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diff --git a/7278.txt b/7278.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cf5dab5 --- /dev/null +++ b/7278.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6458 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Horace, by Theodore Martin + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Horace + +Author: Theodore Martin + + +Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7278] +This file was first posted on April 6, 2003 +Last Updated: May 21, 2013 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HORACE *** + + + + +Produced by Charles Franks, Delphine Lettau and the DP team + + + + + + + +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 Beranger, +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 Beranger did of himself at the height of his +fame, + + + "Je suis vilain, et tres 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 cursed 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 circumcised 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. Barine 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,--habitues 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 drole! 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 Brillat-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, Leuconoe, 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 recherchee 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 Chloe might with Lydia vie, + Renowned in ode or madrigal, + Not Roman Ilia famed as I. + + HE.--I now am Thracian Chloe'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 Calais--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 Chloe 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 Barine (II. 8), where he gives us +a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that _beaute +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, + Barine, 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 Gerome. + +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 Asterie, 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 Lyce, 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 Lydes, 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 Phaethon'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 _melee_ 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, Leuconoee. + 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 Khayyam, 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 Empyrean 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 Elean palm doth lift + To heaven, for winged 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 Dircean 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: Etude Morale et Litteraire 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 +Poetique'--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. + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Horace, by Theodore Martin + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HORACE *** + +***** This file should be named 7278.txt or 7278.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/7/2/7/7278/ + +Produced by Charles Franks, Delphine Lettau and the DP team + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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