those which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III.
2) of "_Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat iter
via_"--

  "Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars
    Who never should have died,
  A pathway cleaves among the stars,
    To meaner souls denied."

But they are only gleams, impassioned hopes, yearnings of the
unsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mystery
of life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us,
to make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for what
it has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal future, in which no
single faculty of enjoyment should be left.

Take from life the time spent in hopes or fears or regrets, and how
small the residue! For the same reason, therefore, that he prized life
intensely, Horace seems to have resolved to keep these consumers of
its hours as much at bay as possible. He would not look too far
forward even for a pleasure; for Hope, he knew, comes never
unaccompanied by her twin sister Fear. Like the Persian poet, Omar
Khayyám, this is ever in his thoughts--

       "What boots it to repeat,
  How Time is slipping underneath our feet?
    Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday,
  Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?".

To-day--that alone is ours. Let us welcome and note what it brings,
and, if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our
eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of an
irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on your
heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the
best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he
knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never
learn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue
glories between To-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter, and
draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?"
Horace would have hailed a brother in the philosopher of New England.

Even in inviting Maecenas to his Sabine farm (Odes, III. 29), he does
not think it out of place to remind the minister of state, worn with
the cares of government, and looking restlessly ahead to anticipate
its difficulties, that it may, after all, be wiser not to look so far
ahead, or to trouble himself about contingencies which may never
arise. We must not think that Horace undervalued that essential
quality of true statesmanship, the "_animus rerum prudens_"
(Odes, IV. 9), the forecasting spirit that "looks into the seeds of
Time," and reads the issues of events while they are still far off. He
saw and prized the splendid fruits of the exercise of this very power
in the growing tranquillity and strength of the Roman empire. But the
wisest may over-study a subject. Maecenas may have been working too
hard, and losing under the pressure something of his usual calmness;
and Horace, while urging him to escape from town for a few days, may
have had it in view to insinuate the suggestion, that Jove smiles, not
at the common mortal merely, but even at the sagacious statesman, who
is over-anxious about the future--"_ultra fas trepidat_"--and to
remind him that, after all,

  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
  Rough-hew them how we may."

Dryden's splendid paraphrase of this Ode is one of the glories of our
literature, but it is a paraphrase, and a version closer to the
original may be more appropriate here:--

  "Scion of Tuscan kings, in store
    I've laid a cask of mellow wine,
  That never has been broached before.
    I've roses, too, for wreaths to twine,
  And Nubian nut, that for thy hair
  An oil shall yield of fragrance rare.

       *       *       *       *       *

  "The plenty quit, that only palls,
    And, turning from the cloud-capped pile
  That towers above thy palace halls,
    Forget to worship for a while
  The privileges Rome enjoys,
  Her smoke, her splendour, and her noise.

  "It is the rich who relish best
    To dwell at times from state aloof;
  And simple suppers, neatly dressed,
    Beneath a poor man's humble roof,
  With neither pall nor purple there,
  Have smoothed ere now the brow of care.

         *       *       *       *       *

  "Now with his spent and languid flocks
    The wearied shepherd seeks the shade,
  The river cool, the shaggy rocks,
    That overhang the tangled glade,
  And by the stream no breeze's gush
  Disturbs the universal hush.

  "Thou dost devise with sleepless zeal
    What course may best the state beseem,
  And, fearful for the City's weal,
    Weigh'st anxiously each hostile scheme
  That may be hatching far away
  In Scythia, India, or Cathay.

  "Most wisely Jove in thickest night
    The issues of the future veils,
  And laughs at the self-torturing wight
    Who with imagined terrors quails.
  The present only is thine own,
  Then use it well, ere it has flown.

  "All else which may by time be bred
    Is like a river of the plain,
  Now gliding gently o'er its bed
    Along to the Etruscan main,
  Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast,
  Uprooted trees, and boulders vast,

  "And flocks, and houses, all in drear
    Confusion tossed from shore to shore,
  While mountains far, and forests near
    Reverberate the rising roar,
  When lashing rains among the hills
  To fury wake the quiet rills.

  "Lord of himself that man will be,
    And happy in his life alway,
  Who still at eve can say with free
    Contented soul, 'I've lived to-day!
  Let Jove to-morrow, if he will,
  With blackest clouds the welkin fill,

  "'Or flood it all with sunlight pure,
    Yet from the past he cannot take
  Its influence, for that is sure,
    Nor can he mar or bootless make
  Whate'er of rapture and delight
  The hours have borne us in their flight.'"

The poet here passes, by one of those sudden transitions for which he
is remarkable, into the topic of the fickleness of fortune, which
seems to have no immediate connection with what has gone before,--but
only seems, for this very fickleness is but a fresh reason for making
ourselves, by self-possession and a just estimate of what is essential
to happiness, independent of the accidents of time or chance.

  "Fortune, who with malicious glee
    Her merciless vocation plies,
  Benignly smiling now on me,
    Now on another, bids him rise,
  And in mere wantonness of whim
  Her favours shifts from me to him.

  "I laud her whilst by me she holds,
    But if she spread her pinions swift,
  I wrap me in my virtue's folds,
    And, yielding back her every gift,
  Take refuge in the life so free
  Of bare but honest poverty.

  "You will not find me, when the mast
    Groans 'neath the stress of southern gales,
  To wretched prayers rush off, nor cast
    Vows to the great gods, lest my bales
  From Tyre or Cyprus sink, to be
  Fresh booty for the hungry sea.

  "When others then in wild despair
    To save their cumbrous wealth essay,
  I to the vessel's skiff repair,
    And, whilst the Twin Stars light my way,
  Safely the breeze my little craft
  Shall o'er the Aegean billows waft."

Maecenas was of a melancholy temperament, and liable to great
depression of spirits. Not only was his health at no time robust, but
he was constitutionally prone to fever, which more than once proved
nearly fatal to him. On his first appearance in the theatre after one
of these dangerous attacks, he was received with vehement cheers, and
Horace alludes twice to this incident in his Odes, as if he knew that
it had given especial pleasure to his friend. To mark the event the
poet laid up in his cellar a jar of Sabine wine, and some years
afterwards he invites Maecenas to come and partake of it in this
charming lyric (Odes, I. 20):--

  "Our common Sabine wine shall be
  The only drink I'll give to thee,
    In modest goblets, too;
  'Twas stored in crock of Grecian delf,
  Dear knight Maecenas, by myself,
    That very day when through
  The theatre thy plaudits rang,
  And sportive echo caught the clang,
    And answered from the banks
  Of thine own dear paternal stream,
  Whilst Vatican renewed the theme
    Of homage and of thanks!
  Old Caecuban, the very best,
  And juice in vats Calenian pressed,
    You drink at home, I know:
  My cups no choice Falernian fills,
  Nor unto them do Formiae's hills
    Impart a tempered glow."

About the same time that Maecenas recovered from this fever, Horace
made a narrow escape from being killed by the fall of a tree, and,
what to him was a great aggravation of the disaster, upon his own
beloved farm (Odes, II. 13). He links the two events together as a
marked coincidence in the following Ode (II. 17). His friend had
obviously been a prey to one of his fits of low spirits, and vexing
the kindly soul of the poet by gloomy anticipations of an early death.
Suffering, as Maecenas did, from those terrible attacks of
sleeplessness to which he was subject, and which he tried
ineffectually to soothe by the plash of falling water and the sound of
distant music, [Footnote: Had Horace this in his mind when he wrote
_"Non avium citharoeque cantus somnum reducent_?"--(Odes, III.
1.) "Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre / Shall his lost sleep
restore."] such misgivings were only too natural. The case was too
serious this time for Horace to think of rallying his friend into a
brighter humour. He may have even seen good cause to share his fears;
for his heart is obviously moved to its very depths, and his sympathy
and affection well out in words, the pathos of which is still as fresh
as the day they first came with comfort to the saddened spirits of
Maecenas himself.

  "Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears?
    Why, oh Maecenas, why?
  Before thee lies a train of happy years:
    Yes, nor the gods nor I
  Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust,
  Who art my stay, my glory, and my trust!

  "Ah, if untimely Fate should snatch thee hence,
    Thee, of my soul a part,
  Why should I linger on, with deadened sense,
    And ever-aching heart,
  A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine?
  No, no, one day shall see thy death and mine!

  "Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath;
    Yes, we shall go, shall go,
  Hand link'd in hand, whene'er thou leadest, both
    The last sad road below!
  Me neither the Chimaera's fiery breath,
  Nor Gyges, even could Gyges rise from death,

  "With all his hundred hands from thee shall sever;
    For in such sort it hath
  Pleased the dread Fates, and Justice potent ever,
    To interweave our path. [1]
  Beneath whatever aspect thou wert born,
  Libra, or Scorpion fierce, or Capricorn,

  "The blustering tyrant of the western deep,
    This well I know, my friend,
  Our stars in wondrous wise one orbit keep,
    And in one radiance blend.
  From thee were Saturn's baleful rays afar
  Averted by great Jove's refulgent star,

  "And His hand stayed Fate's downward-swooping wing,
    When thrice with glad acclaim
  The teeming theatre was heard to ring,
    And thine the honoured name:
  So had the falling timber laid me low,
  But Pan in mercy warded off the blow,

  "Pan who keeps watch o'er easy souls like mine.
    Remember, then, to rear
  In gratitude to Jove a votive shrine,
    And slaughter many a steer,
  Whilst I, as fits, an humbler tribute pay,
  And a meek lamb upon his altar lay."

[1]
   So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:--
    "He was my friend, the truest friend on earth;
    A strong and mighty influence joined our birth."

What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen,
did happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas "first deceased;" and
Horace, like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph,

                       "For a little tried
  To live without him, liked it not, and died."

But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, which
must have been about the year B.C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine.
Maecenas lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, we
may believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when his
pulse was low, and his heart sick and weary.

Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing Books
I. and II., which he gave to the world (B.C. 24). The first of these
Odes, like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. They
had for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately in
circulation several years before. That they should have met with
success was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Rome
must have felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of a
more recent time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which was
their ideal, into their native verse; and a feeling of national pride
must have helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his ear
upon the lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayed
to imitate them in their own tongue,--a mistake as great as for Goethe
or Heine to have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into the
language of Herrick or of Burns. But Horace was preserved from
perseverance in this mistake by his natural good sense, or, as he puts
it himself, with a fair poetic licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome's
great founder Quirinus warning him in a dream, that

  "To think of adding to the mighty throng
  Of the great paragons of Grecian song,
  Were no less mad an act than his who should
  Into a forest carry logs of wood."

These exercises may not, however, have been without their value in
enabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into his
native verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if we
except Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was the
last. "Of lyrists," says Quintilian, "Horace is alone, one might say,
worthy to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full of
playful delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as well
as in expression, shows a most happy daring." Time has confirmed the
verdict; and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words of
one of our greatest scholars:--

"Horace's style," says Mr H. A. J. Munro, in the introduction to his
edition of the poet, "is throughout his own, borrowed from none who
preceded him, successfully imitated by none who came after him. The
Virgilian heroic was appropriated by subsequent generations of poets,
and adapted to their purposes with signal success. The hendecasyllable
and scazon of Catullus became part and parcel of the poetic heritage
of Rome, and Martial employs them only less happily than their
matchless creator. But the moulds in which Horace cast his lyrical and
his satirical thoughts were broken at his death. The style neither of
Persius nor of Juvenal has the faintest resemblance to that of their
common master. Statius, whose hendecasyllables are passable enough,
has given us one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode, which recall the bald and
constrained efforts of a modern schoolboy. I am sure he could not have
written any two consecutive stanzas of Horace; and if he could not,
who could?"

Before he published the first two books of his Odes, Horace had fairly
felt his wings, and knew they could carry him gracefully and well. He
no longer hesitates, as he had done while a writer of Satires only (p.
55), to claim the title of poet; but at the same time he throws
himself, in his introductory Ode, with a graceful deference, upon the
judgment of Maecenas. Let that only seal his lyrics with approval, and
he will feel assured of his title to rank with the great sons of
song:--

  "Do thou but rank me 'mong
  The sacred bards of lyric song,
  I'll soar beyond the lists of time,
  And strike the stars with head sublime."

In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, the
poet gives way to a burst of joyous anticipation of future fame,
figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the then
known regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book several
years afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which,
unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. In
both he alludes to the lowliness of his birth, speaking of himself in
the former as a child of poor parents--"_pauperum sanguis
parentum_;" in the latter as having risen to eminence from a mean
estate-"_ex humili potens_." These touches of egotism, the
sallies of some brighter hour, are not merely venial; they are
delightful in a man so habitually modest.

  "I've reared a monument, my own,
    More durable than brass;
  Yea, kingly pyramids of stone
    In height it doth surpass.

  "Rain shall not sap, nor driving blast
    Disturb its settled base,
  Nor countless ages rolling past
    Its symmetry deface.

  "I shall not wholly die. Some part,
    Nor that a little, shall
  Escape the dark Destroyer's dart,
    And his grim festival.

  "For long as with his Vestals mute
    Rome's Pontifex shall climb
  The Capitol, my fame shall shoot
    Fresh buds through future time.

  "Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came
    Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde
  Of rustic boors to sway, my name
    Shall be a household word;

  "As one who rose from mean estate,
    The first with poet fire
  Aeolic song to modulate
    To the Italian lyre.

  "Then grant, Melpomene, thy son
    Thy guerdon proud to wear,
  And Delphic laurels, duly won.
    Bind thou upon my hair!"



CHAPTER IX.

HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS.--HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE.


No intimate friend of Maecenas was likely to be long a stranger to
Augustus; and it is most improbable that Augustus, who kept up his
love of good literature amid all the distractions of conquest and
empire, should not have early sought the acquaintance of a man of such
conspicuous ability as Horace. But when they first became known to
each other is uncertain. In more than one of the Epodes Horace speaks
of him, but not in terms to imply personal acquaintance. Some years
further on it is different. When Trebatius (Satires, II. 1) is urging
the poet, if write he must, to renounce satire, and to sing of
Caesar's triumphs, from which he would reap gain as well as glory,
Horace replies,--

  "Most worthy sir, that's just the thing
  I'd like especially to sing;
  But at the task my spirits faint,
  For 'tis not every one can paint
  Battalions, with their bristling wall
  Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul,
  With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed,
  Or Parthian stricken from his steed."

Then why not sing, rejoins Trebatius, his justice and his fortitude,

  "Like sage Lucilius, in his lays
  To Scipio Africanus' praise?"

The reply is that of a man who had obviously been admitted to personal
contact with the Caesar, and, with instinctive good taste, recoiled
from doing what he knew would be unacceptable to him, unless called
for by some very special occasion:--

  "When time and circumstance suggest,
  I shall not fail to do my best;
  But never words of mine shall touch
  Great Caesar's ear, but only such
  As are to the occasion due,
  And spring from my conviction, too;
  For stroke him with an awkward hand,
  And he kicks out--you understand?"

an allusion, no doubt, to the impatience entertained by Augustus, to
which Suetonius alludes, of the indiscreet panegyrics of poetasters by
which he was persecuted. The gossips of Rome clearly believed
(Satires, II. 6) that the poet was intimate with Caesar; for he is "so
close to the gods"--that is, on such a footing with Augustus and his
chief advisers--that they assume, as a matter of course, he must have
early tidings of all the most recent political news at first hand.
However this may be, by the time the Odes were published Horace had
overcome any previous scruples, and sang in no measured terms the
praises of him, the back-stroke of whose rebuke he had professed
himself so fearful of provoking.

All Horace's prepossessions must have been against one of the leaders
before whose opposition Brutus, the ideal hero of his youthful
enthusiasm, had succumbed. Neither were the sanguinary proscriptions
and ruthless spoliations by which the triumvirate asserted its power,
and from a large share of the guilt of which Augustus could not shake
himself free, calculated to conciliate his regards. He had much to
forget and to forgive before he could look without aversion upon the
blood-stained avenger of the great Caesar. But in times like those in
which Horace's lot was cast, we do not judge of men or things as we do
when social order is unbroken, when political crime is never condoned,
and the usual standards of moral judgment are rigidly enforced. Horace
probably soon came to see, what is now very apparent, that when Brutus
and his friends struck down Caesar, they dealt a deathblow to what,
but for this event, might have proved to be a well-ordered government.
Liberty was dead long before Caesar aimed at supremacy. It was dead
when individuals like Sulla and Marius had become stronger than the
laws; and the death of Caesar was, therefore, but the prelude to fresh
disasters, and to the ultimate investiture with absolute power of
whoever, among the competitors for it, should come triumphantly out of
what was sure to be a protracted and a sanguinary struggle. In what
state did Horace find Italy after his return from Philippi? Drenched
in the blood of its citizens, desolated by pillage, harassed by daily
fears of internecine conflict at home and of invasion from abroad, its
sovereignty a stake played for by political gamblers. In such a state
of things it was no longer the question, how the old Roman
constitution was to be restored, but how the country itself was to be
saved from ruin. Prestige was with the nephew of the Caesar whose
memory the Roman populace had almost from his death worshipped as
divine; and whose conspicuous ability and address, as well as those of
his friends, naturally attracted to his side the ablest survivors of
the party of Brutus. The very course of events pointed to him as the
future chief of the state. Lepidus, by the sheer weakness and
indecision of his character, soon went to the wall; and the power of
Antony was weakened by his continued absence from Rome, and ultimately
destroyed by the malign influence exerted upon his character by the
fascinations of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The disastrous failure
of his Parthian expedition (B.C. 36), and the tidings that reached
Rome from time to time of the mad extravagance of his private life, of
his abandonment of the character of a Roman citizen, and his
assumption of the barbaric pomp and habits of an oriental despot, made
men look to his great rival as the future head of the state,
especially as they saw that rival devoting all his powers to the task
of reconciling divisions and restoring peace to a country exhausted by
a long series of civil broils, of giving security to life and property
at home, and making Rome once more a name of awe throughout the world.
Was it, then, otherwise than natural that Horace, in common with many
of his friends, should have been not only content to forget the past,
with its bloody and painful records, but should even have attached
himself cordially to the party of Augustus? Whatever the private aims
of the Caesar may have been, his public life showed that he had the
welfare of his country strongly at heart, and the current of events
had made it clear that he at least was alone able to end the strife of
faction by assuming the virtual supremacy of the state.

Pollio, Messalla, Varus, and others of the Brutus party, have not been
denounced as renegades because they arrived at a similar conclusion,
and lent the whole influence of their abilities and their names to the
cause of Augustus. Horace has not been so fortunate; and because he
has expressed,--what was no doubt the prevailing feeling of his
countrymen,--gratitude to Augustus for quelling civil strife, for
bringing glory to the empire, and giving peace, security, and
happiness to his country by the power of his arms and the wisdom of
his administration, the poet has been called a traitor to the nobler
principles of his youth--an obsequious flatterer of a man whom he
ought to have denounced to posterity as a tyrant. _Adroit
esclave_ is the epithet applied to him in this respect by Voltaire,
who idolises him as a moralist and poet. But it carries little weight
in the mouth of the cynic who could fawn with more than courtierly
complaisance on a Frederick or a Catherine, and weave graceful
flatteries for the Pompadour, and who "dearly loved a lord" in his
practice, however he may have sneered at aristocracy in his writings.
But if we put ourselves as far as we can into the poet's place, we
shall come to a much more lenient conclusion. He could no doubt
appreciate thoroughly the advantages of a free republic or of a purely
constitutional government, and would, of course, have preferred either
of these for his country. But while theory pointed in that direction,
facts were all pulling the opposite way. The materials for the
establishment of such a state of things did not exist in a strong
middle class or an equal balance of parties. The choice lay between
the anarchy of a continued strife of selfish factions, and the
concentration of power in the hands of some individual who should be
capable of enforcing law at home and commanding respect abroad. So at
least Horace obviously thought; and surely it is reasonable to suppose
that the man, whose integrity and judgment in all other matters are
indisputable, was more likely than the acutest critic or historian of
modern times can possibly be to form a just estimate of what was the
possible best for his country, under the actual circumstances of the
time.

Had Horace at once become the panegyrist of the Caesar, the sincerity
of his convictions might have, been open to question. But thirteen
years at least had elapsed between the battle of Philippi and the
composition of the Second Ode of the First Book, which is the first
direct acknowledgment by Horace of Augustus as the chief of the state.
This Ode is directly inspired by gratitude for the cessation of civil
strife, and the skilful administration which had brought things to the
point when the whole fighting force of the kingdom, which had so long
been wasted in that strife, could be directed to spreading the glory
of the Roman name, and securing its supremacy throughout its conquered
provinces. The allusions to Augustus in this and others of the earlier
Odes are somewhat cold and formal in their tone. There is a visible
increase in glow and energy in those of a later date, when, as years
went on, the Caesar established fresh claims on the gratitude of Rome
by his firm, sagacious, and moderate policy, by the general prosperity
which grew up under his administration, by the success of his arms, by
the great public works which enhanced the splendour and convenience of
the capital, by the restoration of the laws, and by his zealous
endeavour to stem the tide of immorality which had set in during the
protracted disquietudes of the civil wars. It is true that during this
time Augustus was also establishing the system of Imperialism, which
contained in itself the germs of tyranny, with all its brutal excesses
on the one hand, and its debasing influence upon the subject nation on
the other. But we who have seen into what it developed must remember
that these baneful fruits of the system were of lengthened growth; and
Horace, who saw no farther into the future than the practical
politicians of his time, may be forgiven if he dwelt only upon the
immediate blessings which the government of Augustus effected, and the
peace and security which came with a tenfold welcome after the long
agonies of the civil wars.

The glow and sincerity of feeling of which we have spoken are
conspicuous in the following Ode (IV. 2), addressed to Iulus Antonius,
the son of the triumvir, of whose powers as a poet nothing is known
beyond the implied recognition of them contained in this Ode. The
Sicambri, with two other German tribes, had crossed the Rhine, laid
waste part of the Roman territory in Gaul, and inflicted so serious a
blow on Lollius, the Roman legate, that Augustus himself repaired to
Gaul to retrieve the defeat and resettle the province. This he
accomplished triumphantly (B.C. 17); and we may assume that the Ode
was written while the tidings of his success were still fresh, and the
Romans, who had been greatly agitated by the defeat of Lollius, were
looking eagerly forward to his return. Apart from, its other merits,
the Ode is interesting from the estimate Horace makes in it of his own
powers, and his avowal of the labour which his verses cost him.

  "Iulus, he who'd rival Pindar's fame,
  On waxen wings doth sweep
  The Empyréan steep,
  To fall like Icarus, and with his name
  Endue the glassy deep.

  "Like to a mountain stream, that roars
  From bank to bank along,
  When Autumn rains are strong,
  So deep-mouthed Pindar lifts his voice, and pours
  His fierce tumultuous song.

  "Worthy Apollo's laurel wreath,
  Whether he strike the lyre
  To love and young desire,
  While bold and lawless numbers grow beneath
  His mastering touch of fire;

  "Or sings of gods, and monarchs sprung
  Of gods, that overthrew
  The Centaurs, hideous crew,
  And, fearless of the monster's fiery tongue,
  The dread Chimaera slew;

  "Or those the Eléan palm doth lift
  To heaven, for wingèd steed,
  Or sturdy arm decreed,
  Giving, than hundred statues nobler gift,
  The poet's deathless meed;

  "Or mourns the youth snatched from his bride,
  Extols his manhood clear,
  And to the starry sphere
  Exalts his golden virtues, scattering wide
  The gloom of Orcus drear.

  "When the Dircéan swan doth climb
  Into the azure sky,
  There poised in ether high,
  He courts each gale, and floats on wing sublime,
  Soaring with steadfast eye.

  "I, like the tiny bee, that sips
  The fragrant thyme, and strays
  Humming through leafy ways,
  By Tibur's sedgy banks, with trembling lips
  Fashion my toilsome lays.

  "But thou, when up the sacred steep
  Caesar, with garlands crowned,
  Leads the Sicambrians bound,
  With bolder hand the echoing strings shalt sweep,
  And bolder measures sound.

  "Caesar, than whom a nobler son
  The Fates and Heaven's kind powers
  Ne'er gave this earth of ours,
  Nor e'er will give though backward time should run
  To its first golden hours.

  "Thou too shalt sing the joyful days,
  The city's festive throng,
  When Caesar, absent long,
  At length returns,--the Forum's silent ways,
  Serene from strife and wrong.

  "Then, though in statelier power it lack,
  My voice shall swell the lay,
  And sing, 'Oh, glorious day,
  Oh, day thrice blest, that gives great Caesar back
  To Rome, from hostile fray!'

  "'Io Triumphe!' thrice the cry;
  'Io Triumphe!' loud
  Shall shout the echoing crowd
  The city through, and to the gods on high
  Raise incense like a cloud.

"Ten bulls shall pay thy sacrifice,
  With whom ten kine shall bleed:
  I to the fane will lead
  A yearling of the herd, of modest size,
  From the luxuriant mead,

  "Horned like the moon, when her pale light
  Which three brief days have fed,
  She trimmeth, and dispread
  On his broad brows a spot of snowy white,
  All else a tawny red."

Augustus did not return from Gaul, as was expected when this Ode was
written, but remained there for about two years. That this protracted
absence caused no little disquietude in Rome is apparent from the
following Ode (IV. 5):--

  "From gods benign descended, thou
  Best guardian of the fates of Rome,
  Too long already from thy home
  Hast thou, dear chief, been absent now;

  "Oh, then return, the pledge redeem,
  Thou gav'st the Senate, and once more
  Its light to all the land restore;
  For when thy face, like spring-tide's gleam,

  "Its brightness on the people sheds,
  Then glides the day more sweetly by,
  A brighter blue pervades the sky,
  The sun a richer radiance spreads!

  "As on her boy the mother calls,
  Her boy, whom envious tempests keep
  Beyond the vexed Carpathian deep,
  From his dear home, till winter falls,

  "And still with vow and prayer she cries,
  Still gazes on the winding shore,
  So yearns the country evermore
  For Caesar, with fond, wistful eyes.

  "For safe the herds range field and fen,
  Full-headed stand the shocks of grain,
  Our sailors sweep the peaceful main,
  And man can trust his fellow-men.

  "No more adulterers stain our beds,
  Laws, morals, both that taint efface,
  The husband in the child we trace,
  And close on crime sure vengeance treads.

  "The Parthian, under Caesar's reign,
  Or icy Scythian, who can dread,
  Or all the tribes barbarian bred
  By Germany, or ruthless Spain?

  "Now each man, basking on his slopes,
  Weds to his widowed trees the vine,
  Then, as he gaily quaffs his wine,
  Salutes thee god of all his hopes;

  "And prayers to thee devoutly sends,
  With deep libations; and, as Greece
  Ranks Castor and great Hercules,
  Thy godship with his Lares blends.

  "Oh, may'st thou on Hesperia shine,
  Her chief, her joy, for many a day!
  Thus, dry-lipped, thus at morn we pray,
  Thus pray at eve, when flushed with wine."

"It was perhaps the policy of Augustus," says Macleane, "to make his
absence felt; and we may believe that the language of Horace, which
bears much more the impress of real feeling than of flattery,
represented the sentiments of great numbers at Rome, who felt the want
of that presiding genius which had brought the city through its long
troubles, and given it comparative peace. There could not be a more
comprehensive picture of security and rest obtained through the
influence of one mind than is represented in this Ode, if we except
that with which no merely mortal language can compare (Isaiah, xi. and
lxv.; Micah, iv.)"

We must not assume, from the reference in this and other Odes to the
divine origin of Augustus, that this was seriously Relieved in by
Horace, any more than it was by Augustus himself. Popular credulity
ascribed divine honours to great men; and this was the natural growth
of a religious system in which a variety of gods and demigods played
so large a part. Julius Caesar claimed-no doubt, for the purpose of
impressing the Roman populace-a direct descent from _Alma Venus
Genitrix_, as Antony did from Hercules. Altars and temples were
dedicated to great statesmen and generals; and the Romans, among the
other things which they borrowed from the East, borrowed also the
practice of conferring the honours of apotheosis upon their rulers,--
the visible agents, in their estimation, of the great invisible power
that governed the world. To speak of their divine descent and
attributes became part of the common forms of the poetical vocabulary,
not inappropriate to the exalted pitch of lyrical enthusiasm. Horace
only falls into the prevailing strain, and is not compromising himself
by servile flattery, as some have thought, when he speaks in this Ode
of Augustus as "from gods benign descended," and in others as "the
heaven-sent son of Maia" (I. 2), or as reclining among the gods and
quaffing nectar "with lip of deathless bloom" (III. 3). In lyrical
poetry all this was quite in place. But when the poet contracts his
wings, and drops from its empyrean to the level of the earth, he
speaks to Augustus and of him simply as he thought (Epistles, II. 1)--
as a man on whose shoulders the weight of empire rested, who protected
the commonwealth by the vigour of his armies, and strove to grace it
by "sweeter manners, purer laws." He adds, it is true,--

  "You while in life are honoured as divine,
  And vows and oaths are taken at your shrine;
  So Rome pays honour to her man of men,
  Ne'er seen on earth before, ne'er to be seen again "--(C.)

but this is no more than a statement of a fact. Altars were erected to
Augustus, much against his will, and at these men made their prayers
or plighted their oaths every day. There is not a word to imply either
that Augustus took these divine honours, or that Horace joined in
ascribing them, seriously.

It is of some importance to the argument in favour of Horace's
sincerity and independence, that he had no selfish end to serve by
standing well with Augustus. We have seen that he was more than
content with the moderate fortune secured to him by Maecenas. Wealth
had no charms for him. His ambition was to make his mark as a poet.
His happiness lay in being his own master. There is no trace of his
having at any period been swayed by other views. What then had he to
gain by courting the favour of the head of the state? But the argument
goes further. When Augustus found the pressure of his private
correspondence too great, as his public duties increased, and his
health, never robust, began to fail, he offered Horace the post of his
private secretary. The poet declined on the ground of health. He
contrived to do so in such a way as to give no umbrage by the refusal;
nay, the letters which are quoted in the life of Horace ascribed to
Suetonius show that Augustus begged the poet to treat him on the same
footing as if he had accepted the office, and actually become a member
of his household. "Our friend Septimius," he says in another letter,
"will tell you how much you are in my thoughts; for something led to
my speaking of you before him. Neither, if you were too proud to
accept my friendship, do I mean to deal with you in the same spirit."
There could have been little of the courtier in the man who was thus
addressed. Horace apparently felt that Augustus and himself were
likely to be better friends at a distance. He had seen enough of court
life to know how perilous it is to that independence which was his
dearest possession. "_Dulcis inexpertis cultura potentis amici,-
Expertus metuit_," is his ultimate conviction on this head
(Epistles, I. 18)--

  "Till time has made us wise,
  'tis sweet to wait
  Upon the smiles and favour of the great;
  But he that once has ventured that career
  Shrinks from its perils with instinctive fear."

In another place (Epistles, I. 10) he says, "_Fuge magna; licet sub
paupere tecto Reges et regum vita praecurrere amicos_"--

  "Keep clear of courts; a homely life transcends
  The vaunted bliss of monarchs and their friends._" (C.)

But apart from such considerations, life would have lost its charm for
Horace, had he put himself within the trammels of official service. At
no time would these have been tolerable to him; but as he advanced
into middle age, the freedom of entire independence, the refreshing
solitudes of the country, leisure for study and reflection, became
more and more precious to him. The excitements and gaieties and social
enjoyments of Rome were all very well, but a little of them went a
great way. They taxed his delicate health, and they interfered with
the graver studies, to which he became daily more inclined as the
years went by. Not all his regard for Maecenas himself, deep as it
was, could induce him to stay in town to enliven the leisure hours of
the statesman by his companionship at the expense of those calm
seasons of communion with nature and the books of the great men of
old, in which he could indulge his irresistible craving for some
solution of the great problems of life and philosophy. Men like
Maecenas, whose power and wealth are practically unbounded, are apt to
become importunate even in their friendships, and to think that
everything should give way to the gratification of their wishes.
Something of this spirit had obviously been shown towards Horace.
Maecenas may have expressed himself in a tone of complaint, either to
the poet himself, or in some way that had reached his ears, about his
prolonged absence in the country, which implied that he considered his
bounties had given him a claim upon the time of Horace which was not
sufficiently considered. This could only have been a burst of
momentary impatience, for the nature of Maecenas was too generous to
admit of any other supposition. But Horace felt it; and with the
utmost delicacy of tact, but with a decision that left no room for
mistake, he lost no time in letting Maecenas know, that rather than
brook control upon his movements, however slight, he will cheerfully
forego the gifts of his friend, dear as they are, and grateful for
them as he must always be. To this we owe the following Epistle (I.
7). That Maecenas loved his friend all the better for it--he could
scarcely respect him more than he seems to have done from the first--
we may be very sure.

  Only five days, I said, I should be gone;
  Yet August's past, and still I linger on.
  'Tis true I've broke my promise. But if you
  Would have me well, as I am sure you do,
  Grant me the same indulgence, which, were I
  Laid up with illness, you would not deny,
  Although I claim it only for the fear
  Of being ill, this deadly time of year,
  When autumn's clammy heat and early fruits
  Deck undertakers out, and inky mutes;
  When young mammas, and fathers to a man,
  With terrors for their sons and heirs are wan;
  When stifling anteroom, or court, distils
  Fevers wholesale, and breaks the seals of wills.
  Should winter swathe the Alban fields in snow,
  Down to the sea your poet means to go,
  To nurse his ailments, and, in cosy nooks
  Close huddled up, to loiter o'er his books.
  But once let zephyrs blow, sweet friend, and then,
  If then you'll have him, he will quit his den,
  With the first swallow hailing you again.
  When you bestowed on me what made me rich,
  Not in the spirit was it done, in which
  Your bluff Calabrian on a guest will thrust
  His pears: "Come, eat, man, eat--you can, you must!"
  "Indeed, indeed, my friend, I've had enough."
  "Then take some home!" "You're too obliging." "Stuff!
  If you have pockets full of them, I guess,
  Your little lads will like you none the less."
  "I really can't--thanks all the same!" "You won't?
  Why then the pigs shall have them, if you don't."
  'Tis fools and prodigals, whose gifts consist
  Of what they spurn, or what is never missed:
  Such tilth will never yield, and never could,
  A harvest save of coarse ingratitude.
  A wise good man is evermore alert,
  When he encounters it, to own desert;
  Nor is he one, on whom you'd try to pass
  For sterling currency mere lackered brass.
  For me, 'twill be my aim myself to raise
  Even to the flattering level of your praise;
  But if you'd have me always by your side,
  Then give me back the chest deep-breathed and wide,
  The low brow clustered with its locks of black,
  The flow of talk, the ready laugh, give back,
  The woes blabbed o'er our wine, when Cinara chose
  To teaze me, cruel flirt--ah, happy woes!
  Through a small hole a field-mouse, lank and thin,
  Had squeezed his way into a barley bin,
  And, having fed to fatness on the grain,
  Tried to get out, but tried and squeezed in vain.
  "Friend," cried a weasel, loitering thereabout,
  "Lean you went in, and lean you must get out."
  Now, at my head if folks this story throw,
  Whate'er I have I'm ready to forego;
  I am not one, with forced meats in my throat,
  Fine saws on poor men's dreamless sleep to quote.
  Unless in soul as very air I'm free,
  Not all the wealth of Araby for me.
  You've ofttimes praised the reverent, yet true
  Devotion, which my heart has shown for you.
  King, father, I have called you, nor been slack
  In words of gratitude behind your back;
  But even your bounties, if you care to try,
  You'll find I can renounce without a sigh.
  Not badly young Telemachus replied,
  Ulysses' son, that man so sorely tried:
  "No mettled steeds in Ithaca we want;
  The ground is broken there, the herbage scant.
  Let me, Atrides, then, thy gifts decline,
  In thy hands they are better far than mine!"
  Yes, little things fit little folks. In Rome
  The Great I never feel myself at home.
  Let me have Tibur, and its dreamful ease,
  Or soft Tarentum's nerve-relaxing breeze.
    Philip, the famous counsel, on a day--
  A burly man, and wilful in his way--
  From court returning, somewhere about two,
  And grumbling, for his years were far from few,
  That the Carinae [1] were so distant, though
  But from the Forum half a mile or so,
  Descried a fellow in a barber's booth,
  All by himself, his chin fresh shaved and smooth,
  Trimming his nails, and with the easy air
  Of one uncumbered by a wish or care.
  "Demetrius!"--'twas his page, a boy of tact,
  In comprehension swift, and swift in act,
  "Go, ascertain his rank, name, fortune; track
  His father, patron!" In a trice he's back.
  "An auction-crier, Volteius Mena, sir,
  Means poor enough, no spot on character,
  Good or to work or idle, get or spend,
  Has his own house, delights to see a friend,
  Fond of the play, and sure, when work is done,
  Of those who crowd the Campus to make one."

  "I'd like to hear all from himself. Away,
  Bid him come dine with me--at once--to-day!"
  Mena some trick in the request divines,
  Turns it all ways, then civilly declines.
  "What! Says me nay?" "'Tis even so, sir. Why?
  Can't say. Dislikes you, or, more likely, shy."
  Next morning Philip searches Mena out,
  And finds him vending to a rabble rout
  Old crazy lumber, frippery of the worst,
  And with all courtesy salutes him first.
  Mena pleads occupation, ties of trade,
  His service else he would by dawn have paid,
  At Philip's house,--was grieved to think, that how
  He should have failed to notice him till now.
  "On one condition I accept your plea.
  You come this afternoon, and dine with me."
  "Yours to command." "Be there, then, sharp at four!
  Now go, work hard, and make your little more!"
  At dinner Mena rattled on, expressed
  Whate'er came uppermost, then home to rest.
  The hook was baited craftily, and when
  The fish came nibbling ever and again,
  At morn a client, and, when asked to dine,
  Not now at all in humour to decline,
  Philip himself one holiday drove him down,
  To see his villa some few miles from town.
  Mena keeps praising up, the whole way there,
  The Sabine country, and the Sabine air;
  So Philip sees his fish is fairly caught,
  And smiles with inward triumph at the thought.
  Resolved at any price to have his whim,--
  For that is best of all repose to him,--
  Seven hundred pounds he gives him there and then,
  Proffers on easy terms as much again,
  And so persuades him, that, with tastes like his,
  He ought to buy a farm;--so bought it is.
  Not to detain you longer than enough,
  The dapper cit becomes a farmer bluff,
  Talks drains and subsoils, ever on the strain
  Grows lean, and ages with the lust of gain.
  But when his sheep are stolen, when murrains smite
  His goats, and his best crops are killed with blight,
  When at the plough his oxen drop down dead,
  Stung with his losses, up one night from bed
  He springs, and on a cart-horse makes his way,
  All wrath, to Philip's house, by break of day.
  "How's this?" cries Philip, seeing him unshorn
  And shabby. "Why, Vulteius, you look worn.
  You work, methinks, too long upon the stretch."
  "Oh, that's not it, my patron. Call me wretch!
  That is the only fitting name for me.
  Oh, by thy Genius, by the gods that be
  Thy hearth's protectors, I beseech, implore,
  Give me, oh, give me back my life of yore!"
    If for the worse you find you've changed your place,
  Pause not to think, but straight your steps retrace.
  In every state the maxim still is true,
  On your own last take care to fit your shoe!

[1]
   The street where he lived, or, as we should say, "Ship Street." The
   name was due probably to the circumstance of models of ships being
   set up in it.



CHAPTER X.

DELICACY OF HORACE'S HEALTH.--HIS CHEERFULNESS.--LOVE OF BOOKS.--HIS
PHILOSOPHY PRACTICAL.--EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS.--DEATH.


Horace had probably passed forty when the Epistle just quoted was
written. Describing himself at forty-four (Epistles, I. 20), he says
he was "prematurely grey,"--his hair, as we have just seen, having
been originally black,--adding that he is

  "In person small, one to whom warmth is life,
  In temper hasty, yet averse from strife."

His health demanded constant care; and we find him writing (Epistles,
I. 15) to a friend, to ask what sort of climate and people are to be
found at Velia and Salernum,--the one a town of Lucania, the other of
Campania,--as he has been ordered by his doctor to give up his
favourite watering-place, Baiae, as too relaxing. This doctor was
Antonius Musa, a great apostle of the cold-water cure, by which he had
saved the life of Augustus when in extreme danger. The remedy
instantly became fashionable, and continued so until the Emperor's
nephew, the young Marcellus, died under the treatment. Horace's
inquiries are just such as a valetudinarian fond of his comforts would
be likely to make:--

  "Which place is best supplied with corn, d'ye think?
  Have they rain-water or fresh springs to drink?
  Their wines I care not for, when at my farm
  I can drink any sort without much harm;
  But at the sea I need a generous kind
  To warm my veins, and pass into my mind,
  Enrich me with new hopes, choice words supply,
  And make me comely in a lady's eye.
  Which tract is best for game? on which sea-coast
  Urchins and other fish abound the most?
  That so, when I return, my friends may see
A sleek Phaeacian [1] come to life in me:
  These things you needs must tell me, Vala dear,
  And I no less must act on what I hear." (C.)

[1]
   The Phaeacians were proverbially fond of good living.

Valetudinarian though he was, Horace maintains, in his later as in his
early writings, a uniform cheerfulness. This never forsakes him; for
life is a boon for which he is ever grateful. The gods have allotted
him an ample share of the means of enjoyment, and it is his own fault
if he suffers self-created worries or desires to vex him. By the
questions he puts to a friend in one of the latest of his Epistles
(II. 2), we see what was the discipline he applied to himself--

  "You're not a miser: has all other vice
  Departed in the train of avarice?
  Or do ambitious longings, angry fret,
  The terror of the grave, torment you yet?
  Can you make sport of portents, gipsy crones,
  Hobgoblins, dreams, raw head and bloody bones?
  Do you count up your birthdays year by year,
  And thank the gods with gladness and blithe cheer,
  O'erlook the failings of your friends, and grow
  Gentler and better as your sand runs low?" (C.)

And to this beautiful catalogue of what should be a good man's aims,
let us add the picture of himself which Horace gives us in another and
earlier Epistle (I. 18):--

  "For me, when freshened by my spring's pure cold,
  Which makes my villagers look pinched and old,
  What prayers are mine? 'O may I yet possess
  The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less!
  Let the few years that Fate may grant me still
  Be all my own, not held at others' will!
  Let me have books, and stores for one year hence,
  Nor make my life one flutter of suspense!'
    But I forbear; sufficient 'tis to pray
  To Jove for what he gives and takes away;
  Grant life, grant fortune, for myself I'll find
  That best of blessings--a contented mind." (C.)

"Let me have books!" These play a great part in Horace's life. They
were not to him, what Montaigne calls them, "a languid pleasure," but
rather as they were to Wordsworth--

  "A substantial world, both fresh and good,
  Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
  Our pastime and our happiness may grow."

Next to a dear friend, they were Horace's most cherished companions.
Not for amusement merely, and the listless luxury of the self-wrapt
lounger, were they prized by him, but as teachers to correct his
faults, to subdue his evil propensities, to develop his higher nature,
to purify his life (Epistles, I. 1), and to help him towards attaining
"that best of blessings, a contented mind:"--

  "Say, is your bosom fevered with the fire
  Of sordid avarice or unchecked desire?
  Know there are spells will help you to allay
  The pain, and put good part of it away.
  You're bloated by ambition? take advice;
  Yon book will ease you, if you read it _thrice_.
  Run through the list of faults; whate'er you be,
  Coward, pickthank, spitfire, drunkard, debauchee,
  Submit to culture patiently, you'll find
  Her charms can humanise the rudest mind." (C.)

Horace's taste was as catholic in philosophy as in literature. He was
of no school, but sought in the teachings of them all such principles
as would make life easier, better, and happier: "_Condo et compono,
quae mox depromere possum_"--

  "I search and search, and where I find I lay
  The wisdom up against a rainy day." (C.)

He is evermore urging his friends to follow his example;--to resort
like himself to these "spells,"--the _verba et voces_, by which
he brought his own restless desires and disquieting aspirations into
subjection, and fortified himself in the bliss of contentment. He saw
they were letting the precious hours slip from their grasp,--hours
that might have been so happy, but were so weighted with disquiet and
weariness; and he loved his friends too well to keep silence on this
theme. We, like them, it has been admirably said, [Footnote: Étude
Morale et Littéraire sur les Epitres d'Horace; par J. A. Estienne.
Paris, 1851. P.212.] are "possessed by the ambitions, the desires, the
weariness, the disquietudes, which pursued the friends of Horace. If
he does not always succeed with us, any more than with them, in curing
us of these, he at all events soothes and tranquillises us in the
moments which we spend with him. He augments, on the other hand, the
happiness of those who are already happy; and there is not one of us
but feels under obligation to him for his gentle and salutary
lessons,--_verbaque et voces_,--for his soothing or invigorating
balsams, as much as though this gifted physician of soul and body had
compounded them specially for ourselves."

When he published the First Book of Epistles he seems to have thought
the time come for him to write no more lyrics (Epistles, I. 1):-

  "So now I bid my idle songs adieu,
  And turn my thoughts to what is just and true." (C.)

Graver habits, and a growing fastidiousness of taste, were likely to
give rise to this feeling. But a poet can no more renounce his lyre
than a painter his palette; and his fine "Secular Hymn," and many of
the Odes of the Fourth Book, which were written after this period,
prove that, so far from suffering any decay in poetical power, he had
even gained in force of conception, and in that _curiosa
felicitas_, that exquisite felicity of expression, which has been
justly ascribed to him by Petronius. Several years afterwards, when
writing of the mania for scribbling verse which had beset the Romans,
as if, like Dogberry's reading and writing, the faculty of writing
poetry came by nature, he alludes to his own sins in the same
direction with a touch of his old irony (Epistles, II. 1):-

  "E'en I, who vow I never write a verse,
  Am found as false as Parthia, maybe worse;
  Before the dawn I rouse myself and call
  For pens and parchment, writing-desk, and all.
  None dares be pilot who ne'er steered a craft;
  No untrained nurse administers a draught;
  None but skilled workmen handle workmen's tools;
  But verses all men scribble, wise or fools." (C.)

Or, as Pope with a finer emphasis translates his words--

  "But those who cannot write, and those who can,
  All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble to a man."

It was very well for Horace to laugh at his own inability to abstain
from verse-making, but, had he been ever so much inclined to silence,
his friends would not have let him rest. Some wanted an Ode, some an
Epode, some a Satire (Epistles, II. 2)--

  "Three hungry guests for different dishes call,
  And how's one host to satisfy them all?" (C.)

And there was one friend, whose request it was not easy to deny. This
was Augustus. Ten years after the imperial power had been placed in
his hands (B.C. 17) he resolved to celebrate a great national festival
in honour of his own successful career. Horace was called on to write
an Ode, known in his works as "The Secular Hymn," to be sung upon the
occasion by twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls of noble birth.
"The Ode," says Macleane, "was sung at the most solemn part of the
festival, while the Emperor was in person offering sacrifice at the
second hour of the night, on the river side, upon three altars,
attended by the fifteen men who presided over religious affairs. The
effect must have been very beautiful, and no wonder if the impression
on Horace's feelings was strong and lasting." He was obviously pleased
at being chosen for the task, and not without pride,--a very just
one,--at the way it was performed. In the Ode (IV. 6), which seems to
have been a kind of prelude to the "Secular Hymn," he anticipates that
the virgins who chanted it will on their marriage-day be proud to
recall the fact that they had taken part in this oratorio under his
baton:-

  "When the cyclical year brought its festival days,
  My voice led the hymn of thanksgiving and praise,
  So sweet, the immortals to hear it were fain,
  And 'twas HORACE THE POET who taught me the strain!"

It was probably at the suggestion of Augustus, also, that he wrote the
magnificent Fourth and Fourteenth Odes of the Fourth Book. These were
written, however, to celebrate great national victories, and were
pitched in the high key appropriate to the theme. But this was not
enough for Augustus. He wanted something more homely and human, and
was envious of the friends to whom Horace had addressed the charming
Epistles of the First Book, a copy of which the poet had sent to him
by the hands of a friend (Epistles, I. 13), but only to be given to
the Caesar,

  "If he be well, and in a happy mood,
  And ask to have them,--be it understood."

And so he wrote to Horace--the letter is quoted by Suetonius--"Look
you, I take it much amiss that none of your writings of this class are
addressed to me. Are you afraid it will damage your reputation with
posterity to be thought to have been one of my intimates?" Such a
letter, had Horace been a vain man or an indiscreet, might have misled
him into approaching Augustus with the freedom he courted. But he fell
into no such error. There is perfect frankness throughout the whole of
the Epistle, with which he met the Emperor's request (II. 1), but the
social distance between them is maintained with an emphasis which it
is impossible not to feel. The Epistle opens by skilfully insinuating
that, if the poet has not before addressed the Emperor, it is that he
may not be suspected of encroaching on the hours which were due to the
higher cares of state:--

  "Since you, great Caesar, singly wield the charge
  Of Rome's concerns, so manifold and large,--
  With sword and shield the commonwealth protect,
  With morals grace it, and with laws correct,--
  The bard, methinks, would do a public wrong,
  Who, having gained your ear, should keep it long." (C.)

It is not while they live, he continues, that, in the ordinary case,
the worth of the great benefactors of mankind is recognised. Only
after they are dead, do misunderstanding and malice give way to
admiration and love. Rome, it is true, has been more just. It has
appreciated, and it avows, how much it owes to Augustus. But the very
same people who have shown themselves wise and just in this are unable
to extend the same principle to living literary genius. A poet must
have been long dead and buried, or he is nought. The very flaws of old
writers are cried up as beauties by pedantic critics, while the
highest excellence in a writer of the day meets with no response.

  "Had Greece but been as carping and as cold
  To new productions, what would now be old?
  What standard works would there have been, to come
  Beneath the public eye, the public thumb?" (C.)

Let us then look the facts fairly in the face; let us "clear our minds
of cant." If a poem be bad in itself, let us say so, no matter how old
or how famous it be; if it be good, let us be no less candid, though
the poet be still struggling into notice among us.

Thanks, he proceeds, to our happy times, men are now devoting
themselves to the arts of peace. "_Graecia capta ferum victorem
cepit_"--"Her ruthless conqueror Greece has overcome." The Romans
of the better class, who of old thought only of the triumphs of the
forum, or of turning over their money profitably, are now bitten by a
literary furor.

  "Pert boys, prim fathers, dine in wreaths of bay,
  And 'twixt the courses warble out the lay." (C.)

But this craze is no unmixed evil; for, take him all in all, your poet
can scarcely be a bad fellow. Pulse and second bread are a banquet for
him. He is sure not to be greedy or close-fisted; for to him, as
Tennyson in the same spirit says, "Mellow metres are more than ten per
cent." Neither is he likely to cheat his partner or his ward. He may
cut a poor figure in a campaign, but he does the state good service at
home.

  "His lessons form the child's young lips, and wean
  The boyish ear from words and tales unclean;
  As years roll on, he moulds the ripening mind,
  And makes it just and generous, sweet and kind;
  He tells of worthy precedents, displays
  The examples of the past to after days,
  Consoles affliction, and disease allays." (C.)

Horace then goes on to sketch the rise of poetry and the drama among
the Romans, glancing, as he goes, at the perverted taste which was
making the stage the vehicle of mere spectacle, and intimating his own
high estimate of the dramatic writer in words which Shakespeare seems
to have been meant to realise:--

  "That man I hold true master of his art,
  Who with fictitious woes can wring my heart;
  Can rouse me, soothe me, pierce me with the thrill
  Of vain alarm, and, as by magic skill,
  Bear me to Thebes, to Athens, where you will." (C.)

Here, as elsewhere, Horace treats dramatic writing as the very highest
exercise of poetic genius; and, in dwelling on it as he does, he
probably felt sure of carrying with him the fullest sympathies of
Augustus. For among his varied literary essays, the Emperor, like most
dilettanti, had tried his hand upon a tragedy. Failing, however, to
satisfy himself, he had the rarer wisdom to suppress it. The story of
his play was that of Ajax, and when asked one day how it was getting
on, he replied that his hero "had finished his career upon a sponge!"
--"_Ajacem suum in spongio incubuisse_."

From the drama Horace proceeds to speak of the more timid race of
bards, who, "instead of being hissed and acted, would be read," and
who, himself included, are apt to do themselves harm in various ways
through over-sensitiveness or simplicity. Thus, for example, they will
intrude their works on Augustus, when he is busy or tired; or wince,
poor sensitive rogues, if a friend ventures to take exception to a
verse; or bore him by repeating, unasked, one or other of their pet
passages, or by complaints that their happiest thoughts and most
highly-polished turns escape unnoticed; or, worse folly than all, they
will expect to be sent for by Augustus the moment he comes across
their poems, and told "to starve no longer, and go writing on." Yet,
continues Horace, it is better the whole tribe should be disappointed,
than that a great man's glory should be dimmed, like Alexander's, by
being sung of by a second-rate poet. And wherefore should it be so,
when Augustus has at command the genius of such men as Virgil and
Varius? They, and they only, are the fit laureates of the Emperor's
great achievements; and in this way the poet returns, like a skilful
composer, to the _motif_ with which he set out--distrust of his
own powers, which has restrained, and must continue to restrain, him
from pressing himself and his small poetic powers upon the Emperor's
notice.

In the other poems which belong to this period--the Second Epistle of
the Second Book, and the Epistle to the Pisos, generally known as the
_Ars Poetica_--Horace confines himself almost exclusively to
purely literary topics. The dignity of literature was never better
vindicated than in these Epistles. In Horace's estimation it was a
thing always to be approached with reverence. Mediocrity in it was
intolerable. Genius is much, but genius without art will not win
immortality; "for a good poet's made, as well as born." There must be
a working up to the highest models, a resolute intolerance of anything
slight or slovenly, a fixed purpose to put what the writer has to
express into forms at once the most beautiful, suggestive, and
compact. The mere trick of literary composition Horace holds
exceedingly cheap. Brilliant nonsense finds no allowance from him.
Truth--truth in feeling and in thought--must be present, if the work
is to have any value. "_Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et
fons_,"--

  "Of writing well, be sure the secret lies
  In wisdom, therefore study to be wise." (C.)

Whatever the form of composition, heroic, didactic, lyric, or
dramatic, it must be pervaded by unity of feeling and design; and no
style is good, or illustration endurable, which, either overlays or
does not harmonise with the subject in hand.

The Epistle to the Pisos does not profess to be a complete exposition
of the poet's art. It glances only at small sections of that wide
theme. So far as it goes, it is all gold, full of most instructive
hints for a sound critical taste and a pure literary style. It was
probably meant to cure the younger Piso of that passion for writing
verse which had, as we have seen, spread like a plague among the
Romans, and which made a visit to the public baths a penance to
critical ears,--for there the poetasters were always sure of an
audience,--and added new terrors to the already sufficiently
formidable horrors of the Roman banquet. [Footnote: This theory has
been worked out with great ability by the late M. A. Baron, in his
'Epitre d'Horace aux Pisons sur l'Art Poétique'--Bruxelles, 1857;
which is accompanied by a masterly translation and notes of great
value.] When we find an experienced critic like Horace urging young
Piso, as he does, to keep what he writes by him for nine years, the
conclusion is irresistible, that he hoped by that time the writer
would see the wisdom of suppressing his crude lucubrations altogether.
No one knew better than Horace that first-class work never wants such
protracted mellowing.

Soon, after this poem was written the great palace on the Esquiline
lost its master. He died (B.C. 8) in the middle of the year,
bequeathing his poet-friend to the care of Augustus in the words
"_Horati Flacci, ut mei, esto memor_,"--"Bear Horace in your
memory as you would myself." But the legacy was not long upon the
emperor's hands. Seventeen years before, Horace had written:

  "Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath;
    Yes, we shall go, shall go,
  Hand linked in hand, where'er thou leadest, both
    The last sad road below."

The lines must have rung in the poet's ears like a sad refrain. The
Digentia lost its charm; he could not see its crystal waters for the
shadows of Charon's rueful stream. The prattle of his loved Bandusian
spring could not wean his thoughts from the vision of his other self
wandering unaccompanied along that "last sad road." We may fancy that
Horace was thenceforth little seen in his accustomed haunts. He who
had so often soothed the sorrows of other bereaved hearts, answered
with a wistful smile to the friendly consolations of the many that
loved him. His work was done. It was time to go away. Not all the
skill of Orpheus could recall him whom he had lost. The welcome end
came sharply and suddenly; and one day, when, the bleak November wind
was whirling down the oak-leaves on his well-loved brook, the servants
of his Sabine farm heard that they should no more see the good, cheery
master, whose pleasant smile and kindly word had so often made their
labours light.  There was many a sad heart, too, we may be sure, in
Rome, when the wit who never wounded, the poet who ever charmed, the
friend who never failed, was laid in a corner of the Esquiline, close
to the tomb of his "dear knight Maecenas." He died on the 27th
November B.C. 8, the kindly, lonely man, leaving to Augustus what
little he possessed. One would fain trust his own words were inscribed
upon his tomb, as in the supreme hour the faith they expressed was of
a surety strong within his heart,--

NON OMNIS MORIAR.







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