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THE POCKET HORACE.
HORACE
THE LATIN TEXT, WITH CONINGTON'S
TRANSLATION ON OPPOSITE
PAGES.
Cotnphte in one volume. Printed on thin paper
for the pocket. Bontid in stamped sheepskin.
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*\* Also in two Parts: "THE ODES and CAR-
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leather, cut flush, 2s. net. "THE SATIRES,
EPISTLES, and ART OF POETRY." Cloth,
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" A delightful little volume, that scholars and many who
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corner of their valise when starting for their holidays. Take
it all round no translation can rival Conington's." — Jotimal
of Education.
"An enchanting and scholarly volume is this, just small
enough to be carried in the waistcoat pocket, and exquisite
in paper, print, and binding. " — Notes and Queries.
"A delightful pocket companion for those who do not
disdain good English verse alongside the immortal Latin."
— Evening Standard.
"All lovers of Horace should get this book. The get-up
is worthy of the subject ; it is clearly printed on thin paper,
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too heavy for the pedestrian's knapsack, full of a charm
which will outlive all the literature on a railway book-stall."
—School World.
London: GEORGE BELL AND SONS.
HORACE
Miniature Series of Great Writers
Edited by G. C. Williamson, Litt.D.
Pott Svo, Illustrated^ to be had in cloth
or limp leather.
BROWNING. By SiR Frank T. Marzials, C.B.
CHAUCER. By Rev. W. Tuckwell, M.A.
COLERIDGE. By Richard Garnett, C.B., LL.D.
DEFOE. By A. Wherry.
DE QUINCEY. By Henry S. Salt.
DICKENS. By W. Teignmouth Shore.
JOHNSON. By John Dennis.
LAMB. By Walter Jerrold.
MILTON. By G. C. Williamson, Litt.D.
SHAKESPEARE. By Alfred Ewen.
In Preparation.
SCOTT. By J. H. W. Laing, M.B,
GOLDSMITH. By Ernest Lang Buckland,
M.A.
MACAULAY. By Richard Garnett, C.B., LL.D.
MOLIERE. By Sir Frank T, Marzials, C.B.
TENNYSON. By G. C. Williamson, Litt.D.
CARLYLE. By Prof. Richard Jones, Ph.D.
The Ancient Classics
HORACE. By Rev. W. Tuckwell, M.A.
XENOPHON. By E. C. Marchant, M.A.
[/« Preparation.
LONDON: GEORGE BELL & SONS.
hepUM-ntatum of DCoiace
.f'lom a late 'Hi>nuin medaUwn of the Time offoiutantme
.^^am thf olufinalin 'PaAia.
Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers
HORACE
BY
REV. W. TUCKWELL, M.A.
AUTHOR OF "CHAUCER," ETC.
LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1905
CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERV LANE, LONDON.
•^ - f
T
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Struggle 9
Success 19
Satires and Epistles 30
Odes and Epodes 51
swan-'song 74
The Wines of Horace 82
Chronology 85
Index 87
^ - c «- » * *
(tea « t
■^ ' t , r r 5 t
1 . , ' . t J « C « c
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACE
PAGE
Horace, from a Bronze Medallion
Frontispiece
Brutus 12
Maecenas 16
The Site of Horace's Villa .... 22
The Roman Forum 26
Augustus 46
Virgil 64
The Forum Restored, as in a.d. 80 . . 74
THE LIFE OF HORACE
STRUGGLE
QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS, the
" old popular Horace " of Tennyson, petted
and loved, by Frenchmen and Englishmen
especially, above all the poets of antiquity, was
born on 8th December, B.C. 65. He calls him-
self in his poems by the three names indifferently, 1
but to HS he is known only by the affectionate
diminutive of his second or gentile name, borne
by his father, according to the fashion of the
time, as slave to some member of the noble
Horatian family. A slave the father unquestion-
ably had been: meanness of origin was a taunt
often levelled against his son, and encountered
by him with magnanimous indifference; but long
before Horace's birth the older Horatius had
obtained his freedom, had gained sufficient
money to retire from business, and to become
owner of the small estate at Venusia on the
borders of Apulia, where the poet was born and
spent his childhood. He repeatedly alludes to
this loved early home, speaks affectionately of
its surrounding scenery, of the dashing river ,
Aufidus, now Ofanto, of the neighbouring towns, ;
9
lo HORACE
Acherontia, Bantia, Forentum, discoverable in
modern maps as Acerenza, Vanzi, Forenza, of
the crystal Bandusian spring, at whose identity
we can only guess. Here he tells us how,
wandering in the forest when a child and falling
asleep under the trees, he woke to find himself
covered up by woodpigeons with leaves, and
alludes to a prevailing rural belief that he was
specially favoured by the gods. Long afterwards,
too, when travelling across Italy with Maecenas,
he records with delight his passing glimpse of
the familiar wind-swept Apulian hills.
Of his father he speaks ever with deep respect.
"Ashamed of him?" he says, "because he was
a freedman? whatever moral virtue, whatever
charm of character, is mine, that I owe to him.
Poor man though he was, he would not send me
to the village school frequented by peasant
children, but carried me to Rome, that I might
be educated with sons of knights and senators.
He pinched himself to dress me well, himself
attended me to all my lecture-rooms, preserved
me pure and modest, fenced me from evil know-
ledge and from dangerous contact. Of such a
sire how should I be ashamed? how say, as I
have heard some say, that the fault of a man's
low birth is Nature's, not his own? Why, were I
to begin my life again, with permission from the
gods to select my parents from the greatest of
mankind, I would be content, and more than
content, with those I had." The whole self-
respect and nobleness of the man shines out in
these generous lines. (Sat. I, vi, 89.)
HIS LIFE II
Twice in his old age Horace alludes rather
disparagingly to his schooldays in Rome: he was '
taught, he says, out of a translation from Homer
by an inferior Latin writer (Ep. II, i, 62, 69),
and his master, a retired soldier, one Orbilius,
was " fond of the rod " (Ep. II, i, 7 1 ). I observe
that the sympathies of Horatian editors and
commentators, themselves mostly schoolmasters,
are with Orbilius as a much enduring paedagogue
rather than with his exasperated pupil. We know
from other sources that the teacher was a good
scholar and a noted teacher, and that, dying in
his hundredth year, he was honoured by a marble
statue in his native town of Beneventum ; but like
our English Orbilius, Dr. Busby, he is known to
most men only through Horace's resentful epithet;
— " a great man," said Sir Roger de Coverley, " a
great man ; he whipped my grandfather, a very
great man ! "
The young Englishman on leaving school goesi
to Oxford or to Cambridge: the young Roman;
went to Athens. There we find Horace at about
nineteen years of age, learning Greek, and attend-
ing the schools of the philosophers; those same^-
Stoics and Epicureans whom a few years later
the first great Christian Sophist was to harangue
on Mars' Hill. These taught from their several ,
points of view the basis of happiness and the aim ,'
of life. Each in turn impressed him: for a time'
he agreed with Stoic Zeno that active duty is the
highest good; then lapsed into the easy doctrine
of Epicurean Aristippus that subjective pleasure
is the only happiness. His philosophy was never
12 HORACE
very strenuous, always more practical than specu-
lative; he played with his teachers' systems,
mocked at their fallacies, assimilated their serious
lessons.
Then into his life at this time came an influence
which helped to shape his character, but had
nearly wrecked his fortunes. Brutus, fresh from
Caesar's murder, was at Athens, residing, as we
should say, in his old University, and drawing to
himself the passionate admiration of its most
brilliant undergraduates; among the rest, of the
younger Cicero and of Horace. Few characters
in history are more pathetically interesting than
his. High born, yet disdainful of ambitious aims,
irreproachable in an age of almost universal pro-
fligacy, the one pure member of a grossly Hcen-
tious family, modest and unobtrusive although
steeped in all the learning of old Greece, strong
of will yet tolerant and gentle, his austerity so
tempered by humanism that he won not only
respect but love; he had been adored by the gay
young patricians, who paid homage to the virtue
which they did not rouse themselves to imitate,
honoured as an equal by men far older than
himself, by Cicero, by Atticus, by Caesar. As we
stand before the bust in the Palace of the Con-
servators which preserves his mobile features, in
that face at once sweet and sad, at once young
and old, as are the faces not unfrequently of men
whose temperaments were never young — already,
at thirty-one years old, stamped with the linea-
ments of a grand but fatal destiny — we seem to
penetrate the character of the man whom Dante
A Hilar i photo. ]
•*»»•■■
[Palace of t lie Conservators, Rome.
BRUTUS.
HIS LIFE 13
placed in hell, whom Shakespeare, with sounder
and more catholic insight, proclaimed to be the
noblest Roman of them all :
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, This was a man.
Quitting Athens after a time to take command
of the army which had been raised against
Antony, Brutus carried Horace in his company
with the rank of military tribune. He followed
his patron into Asia; one of his early poems
humorously describes a scene which he witnessed
in the law courts at Clazomenae. (Sat. I, vii, 5.)
He was several times in action ; served finally at
Philippi, sharing the headlong rout which followed
on Brutus' death; returned to Rome "humbled
and with' clipped wings." (Od. II, vii, 10; Ep. II,
ii, 50.) His father was dead, his property con-
fiscated in the proscription following on the
defeat, he had to begin the world again at twenty-
four years old. He obtained some sort of clerk-
ship in a public office, and to eke out its slender
emoluments he began to write. What were his
earhest efforts we cannot certainly say, or whether
any of them survive among the poems recognized
as his. He tells us that his first literary model
was Archilochus (Ep. I, xix, 24), a Greek poet of
700 B.C., believed to have been the inventor of
personal satire, whose stinging pen is said to have
• sometimes driven its victims to suicide. For a
time also he imitated a much more recent satirist,
Lucilius, whom he rejected later, as disliking
14 HORACE
both the harshness of his style and the scurrilous
character of his verses. (Sat. I, x.) It has been
conjectured therefore that his earliest composi-
tions were severe personal lampoons, written for
money and to order, which his maturer taste
destroyed. In any case his writings found ad-
mirers. About three years after his return to
Rome his friends Varius and Virgil praised him
to Maecenas; the great man read the young poet's
verses, and desired to see him. (Sat. I, vi, 54.)
It is as an enlightened and munificent patron
r of letters that Maecenas holds his place in popular
estimation, but he was much more than this. He
.had, been since Caesar's death the trusty agent
> and the intimate adviser of Augustus; a hidden
_hand, directing the most delicate manoeuvres of
\ his master. In adroit resource and suppleness
'^ no diplomatist could match him. His acute pre-
vision of events and his penetrating insight into
character enabled him to create the circumstances
and to mould the men whose combination was
necessary to his aims. By the tact and modera-
tion of his address, the honied words which
averted anger, the dexterous reticence which dis-
armed suspicion, he reconciled opposing factions,
veiled arbitrary measures, impressed alike on
nobles and on populace the beneficence of im-
perial despotism, while he kept its harshness out
of sight. Far from parading his extensive powers,
he masked them by ostentatious humility, refus-
ing ofificial promotion, contented with the inferior
rank of " Knight," sitting in theatre and circus
below men whom his own hand had raised to
HIS LIFE 15
station higher than his own. Absorbed in un-
sleeping pohtical toil, he wore the outward garb
of a careless, trifling voluptuary. It was difficult
to believe that this apparently effeminate lounger,
foppish in dress, with curled and scented hair,
luxuriating in the novel refinement of the warm
bath, an epicure in food and drink, patronizing
actors, lolling in his litter amid a train of parasites,
could be the man on whom, as Horace tells us,
civic anxieties and foreign dangers pressed a
ceaseless load. He had built himself a palace
and laid out noble gardens, the remains of which
still exist, at the foot of the Esquiline hill. It
had been the foulest and most disreputable slum
in Rome, given up to the burial of paupers, the
execution of criminals, the obscene rites of
witches, a. haunt of dogs and vultures. He made
it healthy and beautiful; Horace celebrates its
salubrity, and Augustus, when an invalid, came
thither to breathe its air. (Sat. I, viii, 8, 14.)
There Maecenas set out his books and his gems
and his Etruscan ware, entertained his literary and
high born friends, poured forth his priceless
Caecuban and Chian wines. There were drops of
bitter in these cups. His beautiful wife Terentia
tormented him by her temper and her infidelities ;
he put her away repeatedly, as often received her
back. It was said of him that he had been married
a hundred times, though only to a single wife:
"What is the latest conjugal news?" men asked
as his sumptuous litter passed by, "is it a marriage
or a divorce? " And he was haunted by terror of
death. "Prolong my life," was his prayer, in
i6 HORACE
words which Seneca has ridiculed and La Fon-
taine translated finely, yet missing the terseness
of the original, " life amid tortures, life even on
a cross, only life! "
Qu'on me rend impotent,
Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme
Je vive, c'est assez ; je suis plus que content.
His patronage of intellectual men was due to
policy as well as inclination. Himself a cultured
literary critic, foreseeing the full-winged soar of
writers still half-fledged — the " Aeneid" in Virgil's
"Eclogues," the "Odes" of Horace in his
" Epodes " — he would not only gather round his
board the men whom we know to have been his
equals, whose wit and wisdom Horace has em-
balmed in an epithet, a line, an ode; Varius, and
Sulpicius, and Plotius, and Fonteius Capito, and
Viscus; but he saw also and utilized for himself
and for his master the social influence which a
rising poet might wield, the effect with which a
bold epigram might catch the public ear, a well-
conceived eulogy minister to imperial popularity,
an eloquent sermon, as in the noble opening
odes of Horace's third book, put vice out of
countenance and raise the tone of a decadent
community.
J. To Horace, then, now twenty-seven years old,
I these imposing doors were opened. The first
; interview was unsatisfactory; the young poet was
I tongue-tied and stammering, the great man re-
' served and haughty: they parted mutually dis-
-. satisfied. Nine months later Maecenas sent for
Alinari ^yJiotoA
{Palace of the Conscfvatflrs, Rome.
MAECENAS.
HIS LIFE 17
him again, received him warmly, enrolled him
formally amongst his friends. (Sat. I, vi, 61.)
Horace himself tells the story : he explains neither
the first coldness, the long pause, nor the later
cordiality. But he rose rapidly in his patron's
favour; a year afterwards we find him invited to
join Maecenas on a journey to Brundusium, of
which he has left us an amusing journal (Sat. I, v);
and about three years later still was presented by
him with a country house and farm amongst the
Sabine hills, a few miles to the east of Tibur, or,
as it is now called,C Tivolir}
With this a new chapter in his life begins.
During six years he had lived in Rome, first as
an impecunious clerk, then as a client of Mae-
Qenas. To all Roman homes of quality and con-
sequence clients were a necessary adjunct: men
for the most part humble and needy, who at-
tended to welcome the patron when issuing from
his chamber in the morning, preceded and sur-
rounded his litter in the streets, clearing a way
for it through the crowd; formed, in short, his
court, rewarded by a daily basket of victuals or
a small sum of money. If a client was involved
in litigation, his patron would plead his cause in
person or by deputy; he was sometimes asked
to dinner, where his solecisms in good breeding
and his unfashionable dress, the rustic cut of his
beard, thick shoes, gown clumsily draped, made
him the butt of the higher guests. Juvenal, in a
biting satire, describes the humiliation of a poor
client at a rich man's table. " The host," he says,
" drinks old beeswinged Setian wine, served to
1 8 HORACE
him in a gold goblet by a beautiful boy; to you
a coarse black slave brings in a cracked cup wine
too foul even to foment a bruise. His bread is
pure and white, yours brown and mouldy; be-
fore him is a huge lobster, before you a lean
shore-crab; his fish is a barbel or a lamprey,
yours an eel : — and, if you choose to put up with
it, you are rightly served." The relation, though
not held to be disgraceful, involved sometimes
bitter mortifications, and seems to us inconsistent
with self-respect. We remember how it was re-
sented in modern times, though in a much
milder form, by Edmund Spenser, Dr. Johnson,
and the poet Crabbe. Even between a Horace
and a Maecenas it must have caused occasional
embarrassment: we find the former, for instance,
dedicating poems to men whose character he
could not respect, but to whom, as his patron's
associates, he was bound to render homage;
while his supposed intimacy with the all-powerful
minister exposed him to tedious solicitants, who
waylaid him in his daily walks. He had become
sick of ''the smoke and the grandeur and the
roar of Rome" (Od. HI, 29, 12); his Sabine
retreat would be an asylum and a haven ; would
"give him back to himself"; would endow him
with competence, leisure, freedom; he hailed it
as the mouse in his delightful apologue craved
refuge in the country from the splendour and
the perils of the town:
Give me again my hollow tree,
A crust of bread — and liberty.
(Sat. II, 6, fin.)
HIS LIFE 19
SUCCESS
HORACE'S Sabine farm ranks high among
the holy places of the classic world; and
through the labours of successive travellers,
guided by the scattered indications in his poems,
its site is tolerably certain. It was about thirty- two
miles from Rome, reached in a couple of hours
by pilgrims of the present time; to Horace, who
never allowed himself to be hurried, the journey
of a fujl day, or of a leisurely day and a half.
Let us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-
tailed mule (Sat. I, vi, 104), the heavy saddle-
bags across its loins stored with scrolls of Plato,
of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the
comedian, Archilochus the lyric poet. His road
lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose
ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift
waters of the Anio, amid steep hills crowned with
small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites of
Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A
ride of twenty-seven miles would bring him to
Tivoli, or Tibur, where he stopped to rest, some-
times to pass the night, possessing very probably
a cottage in the little town. No place outside
his home appealed to him like this. Nine times
he mentions it, nearly always with a caressing
20 HORACE
epithet. It is green Tibur, dew-fed Tibur, Tibur
never arid, leisurely Tibur, breezy Tibur, Tibur
sloping to the sun. He bids his friend Varus
plant vines in the moist soil of his own Tiburtine
patrimony there; prays that when the sands of
his life run low, he may there end his days;
enumerates, in a noble ode (Od. I, 7), the love-
liest spots on earth, preferring before them all
the headlong Anio, Tibur's groves, its orchards
saturated with shifting streams.
The dark pine waves on Tibur's classic steep,
From rock to rock the headlong waters leap,
Tossing their foam on high, till leaf and flower
Glitter like emeralds in the sparkling shower.
Lovely — but lovelier from the charms that glow
Where Latium spreads her purple vales below;
The olive, smiling on the sunny hill,
The golden orchard, and the ductile rill,
The spring clear-bubbling in its rocky fount.
The mossgrown cave, the Naiad's fabled haunt,
And, far as eye can strain, yon shadowy dome,
The glory of the earth. Eternal Rome.
No picture of the spot can be more graphic
than are these noble lines. They open a New-
digate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, writ-
ten, says tradition, by its brilliant author in a
single night. (R. C. Sewell, Magdalen College,
1825.) Tivoli he had never visited; but those
who stand to-day beside the Temple of the
Sibyl on the edge of its ravine, who enjoy the
fair beauty of the headlong Anio and the lesser
Cascatelle, of the ruined Temple of Tiburtus, the
Grottos of the Sirens and of Neptune, under-
stand how a poet's genius can, as Shakespeare
HIS LIFE 21
tells us, shadow forth things unseen, and give
them local habitation.
From Tibur, still beside the Anio, we drive for
about seven miles, until we reach the ancient
Varia, now Vico Varo, mentioned by Horace as
the small market town to which his five tenant-
farmers were wont to repair for agricultural or
municipal business. (Ep. I, xiv, 3.) Here, then,
we are in the poet's country, and must be guided
by the landmarks in his verse. Just beyond Vico
Varo the Anio is joined by the Licenza. This is
Horace's Digentia, the stream he calls it whose
icy waters freshen him, the stream of which
Mandela drinks. (Ep. I, xviii, 104-105.) And
there, on its opposite bank, is the modern
village Bardela, identified with Mandela by a
sepulchral inscription recently dug up. We turn
northward, following the stream; the road be-
comes distressingly steep, recalling a line in
which the poet speaks of returning homeward
"to his mountain stronghold." (Sat. II, vi, 16.)
Soon we reach a village, Roccagiovine, whose
central square is named Piazza Vacuna. Vacuna
was the ancient name for the goddess Victory;
and against the wall is fixed an exhumed tablet
telling how the Emperor Vespasian here restored
an ancient Temple of Victory. One more echo
this name wakes in Horatian ears — he dates a
letter to his friend Aristius Fuscus as written
"behind the crumbling shrine of Vacuna." (Ep.
I, X, 49.) Clearly we are near him now; he
would not carry his writing tablets far away from
his door. Yet another verification we require.
22 HORACE
He speaks of a spring just beside his home, cool
and fine, medicinal to head and stomach. (Ep.
I, xvi, 12.) Here it is, hard by, called to-day
Fonte d'Oratini, a survival, we should like to
believe, of the name Horatius. Somewhere close
at hand must have been the villa, on one side
or the other of a small hill now called Monte
Rotondo. We may take our Horace from our
pocket, and feel, as with our Wordsworth at
Dove Cottage, with our Scott at Ashestiel, that
we are gazing on the hills, the streams, and val-
leys, which received the primal outpourings of
their muse, and are for ever vocal with its
memories.
From M. Rotondo, eastward to the Licenza,
and southward to the high ground of Rocco-
giovine, stretched apparently the poet's not in-
considerable demesne. Part of it he let off to
five peasants on the metayage system ; the rest
he cultivated himself, employing eight slaves
superintended by a bailiff. The house, he tells
us, was simple, with no marble pillars or gilded
cornices (Od. II, xviii), but spacious enough to
receive and entertain a guest from town, and to
welcome occasionally his neighbours to a cheer-
ful evening meal — " nights and suppers as of
gods" (Sat. II, vi, 65), he calls them; where the
talk was unfashionably clean and sensible, the
fare beans and bacon, garden stuff and chicory
and mallows. Around the villa was a garden,
not filled with flowers, of which in one of his
odes he expresses dislike as unremunerative (Od.
II, XV, 6), but laid out in small parallelograms
llliillillll ^'
HIS LIFE 23
of grass, edged with box and planted with clipped
hornbeam. The house was shaded from above
by a grove of ilexes and oaks; lower down were
orchards of olives, wild plums, cornels, apples.
In the richer soil of the valley he grew corn,
whose harvests never failed him, and, like Eve
in Eden, led the vine to wed her elm. Against
this last experiment his bailiff grumbled, saying
that the soil would grow spice and pepper as
soon as ripen grapes (Ep. I, xiv, 23); but his
master persisted, and succeeded. Inviting
Maecenas to supper, he offers Sabine wine from
his own estate (Od. I, xx, i); and visitors to-
day, drinking the juice of the native grape
at the little Roccogiovine inn, will be of
opinion with M. de Florae, that " this little wine
of the 'country has a most agreeable smack."
Here he sauntered day by day, watched his
labourers, working sometimes, like Ruskin at
Hincksey, awkwardly to their amusement with
his own hands; strayed now and then into the
lichened rocks and forest wilds beyond his farm,
surprised there one day by a huge wolf, who
luckily fled from his presence (Od. I, xxii, 9);
or — most enjoyable of all — lay beside spring or
river with a book or friend of either sex.
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow !
So roll to each other across the ages and the
continents echoes of the Persian and the Roman
bards.
24 HORACE
Of the beauty of his home he speaks ahvays
modestly; it may not compare with Praeneste,
Tarentum, Baiae; its chartn he is never weary
of extolUng. Nowhere, he says, is the air sweeter
and more balmy, in summer temperate, warm in
winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm, tran-
quillity, repose, making, as Wordsworth says,
the very thought of country life a thought of
refuge; and that was what, so long in populous
city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was
his home, where he could possess his soul, could
be self-centred and serene. " This," says Ruskin,
"is the true nature of Home; it is the Place of
Peace."
He loved the country, yet he was no hermit.
When sickened of town life he could apostrophize
the country in the beautiful lines which many a
jaded Londoner has echoed (Sat. H, vi, 60); but
after some months of its placid joys the active
social side of him would re-assert itself: the wel-
coming friends of the great city, its brilliant talk,
its rush of busy life, recovered their attractive-
ness, and for short intervals, in the healthy season
of the year, he would return to Rome. There it is
less easy to image him than in his rustic home.
Nature, if spared by man, remains unaltered;
the heights and recesses of the Digentian valley
meet our eye to-day scarce changed in twenty
centuries, but the busy, crowded Rome of
Horace is now only a desolate excavation. We
stand upon the " Rock of Triumph," the
Capitoline Hill, looking down upon the Forum:
it lies like a stonemason's yard : stumps of pillars,
HIS LIFE 25
fragments of brick or marble, overthrown en-
tablatures, pillars, altars, tangles of staircases and
enclosures, interspersed with poppies, wild oats,
trefoils, confuse and crowd it:
Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grow
Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped
On what were chambers; arch crushed, columns strown
In fragments; choked up vaults, where the owl peeped,
Deeming it midnight.
But patient, daily survey, educated by the re-
storations of a Lanciani, enables us to piece
together these encumbering ruins, until with
tolerable clearness we can follow Horace in his
walk along the Via Sacra towards Caesar's gar-
dens, and can fairly reconstruct the objects which
must have met his view. Everywhere is haunted
ground: there is the bronze wolf of the Capitol,
"thunder-stricken nurse of Rome," and the
Tarpeian rock, from which " the Traitor's leap
cured all ambition." There is the mythical gulf
of Curtius, and the Mamertine prison where the
Catiline conspirators were strangled, with its
vault into which Jugurtha, after gracing the
triumph of Marius, was hurled to die. Maiden-
hair fern grows profusely in the crevices of
Juturna's well, hard by the spring where the
great twin brethren gave their horses drink after
the battle of the Lake Regillus. Half covered
with a mass of green acanthus is the base of
Vesta's Temple, adjoining the atrium of the
Virgins' house surrounded with their portrait
statues: their names are engraved on each
pedestal, but one is carefully erased, its original
26 HORACE
having, it is supposed, violated her vestal vow.
\Ye pause upon the spot where Caesar's body was
burned, and beside the rostra whence Cicero
thundered, and Antony spoke his "Friends,
Romans, countrymen"; return finally to the
Capitoline Museum, nucleus and centre of the
ancient mistress of the world, to gaze upon gods,
senators, emperors, shining still in undiminished
majesty; on the Antinous, the Amazon, the
Juno, the Dying Gladiator, and the Grecian
masterpiece of Praxiteles.
Of his life in Rome Horace has given us a
minute account (Sat. I, vi, no, etc.), "Waking
usually about six, I lie in bed or on my sofa,
reading and writing, till nearly ten o'clock; anoint
myself, go to the Campus for a game at ball,
return home to a light luncheon. Then perhaps
I amuse myself at home, perhaps saunter about
the town; look in at the Circus and gossip with
the fortune-tellers who swarm there when the
games are over; walk through the market, inquir-
ing the price of garden stuff and grain. Towards
evening I come home to my supper of leeks and
pulse and fritters, served by my three slave-boys
on a white marble slab, which holds besides two
drinking cups and ladle, a saltcellar shaped like
a sea-urchin, an oil flask, and a saucer of cheap
Campanian ware ; and so at last I go to bed, not
harassed by the thought that I need rise at day-
break." Sometimes, to his great annoyance, he
would be roused early to become sponsor in the
law courts for a friend; shivering in the morning
cold, pelted by falling hailstones, abused by the
i
^i-'-i
'^>.U
lit- *'-'i^P^ '■ ^''d f-^ ''
'Jii."!- ' ''"^'' ^ ■"?
HIS LIFE 27
crowd through which he had to force his way.
Or he would accompany Maecenas on a drive,
their talk of matters trivial — the time of day, the
early frosts, the merits of popular gladiators.
We remember how delightfully Pope has adapted
the passage to his own relation with Harley.
(Imitation of Sat. II, vi.) Often he dined with
Maecenas or his friends, and one such dinner he
has described, at the house of a rich, vulgar epicure
(Sat. II, viii). The guests were nine in number,
including Maecenas, Varius, and Viscus : they lay
on couches at maplewood tables arranged in three
sides of a square. The first course was a Lucanian
wild boar garnished with salads; when that was
removed, servants wiped the board with purple
napkins. Then a procession of slaves brought in
Caecubari" and Chian wines, accompanied with
cheesecakes, fish, and apples. The second course
was a vast lamprey, prawns swimming in its
sauce; the third an olio of crane, hare, goose's
liver, blackbirds, and wood-pigeons. A sumptu-
ous meal, but spoiled by the host's tedious dis-
quisitions on each dish as it appeared. Of social
gatherings in their higher aspect, of the feasts of
reason which he must have often shared at his
patron's board, we long to know, but Horace is
discreet; for him the rose of Harpocrates was
suspended over every caenobium, and he would
not profane its sacrament. He sat there as an
equal, we know ; his attitude towards those above
him had in it no tinge of servility. That he was, and
meant to be, independent they were fairly warned;
when Maecenas wished to heap on him further
28 HORACE
benefits, he refused: "What I have is enough
and more than enough," he said, "nay, should
fortune shake her wings and leave me, I know
how to resign her gifts " (Od. Ill, xxix, 53). And
if not to Maecenas, so neither to Maecenas'
master, would he sacrifice his freedom. The
emperor sought his friendship, writes caressingly
to Maecenas of " this most lovable little bit
of a man," wished to make him his secretary,
showed no offence at his refusal. His letters
use the freedom of an intimate. " Septimius
will tell you how highly I regard you. I hap-
pened to speak of you in his presence; if you
disdain my friendship, I shall not disdain in
return." — " I wish your little book were bigger;
you seem to fear lest your books should be bigger
than yourself." — " I am vexed with you, that you
have never addressed one of your Epistles to my-
self; are you afraid that to have appeared as my
friend will hurt you with posterity? " Such royal
solicitations are a command, and Horace re-
sponded by the longest and one amongst the
most admired of his Epistles (Ep. H, i). This
was his final effort, unless the fragmentary essay
on criticism, known as the " Art of Poetry,"
belongs to these last years; if that be so, his
closing written words were a humorous dis-
paragement of the "homely slighted shepherd's
trade" (A. P. 470-476).
His life was drawing to a close; his friends
were falling round him like leaves in wintry
weather. Tibullus was dead, and so was Virgil,
dearest and whitest-souled of men (Sat. I, v, 41);
HIS LIFE 29
Maecenas was in failing health and out of favour.
Old age had come to himself before its time;
love, and wine, and festal crown of flowers had
lost their zest:
Soon palls the taste for noise and fray,
When hair is white and leaves are sere.
But he rallies his life-long philosophy to meet
the change; patience lightens the inevitable;
while each single day is his he will spend and
enjoy it in such fashion that he may say at its
conclusion, "I have lived" (Od. Ill, xxix, 41).
His health had never been good, undermined, he )
believed, by the hardships of his campaign with
Brutus ; all the care of Augustus' skilful physician,
Antonius__Musa, failed to prolong his days. He
passed away on the 17th of November, b.c. 8, in
his fifty-seventh year; was buried on theEsquiline
Hill, in a grave near to the sepulchre of Maecenas,
who had died only a few days before; fulfilling the
promise of an early ode, shaped almost in the
words of Moabitish Ruth, that he would not sur-
vive his friend.
The self-same day
Shall crush us twain; no idle oath
Has Horace sworn ; where'er you go.
We both will travel, travel both
The last dark journey down below.
Od. n, xvii.
ft
THE SATIRES AND EPISTLES
TT GRACE'S poems are of two kinds; of one
-L -»- kind the Satires and Epistles, of another
the Odes and Epodes. Their order and dates of
pjjbHcation are shown in the following table:
B.C.
35. First Book of Satires.
30. Second Book of Satires, and Epodes.
23. First three Books of Odes.
20. First Book of Epistles.
19. Epistle to Florus.
17. The Century Hymn,
about 13. Fourth Book of the Odes.
13. Epistle to Augustus.
(?) 10. The Art of Poetry.
Let us examine first the Satires and Epistles.
The word " Satire " meant originally a farrago,
a medley of various topics in various styles and
metres. But all early writings of this kind have
perished; and the first extant Latin satirist, Lu-
cilius, who lived in the second century B.C., de-
voted his pen to castigating the vices of contem-
porary society and of living individuals. This
style of writing, together with his six-foot meas-
ure, called hexameter, was adopted by the
30
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 31
ethical writers who followed him, Horace, Per-
sius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word satire a
meaning which it retains to-day. In more than
one passage Horace recognizes Lucilius as his
master, and imitates him in what is probably the
earliest, certainly the coarsest and least artistic
of his poems; but maturer judgement, revolting
later against the censorious spirit and bad taste
of the older writer, led him to abandon his
model. For good taste is the characteristic of
these poems; they form a comedy of manners,
shooting as it flies the folly rather than the
wickedness of vice : not wounding with a red-hot
iron, but "just flicking with uplifted lash,"
Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to
Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is
life and conduct, the true path to happiness and
goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says;
but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dog-
matic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic.
" Conversations " we may rather call them ; the
polished talk of a well-bred, cultured, practised
worldling, lightening while they point the moral
which he ever keeps in view, by transitions, per-
sonalities, ironies, anecdotes; by perfect literary
grace, by the underlying sympathy whereby wit
is sublimed and softened into humour.
So he tells stories; often trivial, but redeemed
by the lightness of his touch, the avoidance of
redundancy, the inevitable epithets, the cul-
minating point and finish. He illustrates the
extravagance of the day by the spendthrift Clo-
dius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from
32 HORACE
the ear of beautiful Metella (Sat. II, iii, 239),
that he might enjoy drinking at one draught a
million sesterces, near a thousand pounds. More
than once he returns tocastigation of the gluttony,
which, though not yet risen to the monstrosity
described by Juvenal, was invading the houses
of the wealthy. He tells of two brothers — "a
precious pair " — who used to breakfast daily upon
nightingales : of one Maenius, who ruined himself
in fieldfares (Ep. I, xv, 41). In a paper on the
" Art of Dining " he accumulates ironical gastro-
nomic maxims (Sat. II, iv): as that oblong eggs
are to be preferred to round; that cabbages
should be reared in dry soil; that the forelegs
of a doe-hare are choice titbits; that to make a
fowl tender you must plunge it alive into boiling
wine and water; that oysters are best at the new
moon; that prawns and snails give zest to wine;
that olive oil should be mixed with pickled
tunny roe, chopped herbs, and saffron. If these
prescriptions are observed, he says, travestying
a fine Lucretian line, the diner-out may draw
near to and drink deep from the well-spring of a
happy life. By contrast he paints the character
of Ofellus, a farmer, whom he had known when
a boy on the Apulian hills, and had visited in
his old age (Sat. II, ii). Deprived of his estate
after Philippi, Ofellus had rented it from its
new master, working on as tenant where he had
formerly been lord. " How are we worse off
now? " says the gallant old fellow to his sons.
" When I was rich, we lived on smoked bacon
and cabbages, with perhaps a pullet or a kid if
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 33
a friend dropped in; our dessert of split figs and
raisins grown upon the farm. Well, we have just
the same to-day. What matter that they called
me ' owner ' then, that a stranger is called owner
now? There is no such thing as 'owner.' This
man turned us out, someone else may turn him
out to-morrow; his heir will do so at any rate
when he dies. The farm was called mine once,
it is called his to-day; it can never ' belong' to
anyone except the man who works and uses it.
So, my boys, keep stout hearts, and be ready to
meet adversity bravely when it comes."
He lashes the legacy-hunters, who, in a time
when disinclination to marriage had multiplied
the number of childless old men, were becoming
a curse to society; gives rules with affected
seriousness for angling in a senior's hoards (Sat.
II, v). Be sure you send him game, tell him often
how you love him, address him by his first, what
we should call his Christian, name— that tickles
sensitive ears. If he offers you his will, refuse to
read it, but glance sidelong at the line where the
names of legatees are written. Praise his bad
verses, shoulder a way for him in the streets, en-
treat him to cover up from cold his dear old
head, make up to his housekeeper, flatter him
till he bids you stop. Then when he is dead
and you find yourself his heir, shed tears, spend
money on his funeral, bear your honours meekly
— and go on to practise upon someone else.
And he throws in a sly story of a testatrix who
bequeathed her money on condition that the
heir should carry to the grave upon his naked
c
34 HORACE
shoulders her body oiled all over; he had stuck
to her all her life, and she hoped to shake him
off for a moment after death. He enforces the
virtue of moderation and contentment from
Aesop's fables, of the frog, of the daw with bor-
rowed plumage, of the lean weasel who squeezed
himself into a granary through a tiny hole, and
grew so fat that he could not return; from the
story of Phiiippus, who amused himself by eii-
riching a poor man to the ruin of his victim's
peace and happiness (Ep. I, vii, 46); and from
the delightful apologue of the City and the
Country Mouse (Sat. II, vi). He denounces the
folly of miserliness from the example of the ant,
provident in amassing store, but restful in fruition
of it when amassed; reproves ill-natured judge-
ment of one's neighbours almost in the words of
Prior, bidding us be to their faults a little blind
and to their virtues very kind, softening their
moral blemishes as lovers and mothers euphemize
a dear one's physical defects. (Sat. I, iii) " You
will not hsten to me?" he stops now and then
to say; " I shall continue to cry on all the same
until I rouse you, as the audience in the theatre
did the other day " (Sat. II, iii, 60). For it seems
that one Fufius, a popular actor, assumed in a
tragedy the part of Trojan Ilione, whose cue
was to fall asleep upon the stage until roused
with a whisper of " Mother awake ! " by the ghost
of her dead son Deiphilus. Poor Fufius was
tipsy, fell asleep in earnest, and was insensible
to the ghost's appeal, until the audience, entering
into the fun, unanimously shouted, " Wake up,
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 35
Mother ! " Some of you, I know, he goes on, will
listen, even as Polemon did (Sat. II, iii, 254).
Returning from a debauch, the young profligate
passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lectur-
ing, and burst riotously in. Presently, instead of
scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched and
moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken
his effeminate ornaments, long sleeves, purple
leggings, cravat, the garland from his head, the
necklace from his throat ; came away an altered
and converted man. One thinks of a poem by
Rossetti, and of something further back than
that; for did we not hear the story from sage
Mr. Barlow's lips, in our Sandford and Merton
salad days?
In the earlier Satires his personalities are some-
times gi;pss : chatterbox Fabius, scattercash
Nomentanus, blear-eyed Crispinus, Hermogenes
the fop, Pantolabus the trencherman, Gorgonius
the goat-scented, Rufillus the pastille-perfumed,
were derisive sobriquets, which, while minister-
ing to the censoriousness of readers by names
genuine or well understood, must have bitterly
offended the men thus stigmatized or trans-
parently indicated. This he admits regretfully in
his later Satires, throwing some blame on a prac-
tice of his father, who when cautioning him
against vice, always pointed the warning by
some example from among their acquaintance.
So, leaving personal satire, he turns to other
topics; relates divertingly the annoyances of a
journey; the mosquitoes, the frogs which croaked
all night (Sat. I, v), the bad water and the ill-
36 HORACE
baked bread. Or he paints the slummy quarter of
the city in which the witches held their horrible
rites, and describes their cruel orgies as he peeped
at them through the trees one night. Or he girds,
facetiously and without the bitterness of Persius
or Juvenal, at the Jews (Sat. I, v, loo), whose
stern exclusiveness of faith was beginning toexcite
in Rome the horror vigorously expressed by Gallio
in M. Anatole France's recent brilliant work. Or
he delineates, on a full canvas and with the
modernity which is amongst his most endearing
characteristics, the " Bore " of the Augustan age.
He starts on a summer morning, light-hearted
and thinking of nothing at all, for a pleasant
stroll along the Sacred Way (Sat. I, ix).' A man
whom he hardly knew accosts him, ignores a stiff
response, clings to him, refuses to be shaken off,
sings his own praises as poet, musician, dancer,
presses impertinent questions as to the house-
hold and habits of Maecenas. Horace's friend
Fuscus meets them; the poet nods and winks,
imploring him to interpose a rescue. Cruel Fus-
cus sees it all, mischievously apologizes, will not
help, and the shy, amiable poet walks on with
his tormentor, "his ears dropped like those of
an overladen ass." At last one of the bore's
creditors comes up, collars him with threats,
hales him to the law courts, while the relieved
^ May the writer ask indulgence while he recalls how,
exactly fifty-eight years ago, ,as senior boy at Winchester,
he recited this Satire publicly, receiving in recompense at
Warden Barter's hands the Queen's silver medal for elo-
cution.
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 37
poet quotes in his joy from the rescue of Hector
in the IHad, "Thus Apollo bore me from the
fray." In this Satire, which was admirably imi-
tated by Swift, it always seems to me that we get
Horace at his very best, his dry quaintness and
his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire
died with him ; to reappear in our own Augustan
age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo
in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress
itself in every page on the lambent humour, the
,' self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet be-
nignant wit of Thackeray.
Between the latest of the Satires and the
earliest^ of the Epistles, we have to reckon an
interval of something like ten years, during which
had been published the Epodes and the majority
of the Odes. " Epistles " his editors have agreed
to entitle them; but not all of them are genuine
Letters. Some are rather dedicated than written
to the persons whose names they bear; some are
thrown for literary purposes into epistolary form;
some again are definitely and personally ad-
dressed to friends. "Sermons" he calls them
himself as he called the Satires, and their motive
is mostly the same; like those, they are Con -
versations, only with absent correspondents in-
stead of with present i ntpHnnitors, real — or
imag ine3i He follows in them the old theme,
the art of living, the happiness of moderation
and contentment; preaching easily as from
38 HORACE
Rabelais' easy chair, with all the Frenchman's
wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we
feel how the ten years of experience, of thought,
of study, have matured his views of life, how
again the labour spent during their progress on
lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing
influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have
trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style.
" The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman,
" are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics
of Virgil, and perhaps the Satires of Juvenal,
the most perfect and most original form of
Roman verse."
Of the three letters to Maecenas, one, like the
Ode we have before quoted on p. 28, is a vigor-
ous assertion of independence. The great man,
sorely sick and longing for his friend, had written
peevishly (Ep. I, vii), "You said you should be
absent five days only, and you stay away the whole
of August." "Well — I went away because I was ill,
and I remain away because in this ' undertakers'
month,' as you call it in Rome, I am afraid of
being worse if I go back. When cold weather
comes I shall go down to the sea; then, with the
first swallow, dear friend, your poet will revisit
you. I love you fondly; am grateful to you every
hour of my life; but if you want to keep me
always by your side, you must restore to me the
tender grace of vanished youth; strong lungs,
thick black hair, musical voice and ringing
laughter ; with our common love for pretty
Cinara now dead and gone." A positive sturdy
refusal, not without hints that if the patron re-
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 39
pents his benefactions or demands sacrifice of
freedom in exchange for them, he had better
take them back : yet a remonstrance so disarm-
ing, infused with such a blend of respect and
playfulness, such wealth of witty anecdote and
classical allusion, that we imagine the fretfulness
of the appeased protector evaporating in admira-
tion as he reads, the answer of affectionate
apology and acceptance dictated in his pacified
response.
In another inimitable letter (Ep. I, 9), as brief
as this is long, he recommends hisfriendSeptimius
to Tiberius Claudius Nero, stepson of Augustus, a
young man of reserved unpleasant manners, and
difficult to approach. The suasive grace with
which it disclaims presumption, yet pleads his
own merits as a petitioner and his friend's as a
candidate for favour, with its dignified deference,
implied not fulsome, to the young prince's rank,
have caused it to be compared with that master-
piece of delicate solicitation, St. Paul's Epistle
to Philemon. It is cited by Steele in the "Spec-
tator " as a model of epistolary tact (" Spectator,"
No. 493); we cannot improve upon his transla-
tion:
"Septimius, who waits on you with this, is
clearly well acquainted with the place you are
pleased to allow me in your friendship. For
when he beseeches me to recommend him to
your notice in such a manner as to be received
by you, who are delicate in the choice of your
friends and domestics, he knows our intimacy
and understands my ability to serve him better
40 HORACE
than I do myself. I have defended myself against
his ambition to be yours as long as I possibly
could; but fearing the imputation of hiding my
influence with you out of mean and selfish con-
siderations, I am at last prevailed upon to give
you this trouble. Thus, to avoid the appearance
of a greater fault, I have put on this confidence.
If you can forgive such transgression of modesty
in behalf of a friend, receive this gentleman into
your interests and friendship, and take it from
me that he is a brave and honest man."
An epistle written and sent about the same
time, possibly by the same bearer, shows Horace
in an amiable light as kindly Mentor to the young
Telemachi of rank who were serving on Tiberius'
staff (Ep. I, iii). "Tell me, Florus, whereabouts
you are just now, in snowy Thrace or genial Asia?
which of you poets is writing the exploits of
Augustus? how does Titius get on with his Latin
rendering of Pindar? my dear friend Celsus, what
is he at work upon? his own ideas, I hope, not
cribs from library books. And you? are you
abandoning all other allurements for the charms
of divine philosophy? Tell me, too, if you have
made up your quarrel with Munatius. To break
the tie of brotherhood is a crime : please, please
be friends with him again, and bring him with
you when next you come to see me. I am fatten-
ing a calf to feast you both." Here is a dinner
invitation (Ep. I, v.): "If you can put up with
deal tables and a mess of greens served in a
common dish, with wine five years old and not at
all bad, come and sup with me, Torquatus, at sun-
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 41
set. We have swept up the hearth and cleaned the
furniture; you may see your face reflected in cup
and platter. We will have a long summer evening
of talk, and you can sleep afterwards as late as you
like, for to morrow is Augustus' birthday, and there
will be no business in the courts. I told you the
wine is good, and there is nothing like good
drink. It unlocks reticence, unloads hearts, en-
courages the shy, makes the tongue-tied eloquent
and the poor opulent. I have chosen my com-
pany well: there will be no blab to repeat our
conversation out of doors. Butra and Septimius
are coming, and I hope Sabinus. Just send a
line to say whom you would like to have besides.
Bring friends if you choose, but the weather is
hot, and we must not overcrowd the rooms." It
all sounds delightful, except perhaps the mess of
greens; but a good Italian cook can make
vegetables tempting down to the present day. I
think we should all have loved to be there, as at
the neat repast of Attic taste with wine, which
tempted virtuous Laurence to sup with Milton.
So should we like to know what called forth this
pretty piece of moralizing, addressed to the poet
TibuUus (Ep. I, iv). He was handsome, prosper-
ous, popular, yet melancholy. Horace affection-
ately reproves him. " Dear Albius," he says,
using the intimate fore-name, " Dear Albius, tell
me what you are about in your pretty villa: writ-
ing delicate verses, strolling in your forest glades,
with thoughts and fancies I am sure all that a
good man's should he? What can you want be-
sides the beauty, wealth, full purse, and seemly
42 HORACE
household which the gods have given you? Dear
friend, I tell you what you want, contentment with
the present hour. Try and imagine that each day
which dawns upon you is your last ; then each suc-
ceeding day will come unexpected and delightful.
I practise what I preach : come and take a look at
me; you will find me contented, sleek, and plump,
' the fattest little pig in Epicurus' sty.' " And he
impresses the same lesson on another friend,
Bullatius, who was for some reason restless at
home and sought relief in travel. " What ails you
to scamper over Asia or voyage among the Isles
of Greece? Sick men travel for health, but you
are well. Sad men travel for change, but change
diverts not sadness, yachts and chaises bring no
happiness; their skies they change, but not their
souls who cross the sea. Enjoy the to-day, dear
friend, which God has given you, the place where
God has placed you: a Little Pedlington is
cheerful if the mind be free from care " (Ep. I,
His great friend Fuscus twits him, as Will
Honeycomb twitted Mr. Spectator, with his pas-
sion fora countrylife(Ep. I,x). "You are a Stoic,"
Horace says, "your creed is to live according to
Nature. Do you expect to find her in the town
or in the country? whether of the two yields
more peaceful nights and sweeter sleep? is a
marble floor more refreshing to the eyes than a
green meadow? water poured through leaden
pipes purer than the crystal spring? Even amid
your Corinthian columns you plant trees and
shrubs; though you drive out Nature she will
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 43
silently return and supplant your fond caprices.
Do interpose a little ease and recreation amid
the money-grubbing which confines you to the
town. Money should be the servant, not the
queen, the captive, not the conqueror. If you
want to see a happy man, come to me in the
country. I have only one thing wanting to per-
fect happiness, my desire for your society." Two
longer letters are written to his young friend
Lollius (Ep. I, ii, xviii). The first is a study of
Homer, which he has been reading in the
country. In the "Iliad" he is disgusted by the
reckless selfishness of the leaders; in the hero
of the " Odyssey " he sees a model of patient,
wise endurance, and impresses the example on
his friend. It is curious that the great poet of
one age, reading the greater poet of another,
should fasten his attention, not on the poetry,
but on the ethics of his predecessor. The re-
maining letter is called out by Lollius' appoint-
ment as confidential secretary to some man of
great consequence; an office such as Horace
himself declined when offered by Augustus. The
post, he says, is full of difficulty, and endangering
to self-respect: the servility it exacts will be in-
tolerable to a man so truthful, frank, and inde-
pendent as his friend. Let him decline it : or, if
committed, get out of it as soon as possible.
Epistles there are without a moral purpose,
called forth by some special occasion. He sends
his " Odes " by one Asella for presentation to
Augustus, punning on the name, as representing
an Ass laden with manuscripts (Ep. I, xiii). The
44 HORACE
fancy was carried out by Pope in his frontispiece
to the " Dunciad." Then his doctor tells him to
forsake Baiae as a winter health resort, and he
writes to one Vala, who lives in southern Italy,
inquiring as to the watering places lower down
the coast (Ep. I, xv). He must have a place
where the bread is good and the water pure; the
wine generous and mellow; in the market wild
boars and hares, sea-urchins and fine fish. He
can live simply at home, but is sick now and
wants cherishing, that he may come back fat as
one of the Phaeacians— luxurious subjects, we
remember, of King Alcinous in the "Odyssey,"
Good food we love, and music, and the dance,
Garments oft changed, warm baths, and restful beds,
Odyssey, viii, 248.
Julius Florus, poet and orator, presses him to
write more lyrics (Ep. H, ii). For many reasons,
no, he answers. I no longer want money. I am
getting old. Lyrics are out of fashion. No one
can write in Rome. I have become fastidious.
His sketch of the ideal poet is believed to portray
the writings of his friend Virgil. It is nobly
paraphrased by Pope:
But how severely with themselves proceed
The men, who wrile such verse as we can read !
Their own strict judges, not a word they spare,
That wants or force, or light, or weight, or care;
Pour the full tide of eloquence along,
Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong;
, Prune the luxuriant, the uncouth refine,
I But show no mercy to an empty line;
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 45
Then polish all with so much life and ease,
You think 'tis nature, and a knack to please;
But ease in writing flows from art, not chance, I
As those move easiest who have learned to dance. /
The "Epistle to Augustus" (Ep. II, i) was
written (page 28) at the Emperor's request. After
some conventional compliments it passes to a
criticism of Latin poetry past and present ; com-
paring, like Swift's " Battle of the Books," the
merits of the contemporary and of the older
masters. There is a foolish mania just now, he
says, for admiring our older poets, not because
they are good, but because they are old. The
origin and development of Roman poetry made
it certain that perfection must come late. He
assumes that Augustus champions the moderns,
and compUments him on the discernment which
preferred a Virgil and a Varius (and so, by im-
plication, a Horace) to thePlautuses and Terences
of the past.
The "Art of Poetry " is thought to be an un- '
finished work. Unmethodical and without pro-
portion, it may have been either compiled
clumsily after the poet's death, or put together
carelessly by himself amid the indolence which
grows sometimes upon old age.' It declares the
essentials of poetry to be unity of conception
and ingenuity of diction, urges that mechanical
correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling,
gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the
chorus, of metre. For matter such as this a
Horace was not needed, but the felicity of its*
handling has made it to many Horatian students J
^^^v
'. Ll Uio-i/^^"
46 HORACE
the most popular of his conversational works. It
abounds in passages of finished beauty; such as
his comparison of verbal novelties imported into
a literature with the changing forest leaves ; his
four ages of humanity— the childish, the adoles-
cent, the manly, the senile— borrowed from
Aristotle, expanded by Shakespeare, and taken
up by Keats ; his comparison of Poetry to Paint-
ing ; his delineation of an honest critic. Brief
phrases which have become classical abound.
The "purple patch " sewn on to a sober narrative;
the wine jar turning to a pitcher as the potter's
wheel revolves; the injunction to keep a book
ten years before you pubhsh it; the near kinship
of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome
of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary
of bringing gods upon the stage ; the occasional
nod of Homer;— are commonplace citations so
crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that
even the unlettered scientist imports them into
his treatises, sometimes with curious effect.
If for a full appreciation of these minor
beauties a knowledge of the Latin text is neces-
sary, the more abounding charm of both Satires
and Epistles is accessible to the Latinless reader.
For the bursts of poetry are brief and rare, is*.
suing from amid what Horace often reminds us
are essentially plain prose essays in conversa-
tional form, their hexametral garb an unpoetical
accident. Two versions present themselves to
the unclassical student. The first is Conington's
scholarly rendering, hampered sometimes rather
than adorned by its metrical shape; the other is
Alinari (•lioto.\
[ UJfizi Gallery, Florence.
AUGUSTUS.
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 47
the more recent construe of Dean Wickham,
clear, flowing, readable, stamping with the trans-
lator's high authority many a disputed passage.
Both set temptingly before English readers the
Rome of Horace's day, and promote them to an
intimacy with his own mind, character, history.
Preferable to both, no doubt, are the "Imita-
tions " of Pope, which do not aim at literal
transference, but work, as does his yet more
famous Homer, by melting down the original,
and pouring the fused mass into an English
mould. Their background is Twit'nam and the
Mall instead of Tibur and the Forum; their
Maecenas St. John, their Trebatius Fortescue,
their Numicius Murray. Where Horace appeals
to Ennius and Attius, they cite Shakespeare
and CoVley; while the forgotten wits, worthies,
courtiers, spendthrifts of Horatian Rome re-
appear as Lord Hervey or Lady Mary, as Ship-
pen, Chartres, Oldfield, Darteneuf; and Horace's
delicate flattery of a Roman Emperor is traves-
tied with diabolical cleverness into bitter mock-
ery of an English king. In these easy and
polished metamorphoses we have Pope at his
very best; like Horace, an epitome of his time,
bearing the same relation, as patriot, scholar,
worldling, epicurean, poet, satirist, to the London
of Queen Anne, which Horace bore to the Augus-
tan capital ; and so reproducing in an English garb
something at any rate of the exotic flavour of his
original. In an age when Pope is undeservedly
and disastrously neglected, I shall do well to
present some few Horatian samples from the
48 HORACE
king-poet of his century; by whose wit and finish,
unsurpassed if not unequalled in our literature,
the taste of my own contemporaries was formed ;
and to whom a public which decries or ignores
him pays homage every day, by quoting from him
unconsciously oftener than from anyone except
Shakespeare.
Here is a specimen from the Satires, heighten-
ing our interest in Horace's picture by its adapta-
tion to familiar English characters. Great Scipio
and Laelius, says Horace (Sat. H, i, 72), could
unbend their dignity to trifle and even to romp
with Lucilius. Says Pope of his own Twicken-
ham home:
Know, all the distant din that world can keep
Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but sooths my sleep.
, There my retreat the best Companions grace,
j Chiefs out of war, and Statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul:
And he, whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines.
Now forms my Quincunx and now ranks my vines.
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain.
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.
That Naevius is no longer read (Ep. H, i, 53)
affects us slightly, for of Naevius we know nothing;
Pope substitutes awriter known and admired still :
Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forget his Epic, nay, Pindaric art,
\ But still I love the language of his heart.
Horace tells how the old rough Saturnian
measure gave way to later elegance (Ep. H, i,
SATIRES AND EPISTLES 49
157). Pope aptly introduces these fine resonant
lines :
Waller's was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.
Horace claims for poetry that it lifts the mind
from the coarse and sensual to the imaginative
and pure (Ep. II, i, 128). Pope illustrates by a
delightful compliment to moral Addison, with
just one little flick of the lash to show that he
remembered their old quarrel :
In our own day (excuse some courtly stains),
No whiter page than Addison's remains.
He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth,
And sets the passions on the side of Truth ;
Forms ^he soft bosom with the gentlest art,
And pours each human virtue in the heart.
Horace, speaking of an old comic poet, Livius
(Ep. II, i, 69), whom he had been compelled
to read at school, is indignant that a single
neat line or happy phrase should preserve an
otherwise contemptible composition. This is
Pope's expansion :
But, for the wits of either Charles' days,
The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more.
Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er.
One simile, that solitary shines
In the dry desert of a thousand lines, /
Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page.
Has sanctified whole poems for an age.
Horace paints the University don as he had
D
so HORACE
seen him emerging from his studious seclusion
to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative,
moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 8i).
Pope carries him to Oxford:
The man, who, stretched in Isis' calm retreat,
To books and study gives seven years complete ;
See, strowed with learned dust, his nightcap on,
lie walks, an object new beneath the sun.
The boys flock round him, and the people stare;
So stift", so mute ! some statue you would swear,
Stept from its pedestal to take the air.
Finally, Horace extols the poet as distinct
from the mere versifier (Ep. II, i, 210). Pope's
rendering ought to dispel the plea of an unfeel-
ingness sometimes lightly urged against him :
Let me for once presume to instruct the times
To know the Poet from the Man of Rhymes:
'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains, /
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns, '
Enrage, compose, with more than magic art.
With pity and with terror tear my heart ;
And snatch me o'er the earth or tli rough the air.
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.
If only he had handled more ! but of the forty-
one Conversations Pope imitated only seven.
And so to assimilate those remaining we must
descend from the heights of poetry to the cool
sequestered vale of literal masquerade. To a lady
wintering in Rome who consulted me lately as
to guide-books, I ventured to recommend Haw-
thorne's "Transformation," Marion Crawford's
" Ave Roma," and Dean Wickham's translation
of the Satires and Epistles.
ODES AND EPODES
T HAVE tried to interpret in some degree the
■•- teaching of the Satires and P^pistles. Yet
had the author's genius found expression in these
Conversations only, he would not have become
through nineteen centuries the best beloved of
Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by
the weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sen-
sualist JVlaecenas; "playing round the heart-
strings " of the stern censor Persius; endowed
by Petronius and Quintilian with the prize of in-
communicable felicity; the darling of Dante,
Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old
popular Horace" of Tennyson; the Horace
whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness"
pierced the soul and brain of aged John Henry
Newman. " His poems," says a great French
critic (St. Beuve, " Horace "), " form a manual of
good taste, of poetic feeling, of practical and
worldly wisdom. The Christian has his Bible;
the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St.
Augustine; an earlier philosophy on Montaigne;
Horace comes within the range of all : in reading
him we break not in any way with modernity, yet
retain our hold upon antiquity. I know nothing
more delightful as one grows in years, when the
5'
50 HORACE
seen him emerging from his studious seclusion
to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative,
moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 8i).
Pope carries him to Oxford:
The man, who, stretched in Isis' calm retreat,
To books and study gives seven years complete ;
See, strowed with learned dust, his nightcap on,
He walks, an object new beneath the sun.
The boys flock round him, and the people stare;
So stiff, so mute ! some statue you would swear,
Stept from its pedestal to take the air.
Finally, Horace extols the poet as distinct
from the mere versifier (Ep. II, i, 210). Pope's
rendering ought to dispel the plea of an unfeel-
ingness sometimes lightly urged against him:
Let me for once presume to instruct the times
To know the Poet from the Man of Rhymes:
'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains.
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns,
Enrage, compose, with more than magic art,
With pity and with terror tear my heart ;
And snatch me o'er the earth or through the air.
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.
If only he had handled more ! but of the forty-
one Conversations Pope imitated only seven.
And so to assimilate those remaining we must
descend from the heights of poetry to the cool
sequestered vale of literal masquerade. To a lady
wintering in Rome who consulted me lately as
to guide-books, I ventured to recommend Haw-
thorne's "Transformation," Marion Crawford's
" Ave Roma," and Dean Wickham's translation
of the Satires and Epistles.
ODES AND EPODES
T HAVE tried to interpret in some degree the
-^ teaching of the Satires and Epistles. Yet
had the author's genius found expression in these
Conversations only, he would not have become
through nineteen centuries the best beloved of
Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by
the weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sen-
sualist Maecenas; "playing round the heart-
strings'* of the stern censor Persius; endowed
by Petronius and Quintilian with the prize of in-
communicable felicity; the darHng of Dante,
Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old
popular Horace" of Tennyson; the Horace
whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness"
pierced the soul and brain of aged John Henry
Newman. " His poems," says a great French
critic (St. Beuve, " Horace "), " form a manual of
good taste, of poetic feeling, of practical and
worldly wisdom. The Christian has his Bible;
the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St.
Augustine; an earlier philosophy on Montaigne;
Horace comes within the range of all: in reading
him we break not in any way with modernity, yet
retain our hold upon antiquity. I know nothing
more delightful as one grows in years, when the
51
54 HORACE
retirement for the Stock Exchange, sells his estate
in quick disgust, and returns to city life:
So said old Ten-per-cent, when he
A jolly farmer fain would be.
His moneys he called in amain —
Next week he put them out again.
is the spirited rendering of Mr. Goldwin Smith.
In his remaining Epodes we may trace the
germ of his later written Odes. We have the
affectionate addresses to Maecenas, the disgust
at civil discords, the cheery invitations to the
wine cup, the wooing of some coy damsel. By
and by Maecenas presses him to bring them out
completed in a volume, and he pleads a fugitive
amour in excuse for his delay. Published, how-
ever, they were, notwithstanding the distractions
of Neaera; went, neatly written out in red-
lined columns, to the brothers Sosii in the street
called Argiletum, to be multiplied by the libra-
rian's scribes on well-bleached Egyptian papyrus,
bound in pumiced parchment, stored in metal
boxes on the bookseller's shelves within, while
the names of the author and his work were in-
scribed upon a pillar outside the shop, as a
guide to intending purchasers. Copies were sold,
probably, for a few denarii each ; what would we
not give for one of them to-day? Let us hope
that their author was well paid.
Horace was now thirty-five years old: the
Epodes had taught him his power over lyric
verse. He had imitated at first the older Roman
satirists; here by Maecenas' advice he copied
ODES AND EPODES 55
from Greek models, from Alcaeus and Sappho,
claiming ever afterwards with pride that he was
the first amongst Roman poets to wed Aeolian /
lays to notes of Italy (Od. Ill, xxx, 13). He /
spent seven years in composing the first three (
Books of the Odes, which appeared in a single
volume about B.C. 23. More than any of his
poems they contain the essence of his indefin-
able magic art. They deal apparently with dull :
truisms and stale moralities, avowals of simple '
joys and simple sorrows. They tell us that life is
brief and death is sure, that light loves and
ancient wines are good, that riches are burden-
some, and enough is better than a feast, that
country life is delightful, that old age comes on
us apace, that our friends leave us sorrowing and
our sorrow does not bring them back. Trite say-
ings no doubt; but embellished one and all with
an adorable force and novelty at once sadly
earnest and vividly exact; not too simple for the 1
profound and not too artful for the shallow;
consecrated by the verbal felicity which belongs
only to an age of peculiar intellectual refinement,
and which flashed diamond-like from the facets
of his own highly polished mind. " He is the
Breviary of the natural man, his poetry is the
Imitation not of Christ but of Epicurus."
His Odes may be roughly classified as Re-
ligious, Moral, Philosophical, Personal, Amatory.
I. Religious. Between the classic and the
Christian hymn, as Matthew Arnold has re-
minded us, there is a great gulf fixed. The Latin
conception of the gods was civic ; they were
56 HORACE
superior heads of the Republic; the Roman
church was the invisible Roman state; religion
was merely exalted patriotism. So Horace's ad-
dresses to the deities for the most part remind
them of their coronation oaths, of the terms on
which they were worshipped, their share in the
bargain with humanity, a bargain to be kept on
their side if they expected tribute of lambs and
piglings, of hallowed cakes and vervain wreaths.
Very little of what we call devotion seasons
them. In two Odes (I, ii, xii), from a mere
litany of Olympian names he passes to a much
more earnest deification of Augustus. Another
(HI, xix) is a grace to Bacchus after a wine-bout.
Or Faunas is bidden to leave pursuing the
nymphs (we think of Elijah's sneer at Baal) and
to attend to his duties on the Sabine farm, of
blessing the soil and protecting the lambs (III,
xviii). The hymn to Mercury recounts mythical
exploits of the winged god, his infantile thefts
from Apollo, his guiding Priam through the
Grecian camp, his gift of speech to men, his
shepherding souls to Hades (I, x). Venus is in-
voked in a dainty prayer to visit the chapel
which Glycera is building for her (I, xxx) :
O come, and with thee bring thy glowing boy,
The Graces all, with kirtles flowing free,
Youth, that without thee knows but little joy.
The jocund nymphs and blithesome Mercury.
The doctrine of an overruling Providence Horace
had expressly rejected in the Satires (Sat. iv, loi),
holding that the gods are too happy and too
ODES AND EPODES 57
careless in their superior aloof security to plague
themselves with the affairs of mortals. But he
felt sometimes, as all men feel, the need of a
supreme celestial Guide : in the noble Ode which
Ruskin loved he seems to find it in Necessity or
Fortune (Od. I, xxxv); and once, when scared
by thunder resounding in a cloudless sky, recants
what he calls his "irrational rationalism," and
admits that God may, if He will, put down the
mighty and exalt the low (I, xxxiv). So again in
his hymn for the dedication of Apollo's Temple
on the Palatine (I, xxxi) a serious note is struck.
He will not ask the God for rich cornfields and
fat meadow land, for wines of Cales proffered in
a golden cup. A higher boon than these his
prayer demands :
O grant me, Phoebus, calm content,
Strength unimpaired, a mind entire.
Old age without dishonour spent,
Nor unbefriended of the lyre.
On the other hand, his Ode to Melpomene (IV,
iii), written in the consciousness of accepted emin-
ence as the national poet, " harpist of the Roman
lyre, " breathes a sentiment of gratitude to Divinity
far above the typical poetic cant of homage to
the Muse. And his fine Secular Hymn, composed
by Augustus's request for the great Century
Games, strikes a note of patriotic aspiration and
of moral earnestness, not unworthy to compare
with King Solomon's Dedication Prayer; and is
such as, with some modernization of the Deities
invoked, would hardly misbecome a national re-
S8 HORACE
ligious festival to-day. It was sung by twenty-
seven noble boys and as many high-born maidens,
now in antiphon, now in chorus, to Apollo and
Diana, as representing all the gods. Apollo, bless
our city ! say the boys. Dian, bless our women
and our children, say the girls, and guard the
sanctity of our marriage laws. Bring forth Earth's
genial fruits, say both; give purity to youth and
peace to age. Bring back the lapsed virtues of
the Golden Age; Faith, Honour, antique Shame-
fastness and Worth, and Plenty with her teeming
horn. Hear, God ! hear, Goddess ! Yes, we feel
our prayers are heard — ■
Now homeward we repair,
Full of the blessed hope which will not fail,
That Jove and all the gods have heard our prayer.
And with approving smiles our homage hail:
We, skilled in choral harmonies to raise
The hymn to Phoebus and Diana's praise.
Of course in all this there is no touch of ecstasy;
no spark of the inspiration which in a St. Francis,
a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley, scales the
heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative
Roman temperament lacked the instinct of adora-
tion, so was it deficient in that other constituent
of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality.
There might be a shadowy world — the poets said
so — Odysseus visited its depths and brought
back its report — but it was a gloomy place at
best. Horace alludes to it always in the tone of
the Hebrew Psalmists, or of Hezekiah sick to
death, utilizing Minos and Cerberus and Tanta-
lus and Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with
ODES AND EPODES 59
an undertone of sadness and alarm. Not
Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite
lament for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-
blood to the phantom pale who has joined the
spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods
are pitiless — we can only bear bereavements "y^
patiently (II, iii). You must leave, my Dellius,
your pleasant groves and your cottage upon
Tiber's banks, since Orcus, ruthless king, swoops
equally on all :
Land, home, and winsome wife must all be left;
And cypresses abhorred,
Alone of all the trees
That now your fancy please,
Shall shade his dust who was awhile their lord.
(II, xiv, 21.)
2. Moral. But if the gods are beyond our
ken, and if the world to come is misty, we still
have this world with us; a world not always to
be daffed aside with love and wine and comrade-
ship, since behind its frolic wantonness lie the
ennobling claims of duty and of conscience. As
with Fielding, as with Thackeray, the light cur-
rent tone of sportiveness or irony heightens the
rare solemnity of didactic moral earnestness. Of
all the Latin poets, says Sir Richard Fanshaw,
Horace is the fullest fraught with excellent
morality. In the six stately Odes which open the
third book, together with a later Ode (xxiv) which
closes the series and ought never to have been
severed from it, Horatian poetry rises to its
greatest height of ethical impressiveness. Ushered
in with the solemn words of a hierophant bidding
6o HORACE
the uninitiated avaunt at the commencement of
a religious ceremony (III, i, 1-2), delivered with
official assumption in the fine frenzy of a muse-
inspired priest, their unity of purpose and of style
makes them virtually a continuous poem. It
lashes the vices and the short-sighted folly of
society ; with the Sword of Damocles above his
head the rich man sits at a luxurious board (III,
i, 17); sails in his bronzed galley, lolls in his
lordly chariot, with black Care ever at the helm
or on the box (III, i, 40). By hardihood in the
field and cheerful poverty at home Rome became
great of yore; such should be the virtues of to-
day. Let men be moral; it was immorality that
ruined Troy; heroic — read the tale of Regulus;
courageous, but with courage ordered, disciplined,
controlled (III, iii; v; iv, 65). Brute force
without mind, he says almost in Milton's words,
falls by its own strength, as the giants fell en-
countering the gods :
>'
' For what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom? vast, unwieldy, burdensome;
Proudly secure, yet liable to fall
By weakest subtleties, not made to rule,
But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
("Samson Ag.," 53.)
Self-discipline, he reminds his audience, need
not be sullen and austere; in regenerated Rome
the Muses still may rule. Mild thoughts they
plant, and they joy to see mild thoughts take
root; refinement of manners and of mind, and
the gladsomeness of literary culture (III, iv, 41).
He turns to reprove the ostentation of the
ODES AND EPODES 6i
rich; their adding field to field, poor families
evicted from farmstead and cottage to make way
for spreading parks and ponds and gardens ;
driven from home
Both wife and husband forth must roam,
Bearing their household gods close pressed,
With squalid babes, upon their breast.
(II, xviii, 23.)
Not thus was it in the good old times. Then
rich men lavished marble on the temples of the
gods, roofed their own cottages with chance-cut
turf (II, XV, 13). And to what end all this
splendour? Behind your palace walls lurks the
grim architect of a narrower home; the path of
glory leads but to the grave (II, xviii, 17). And
as on \he men, so on the women of Rome his
solemn warnings are let fall. Theirs is the task
to maintain the sacred family bond, the purity
of marriage life. Let them emulate the matrons
of the past, severe mothers of gallant sons (III,
vi, 37). Let men and women join to stay the
degeneracy which has begun to set in, and which,
unchecked, will grow deadlier with each genera-
tion as it succeeds.
How Time doth in its flight debase
Whate'er it finds? our fathers' race.
More deeply versed in ill
Than were their sires, hath born us yet
More wicked, destined to beget
A race more vicious still.
(HI, vi, 45-)
. ,. . >
3. Philosophical. " How charmmg is divme
philosophy?" said the meek younger brother in
6U0 ^ c^wU.>i-
62 HORACE
" Comus " to his instructive senior. Speaking as
, one of the profane, I find not less charming the
humanist philosophy of Horace. Be content ! be
moderate! seize the present! are his maxims.
Be content! A mind without anxiety is the
highest good (H, xvi). Great desires imply great
wants (HI, xvi, 42). 'Tis well when prayer seeks
and obtains no more than life requires.
Happy he,
Self-centred, who each night can say,
"My life is lived": the morn may see
A clouded or a sunny day :
That rests with Jove; but what is gone
He will not, can not, turn to nought,
Nor cancel as a thing undone
What once the flying hour has brought.
(in, xxix, 41.)
Be moderate! He that denies himself shall
gain the more (HI, xvi, 21). He that ruleth his
spirit is better than the lord of Carthage. Hold
fast the golden mean (H, x, 5). The poor man's
supper, spare but neat and free from care, with
no state upon the board except his heirloom
silver saltcellar, is better than a stalled ox and
care therewith (II, xvi, 13). And he practised
what he preached, refusing still fresh bounties
which Maecenas pressed upon him. What more
want I than I have? he says:
Truth is mine with genius mixed,
The rich man comes and knocks at my poor gate.
Favoured thus I ne'er repine,
Nor weary Heaven for more, nor to the great
For larger bounty pray.
My Sabine farm my one sufficient boon.
(H, xviii, 9.)
ODES AND EPODES 63
Seize the Present! Now bind the brow with
late roses and with myrtle crowns; now drown
your cares in wine, counting as gain each day
that Chance may give (I, vii, 31 ; I, ix, 14). Pale
Death will be here anon; even while I speak
time slips away: seize to-day, trust nothing to
the morrow.
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
To-day of past regrets and future fears :
To-morroivl why to-morrow I may be
Myself with yesterday's seven thousand years.
What more commonplace than this saying
that we all must die? but he brings it home
to us ever and again with pathetic tearful
fascinating force. Each time we read him, his
sweet sad pagan music chants its ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, and we hear the earth fall upon the
coffin lid amongst the flowers.
Ah, Postumus, they fleet away
Our years, nor piety one hour
Can win from wrinkles, and decay,
And death's indomitable power;
Not though three hundred steers you heap
Each day, to glut the tearless eyes
Of Him, who guards in moated keep
Tityos, and Geryon's triple size :
All, all, alas ! that watery bound
Who eat the fruits that Nature yields,
Must traverse, be we monarchs crowned.
Or humblest tillers of the fields.
(II, xiv.)
The antipathy is not confined to heathenism ;
we distrust the Christian who professes to ignore
64 HORACE
it; many of us felt drawn by a brotherhood of
humanity to the late scholarly Pope, when we
learned that, as death looked him in the face,
he clung to Pagan Horace as a truthful and
sympathetic oracle. " And we all go to-day to
this singer of the ancient world for guidance in
the deceptions of life, and for steadfastness in
the face of death."
4. Personal. Something, but not very much,
we learn of Horace's intimates from this class of
Odes. Closest to him in affection and oftenest
addressed is Maecenas. The opening Ode pays
homage to him in words closely imitated by
Allan Ramsay in addressing the chief of his
clan:
Dalhousie of an auld descent,
My chief, my stoup, my ornament ;
and at the end of the volume the poet repeats
his dedication (HI, xxix). Twice he invites his
patron to a feast; to drink wine bottled on the
day some years before when entering the theatre
after an illness he was received with cheers by the
assembled multitude (I, xx); again on March ist,
kept as the festal anniversary of his own escape
from a falling tree (HI, viii). To a querulous
letter from his friend written when sick and dread-
ing death, he sends the tender consolation and
remonstrance of which we spoke before (p. 29).
In a very different tone he sings the praises of
Licymnia (H, xii), supposed to be Terentia,
Maecenas' newly-wedded wife, sweet voiced,
witty, loving, of whom her husband was at the
A linari photo . ]
{Capitol M iiscitin, Rome,
VIRGIL.
ODES AND EPODES 65
time passionately enamoured. He recounts
finally, with that delicate respectful gratitude
which never lapses into servility, his lifelong
obligation, lauding gratefully the still removed
place which his friend's bounty has bestowed:
A clear fresh stream, a little field, o'ergrown
With shady trees, a crop that ne'er deceives.
(Ill, xvi, 29.)
Not less tenderly affectionate is the exquisite
Ode to Virgil on the death of Quinctilius.
By many a good man wept Quinctilius dies,
By none than you, my Virgil, trulier wept;
(I, xxiv.)
or to his devoted young friend Septimius (p. 39)
(II, vi)>^who would travel with him to the ends of
the world, to Moorish orCantabrian wilds. Not so
far afield need they go; but when age steals on
they will journey to Tarentum, sweetest spot on
earth:
That spot, those happy heights, desire
Our sojourn; there, when life shall end.
Your tear shall dew my yet warm pyre.
Your bard and friend.
To the great general Agrippa (I, vi), rival of
Maecenas in the good graces of Augustus, he
sends a tribute complimentary, yet somewhat
stiffly and officially conceived; lines much more
cordial to the high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17),
whose statue stands to-day amid the pale im-
mortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have
a note of tonic banter to TibuUus, "jilted by a
E
66 HORACE
fickle Glycera," and " droning piteous elegies "
(I, xxxiii) ; a merry riotous impersonation of an
imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-
made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and
tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and
rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious
mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv),
who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of
it. He may yet find out that though fallen into
obscurity she is in truth high-born and noble,
and will present him with a patrician mother-in-
law.
For aught that you know now, fair Phyllis may be
The shoot of some highly respectable stem ;
Nay, she counts, I'll be sworn, a few 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.
Several of his correspondents we can only
name; the poet Valgius, the tragedians Pollio
and Fuscus; Sallust, grandson of the historian;
Pompeius, his old comrade in the Brutus wars;
Lollius, defeated in battle and returning home in
disgrace. Nor need we labour to identify a host
of others; Iccius, Grosphus, Dellius; who figure
as mere dedicatory names; nor persons men-
tioned casually, such as Telephus of the rosy
neck and clustering hair (I, xiii; III, xix), whom
Bulwer Lytton, with fine memories of his own
ambrosial petted youth, calls a " typical beauty-
ODES AND EPODES 6-j
man and lady-killer." The Horatian personages,
remarks Dean Milman, would contain almost
every famous name of the Augustan age.
5. Amatory. "Speak'st thou of nothing but
ladies? " says Feste the Jester to poor Malvolio.
He might have said the same to Horace; for of
the Odes in the first three Books one third part
is addressed to or concerned with women. How
many of the pretty female names which musical-
ize his love songs, in syllables that breathe of
the sweet south and melt like kisses in the utter-
ance, are representative of real girls, we cannot
guess; with none of them except perhaps one,
who died young, does he seem to have been
really in love. He was forty years old when
most pf his amorous Odes were written; an age
at which, as George Eliot has reminded us, the
baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than
immersion. Something he must have known of
love, or he could not write as he has done; but'
it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather than
the impassioned self-surrender of a lover; of a
gay bachelor, with roving critical eye, heart whole
yet fancy free, too practised a judge of beauty to
become its slave. Without emotion, without
reverence, but with keen relishing appreciation,
he versifies Pyrrha's golden curls, and Lycoris'
low forehead — feminine beauties both to a Roman
eye — and Phyllis' tapering arms and shapely
ankles, and Chia's dimpled cheek, and the tangles
of Neaera's hair, and the gadabout baggage Lyde,
and Glycera's dazzling complexion that blinds the
gazer's eye (I, v, xix, xxxiii; H, iv, 21; HI, xiv,
68 HORACE
2 1). They are all inconstant good-for-noughts, he
knows; but so are men, and so is he; keep up
the pleasant give-and-take, the quarrels and the
reconciliations. All the youths of Rome are in
love with a beautiful Ninon D'Enclos named
Barine — Matthew Arnold declared this to be
the finest of all the Odes (II, viii) — she perjures
herself with every one in turn. But it seems to
answer; she shines forth lovelier than ever.
Venus and the nymphs only laugh, and her lovers,
young and old, continue to hug their chains.
New captives fill the nets you weave ;
New slaves are bred ; and those before,
Though oft they threaten, never leave
Your perjured door.
Sometimes he plays the monitor. Asterie's
husband is laid up in Greece by contrary winds:
he is faithful to his wife, though his hostess
tempts him : let the wife be on her guard against
her handsome neighbour Enipeus (III, vii). His
own charmers are sometimes obdurate: Chloe
and Lyde run away from him like fawns (I, xxiii) :
that is because they are young; he can wait till
they are older; they will come to him then of
themselves: "they always come," says Disraeli
in " Henrietta Temple." He has quarrelled with
an old flame (I, xvi), whom he had affronted by
some libellous verses. He entreats her pardon ;
was young and angry when he wrote; will burn
the offending lines, or fling them into the sea:
Come, let me change my sour for sweet,
And smile complacent as before ;
ODES AND EPODES 69
Hear me my palinode repeat,
And give me back your heart once more.
He professes bitter jealousy of a handsome strip-
ling whose beauty Lydia praises (I, xiii). She is
wasting her admiration; she will find him un-
faithful; Horace knows him well:
Oh, trebly blest, and blest for ever.
Are they, whom true affection binds,
In whom no doubts nor janglings sever
The union of their constant minds ;
But life in blended current flows,
Serene and sunny to the close.
If anyone now reads " Lalla Rookh," he will
recall an exquisite rendering of these lines from
the lips of veiled Nourmahal:
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 !
But, perhaps, if a jury of scholars could be
polled as to the most enchanting amongst all
Horace's lovesongs, the highest vote would be
cast in favour of the famous " Reconciliation "
of the roving poet with this or with some other
Lydia (HI, ix). The pair of former lovers,
mutually faithless, exchange defiant experience of
their several infidelities; then, the old affection
reviving through the contact of their altercation,
70 HORACE
agree to discard their intervening paramours, and
return to their first allegiance.
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,
Thou fickle as an April sky,
More churlish too than Adria's sea.
With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die.
ODES AND EPODES 71
The austere Scaliger used to say that he would \
rather have written this ode than be King of
Spain and the Indies : Milton's Eve expresses her
devotion to Adam in an apostrophe paraphrased
from its closing lines.
Observe, too, how we find in all the Odes as
we read them, not only a gallery of historical
pictures, nor only an unconscious revelation of
the poet's self, of, that is, the least subjective
among poets, ever, as says Sir Stephen De Vere,
looking outward, never looking in; but they
incidentally paint for us in vivid and familiarizing
tints the intimate daily life of that far-off ancient
queen of cities. We walk with them the streets
of Rome. We watch the connoisseurs gaz-
ing into the curiosity shops and fingering the
bronzes or the silver statuettes; the naughty
boys jeering the solemn Stoic as he walks along,
staid, superior, absent; the good boys coming
home from school with well-thumbed lesson
books; the lovers in the cookshops or restaurants
shooting apple pips from between finger and
thumb, rejoicing in the good omen if they strike
the ceiling; the stores of Sulpicius the wine mer-
chant and of Sosius the bookseller; the great
white Latian ox, exactly such as. you see to-day,
driven towards the market, with a bunch of hay
upon his horns to warn pedestrians that he ;
dangerous; the coarse drawings in chalk or
colours on the wall advertising some famous
gladiator; at dusk the whispering lovers in the
Campus, or the romping hide-and-seek of lads
and lasses at the corners of the streets or squares,
72 HORACE
just as you may watch them to-day on spring or
winter evenings amongst the lower arches of the
Colosseum; — it is a microcosm, a cameo, of that
old-world life. Horace knew, and feared not to
say, that in his poems, in his Odes especially,
he bequeathed a deathless legacy to mankind,
while setting up a lasting monument to himself.
One thing he could not know, that when near
two thousand years had passed, a race of which
he had barely heard by name as dwelling
" quite beyond the confines of the world," would
cherish his name and read his writings with a
grateful appreciation even surpassing that of his
contemporary Romans.
A few Odes remain, too casual to be classified;
rejoicings over the vanishing of winter and the
return of spring (I, iv); praises of the Tibur
streams, of Tarentum (H, vi) which he loved
only less than Tibur, of the Lucretilis Groves
(I, xvii) which overhung his Sabine valley, of the
Bandusian spring beside which he played in boy-
hood. We have the Pindaric or historic Odes,
with tales of Troy, of the Danaid brides, of
Regulus, of Europa (HI, iii, v, xi, xvii); the
dramatic address to Archytas (I, xxviii), which
soothed the last moments of Mark Pattison; the
fine epilogue which ends the book, composed in
the serenity of gained renown;
And now 'tis done : more durable than brass
My monument shall be, and raise its head
O'er royal pyramids : it shall not dread
Corroding rain or angry Boreas,
Nor the long lapse of immemorial time.
ODES AND EPODES
73
I shall not wholly die ; large residue
Shall 'scape the Queen of funerals. Ever new
My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb
With silent maids the Capitolian height.
" Born," men will say, " where Aufidus is loved,
Where Danaus scant of streams beneath him bowed
The rustic tribes, from dimness he waxed bright,
First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay
To notes of Italy." Fut glory on,
My own Melpomene, by genius won,
And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.
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SWAN SONG
WHEN a well-graced actor has left the stage
amid trumpeted farewells from an admir-
ing but regretful audience, we somewhat resent
his occasional later reappearance. So, when a
poet's last word has been spoken, and spoken
emotionally, an Afterword is apt to offend: and
we may wish that the fine poem just quoted had
been reserved as finish to the volume yet to
come, which lacks a closing note, or even that
the volume itself had not been published. The
fourth Book of the Odes was written nearly ten
years after the other three, and Horace wrote it
not as Poet but as Laureate. His Secular Hymn
appeared in b.c. 17, when he was forty-eight
years old; and after it Augustus pressed him to
celebrate the victories of his two stepsons, Drusus
and Tiberius, over the tribes of the Eastern Alps.
If he wrote unwillingly, his hand had not lost
its cunning. The sentiment is paler and more
artificial, but the old condensation and felicity
remain. He begins with rather sad reluctance.
He is old; the one woman whom he loved is
dead; his lyric raptures and his love campaign-
ings are at an end; he is tired of flattering hopes,
of noisy revels, of flower garlands fresh with dew.
74
SWAN SONG 75
Or are they war songs, not love songs, that are
wanted? There he is more helpless still. It
needs a Pindar worthily to extol a Caesar: he is
no Pindar; and so we have an ode in honour of
the Theban bard. And yet, as chosen lyrist of
the Roman race, he cannot altogether refuse the
call. Melpomene, who from his cradle marked
him for her own, can still shed on him if she will
the power to charm, can inspire in him " music
of the swan." So, slowly, the wasting lyric fire
revives; we get the martial odes to conquering
Drusus and to LoUius, the panegyrics on Augus-
tus and Tiberius, all breathing proud conscious-
ness that " the Muse opens the good man's grave
and lifts him to the gods"; that immortality can
be won pnly by the poet's pen, and that it is in
his own power to confer it.
The remaining poems are in the old spirit,
but are somewhat mournful echoes of the past.
They remind us of the robin's winter song —
" Hark to him weeping," say the country folk,
as they Hsten to the music which retains the
sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls
the gushes of the summer strains. There is still
an ode to Venus: its prayer not now " come to
bless thy worshipper " ; but " leave an old heart
made callous by fifty years, and seek some
younger votary." There is an ode to Spring.
Spring brought down from heaven his earliest
Muse; it came to him charged with youthful
ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message
is that change and death attend all human hopes
and cares. Like an army defeated, the snow has
76 HORACE
retreated; the Graces and the Nymphs can dance
unclad in the soft warm air. But summer will
thrust out spring, autumn summer, then dull
winter will come again ; will come to the year, will
come to you and me. Not birth nor eloquence nor
virtue can save from Minos' judgement seat; like
Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, like all the great ones of
the earth, we shall soon be nameless shades and
a poor pinch of dust. More of the old buoyant
glee comes back in a festal invitation to one
Virgilius, not the poet. There is a ring of Tom
Moore in Sir Theodore Martin's rendering of it.
» * * *
On the young grass reclined, near the murmur of fountains,
The shepherds are piping the song of the plains,
And the god who loves Avcady's purple-hued mountains,
The god of the flocks, is entranced by their strains.
* * * *
To the winds with base lucre and pale melancholy !
In the flames of the pyre these, alas ! will be vain;
Mix your sage ruminations with glimpses of folly,
'Tis delightful at times to be somewhat insane !
There follows a savage assault on one Lyce,
an ancient beauty who had lost her youthful
charms, but kept up her youthful airs :
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 !
Poor 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.
Poor Lyce indeed ! what had she done to be
SWAN SONG 77
so scourged? One address we miss: there is no
ode in this book to Maecenas, who was out of
favour with Augustus, and had lost all political
influence. But the friend is not sunk in the
courtier. The Ides or 13th of April is his old
patron's birthday — a nativity, says Horace, dearer
to him almost than his own, and he keeps it
always as a feast. With a somewhat ghostly
resurrection of voluptuousness dead and gone
he bids Phyllis come and keep it with him. All
things are ready, a cask of Alban nine years old
is broached, the servants are in a stir, the altar
wreathed for sacrifice, the flames curling up the
kitchen chimney, ivy and parsley gathered to
make a wreath for Phyllis' hair. Come then,
sweet girl, last of ray loves; for never again shall
this heart take fire at a woman's face — come,
and learn of me a tune to sing with that dear
voice, and drive away dull care. I am told that
every man in making love assures the charmer
that no woman shall ever succeed her in his re-
gards; but this is probably a veritable amorous
swan-song. He was older than are most men
at fifty-two. Years as they pass, he sadly says,
bereave us one by one of all our precious things;
of mirth, of loves, of banquets; at last the Muse
herself spreads wings to follow them. " You have
sported long enough," she says, " with Amaryllis
in the shade, you have eaten and drunk your
fill, it is time for you to quit the scene." And
so the curtain falls.
To our great loss there is no contemporary
78 HORACE
portrait of Horace. He tells us himself (Ep. H,
ii, 214; I, XX, 29) that he was short of stature,
his hair black but early tinged with grey; that
he loved to bask in sunshine, that his temper was
irascible but easily appeased. In advanced life
he became fat; Augustus jests with him rather
coarsely on his protuberant figure. The portrait
prefixed to this volume is from a Contorniate, or
bronze medallion of the time of Constantine, re-
presenting the poet's likeness as traditionally
preserved amongst his countrymen three hundred
years after his death.
The oldest extant manuscript of his works is
probably that in the public library of Berne, and
dates from the ninth century. The earliest printed
edition, bearing neither date nor printer's name,
is supposed to have been published at Milan in
1470. Editions were also printed at Florence and
at Venice in 1482, and a third at Venice in 1492.
An illustrated edition on vellum was brought
out by Aldus in 1501, and reissued in 1509,
15 14, 1 5 19. The Florence Press of the Giunti
produced splendid specimens in 1503, 15 14,
15 19. Between this date and the end of the
century seven more came forth from famous
presses. Of modern editions we may notice the
vellum Bodoni folio of 1791, and the matchless
Didot of 1799 with its exquisite copperplate
vignettes. Fortunate is the collector who poss-
esses the genuine first edition of Pine's " Hor-
ace," 1733. It is known by an error in the text,
corrected in the subsequent and less biblio-
graphically valuable impression of the same
SWAN SONG 79
year. A beautifully pictorial book is Dean Mil-
man's; the student will prefer Orelli, Macleane,
Yonge, Munro and King, or Dean Wickham's
scholarly volumes.
In composing this modest little book I have
had in view principally readers altogether ignor-
ant of Latin, but wishing to know something of
a writer lauded enthusiastically by all classical
scholars: they will observe that I have not intro-
duced into its pages a single Latin word. I have
nourished also the hope that it might be service-
able to those who have forgotten, but would like
to recover, the Horace which they learned at
school; and to them I would venture to recom-
mend the little copy of the Latin text with Con-
ington's^ version attached, in " Bell's Pocket
Classics." Latinless readers of course must read
him in English or not at all. No translation can
quite convey the cryptic charm of any original,
whether poetry or prose. " Only a bishop," said t^
Lord Chesterfield, " is improved by translation.''^
But prose is far easier to render faithfully than
verse; and I have said that either Conington's
or Dean Wickham's version of the Satires and ]
Epistles, which are both virtually in prose, will <
tell them what Horace said, and sometimes very
nearly how he said it. On the Odes a host of
English writers have experimented. Milton tried
his hand on one, with a result reflecting neither
Milton nor Horace. Dryden has shown what he
could have done but would not do in his tanta-
lising fragment of the Ode to Fortune. Pope
-\
80 HORACE
transformed the later Ode to Venus into a purely
English poem, with a gracefully artificial mechan-
ism quite unlike the natural flow of the original.
Marvell's noble " Horatian Ode," with its superb
stanzas on the death of Charles I, shows what
he might have achieved, but did not attempt.
Francis' rendering of 1765 is generally respect-
able, and in default of a better was universally
read and quoted by his contemporaries : once, in
the Ode to Pyrrhus (III, xx) he attains singular
grace of phrase and metre. Cowper translated
two Odes and imitated two more, not without
happy touches, but with insertions and omissions
that lower poetry into commonplace. Of Cal-
verley's few attempts three are notably good; a
resounding line in his " Leuconoe " (I, xi):
Which flings now the flagging sea-wave on the obstinate
sandstone reef,
is at once Horatian and Tennysonian; and his
"Oh! where is all thy loveliness?" in the later
Ode to Lyce has caught marvellously the minor
key of tender memory which relieves the bru-
tality of that ruthless flagellation. Mr. Goldwin
Smith's more numerous " Bay Leaves " are
fashioned all in goodly measure; and his "Blest
man who far from care and strife " well transfers
to English the breathlessness of Horace's sham \
pastoral ecstasy. Of more ambitious translators
"^ Bulwer Lytton catches now and then the careless
rapture of his original; Sir Theodore Martin is
always musical and flowing, sometimes miracu-
lously fortunate in his metres, but intentionally
SWAN SONG 8 1
unliteral and free. Conington is rigidly faithful,
oftentimes tersely forcible; but misses lyrical
sweetness. Perhaps, if Marvell, Herrick, Cowley,
Prior, the now forgotten William Spencer, Tom
Moore, Thackeray, could be alchemized into
one, they might combine to yield an English
Horace. Until eclectic nature, emulating the
Grecian sculptor, shall fashion an archetype from
these seven models, the vernacular student, with
his Martin and his Conington, sipping from each
alternately, like Horace's Matine bee (IV, ii, 27),
the terseness of the professor and the sweetness of
the poet, may find in them some echo from the
ever-shifting tonality of the Odes, something of
their verbal felicity, something of their thrilling
wistfulnessj may strive not quite unsuccessfully,
in the^words of Tennyson's "Timbuctoo," to
attain by shadowing forth the unattainable.
ON THE "WINES" OF HORACE'S
POETRY
THE wines whose historic names sparkle
through the pages of Horace have become
classical commonplaces in English literature.
" Well, my young friend, we must for once prefer
the Falernian to the vile Sabimim" says Monk-
barns to Lovel when the landlord of the Hawes
Inn at Queensferry brings them claret instead of
port. It may be well that we should know some-
what of them.
The choicest of the Italian wines was Caecuban,
from the poplar-trained vines grown amongst the
swamps of Amyclae in Campania. It was a
heady, generous wine, and required long keeping;
so we find Horace speaking of it as ranged in the
farthest cellar end, or " stored still in our grand-
sire's binns" (III, xxviii, 2, 3; I, xxxvii, 6); it
was reserved for great banquets, kept carefully
under lock and key: "your heir shall drain the
Caecuban you hoarded under a hundred pad-
locks" {II, xiv, 25). It was beyond Horace's
means, and only rich men could afford to drink
it; we hear of it at Maecenas' table and on board
his galley (I, xx, 9); and it appeared at the costly
banquet of Nasidienus (page 27). With the
Caecuban he couples the Formian (I, xx, 11),
and Falernian (I, xx, 10), grown on the southern
"WINES" OF HORACE'S POETRY 83
slopes of the hills dividing Campania from
Latium. " In grassy nook your spirit cheer with
old Falernian vintage," he says to his friend
Dellius (II, iii, 6). He calls it fierce, rough, fiery;
recommends mixing it with Chian wine, or with
wine from Surrentum (Sat. II, iv, 55), or sweet-
ening and diluting it with honey from Mount
Hymettus (Sat. II, ii, 15). From the same district
came the Massic wine, also strong and fiery. " It
breeds forgetfulness" (II, vii, 2 1), he says ; advises
that it should be softened by exposure to the open
sky (Sat. II, 4, 51). He had a small supply of
it, which he kept for a " happy day " (III, xxi, 6).
The Calenian wine, from Cales near Falernum,
was of similar character. He classes it with
Caecuban as being too costly for a poor man's
purse (1, XX, 10) : writing late in life to a friend,
promises to find him some, but says that his
visitor must bring in exchange an alabaster box
of precious spikenard (IV, xii, 17). Next after
these Campanian vintages came the Allan. He
tells Phyllis that he will broach for her a cask
of it nine years old (IV, xi, i). It was offered,
too, at Nasidienus' dinner as an alternative to
Caecuban; and Horace praises the raisins made
from its berries (Sat. II, iv, 72). Of the Sabine,
poorestof Italian wines, we have spoken (page 23).
The finest Greek wine was Chian, thick and
luscious ; he couples it in the Epode to Maecenas
(IX, 34) with Lesbian which he elsewhere (I,
xvii, 21) calls "innocent" or mild. Coan wine
he mentions twice, commending its medicinal
value (Sat. II, iv, 29; II, viii, 9).
84 HORACE
In justice to Horace and his friends, it is right
to observe that connoisseurship in wine must not
be confounded with inebriety. They drank to
exhilarate, not to stupefy themselves, to make
them what Mr. Bradwardine called ebrioli not
ebrii\ and he repeatedly warns against excess.
The vine was to him "a sacred tree," its god,
Bacchus, a gentle, gracious deity (I, xviii, i):
'Tis thine the drooping heart to heal,
Thy strength uplifts the poor man's horn ;
Inspired by thee, the soldier's steel,
The monarch's crown, he laughs to scorn.
Ill, xxi, 17.
"To total abstainers," he says, "heaven makes
all things hard " (I, xviii, 3); so let us drink, but
drink with moderate wisdom, leave quarrelsome-
ness in our cups to barbarous Scythians, to brute
Centaurs and Lapithae: let riot never profane
our worship of the kindly god. We must again
remember that they did not drink wine neat, as
we do, but always mixed with water. Come, he
says to his slave as they sit down, quench the fire
of the wine from the spring which babbles by
(n, xi, 19). The common mixture was two of
water to one of wine; sometimes nine of water
to three of wine, the Muses to the Graces; very
rarely nine of wine to three of water.
Who the uneven Muses loves,
Will fire his dizzy brain with three times three.
Three once told the Grace approves;
She with her two bright sisters, gay and free.
Hates lawless strife, loves decent glee.
Ill, xix, II,
CHRONOLOGY OF HORACE'S LIFE
AND WORKS
B.C. AGE.
65 Born December 8th.
44 21 Entered as student at Athens.
43 22 In Brutus' army.
( Philippi.
4^ ^4 -j Return to Rome.
38 27 Introduced to Maecenas.
35 30 Satires, Book I.
30 35 Satires, Book II, and Epodes.
23 42 Odes I-III.
20 45 Epistles, Book I.
19 46 Epistles, Book II, ii.
17 48 The Century Hymn.
13 52 Odes, Book IV.
13 52 Epistle to Augustus.
10? 55? Art of Poetry.
8 57 Died November 17th.
85
INDEX
A CTIUM, 53.
J-\ Addison, 37, 49.
Aelius, Lamia, 65.
Agrippa, 65.
Anio, 19-21.
Antony, 26.
Archilochus, 13, ig.
Argiletum, 54.
Aristius, Fuscus, 21, 36,
42, 61, 66.
Arnold, Matthew, 55, 68.
Asella, 43.
Asterie, 68.
Athens, 11, 50.
Aufidus, 9, 73.
Augustus, 15, 28, 29, 45,
51, 56, 57, 65, 75, 77,
78.
Bandusia, 10, 72.
Barine, 68.
Brundusium, 17.
Brutus, 12, 13.
Calverley, 80.
Capitoline Hill, 16, 24-26,
65-
Chesterfield, 79.
Clients, 17.
Conington, 46, 81.
Coverley, 11.
Cowper, 80.
De Vera, Sir Stephen, 71.
Digentia, 21.
Dryden, 79.
Eliot, G., 67.
Enipeus, 68.
Epicureans, 11.
Epicurus, 55.
Fanshaw, Sir R., 59,
Florae, 23, 44.
Florus, 40, 44.
Fonteius Capito, 16,
Forum, 24, etc.
Fufius, 34.
Gallio, 36.
Goldwin Smith, 54, 80.
Homer: Iliad, 11, 37, 43;
Odyssey, 44.
Horace: childhood, 10;
studies at Athens, 1 1 ;
influence of Brutus, 12;
Philippi, 13; struggle at
Rome, 13; introduction
to Maecenas, 14; Sa-
bine farm, 19; publishes
Satires, 30; Epistles,
37; Epodes, 52; Odes,
55; Swan Song, 74;
his death, 29, 77; edi-
87
88
INDEX
tions of his works, 78;
his " wines," 82 ; biblio-
graphy, 85.
Jews in Rome, 36.
Juvenal, 17, 23, 31.
Lalla Rookh, 69.
Lanciani, Professor, 25.
Lollius, 43, 66.
Lucilius, 13, 31, 48.
Lyce, 80.
Lydia, 69, 70.
Lytton, E. B., 66, 80.
Maecenas, 14, 17, 27-29,
38, 51-54, 62, 64.
Martin, Sir Theodore, 76,
80.
Marvel), 80, 81.
Milman, 38.
Milton, 41, 53, 60-62, 71,
79-
Murena, 66.
Newman, Cardinal, 51.
Ofellus, 32.
Omar Khayyam, 23, 63.
Orbilius, 11.
Pattison, Mark, 72.
Philippi, 13, 32.
Philippus, 34.
Phyllis, 66, ()"], 77.
Pindar, 75.
Polemon, 35.
Pope, 27,41,44,47-50, 79.
Pope Leo XIII, 64.
Postumus, 63.
Sabine farm, 17-19, etc.
Satire, origin of, 30.
Scaliger, 71.
Scott, 22, 82, 84.
Secular hymn, 57, 74-
Seneca, 16.
Septimius, 28, 39, 41, 65.
Sewell, R. C, 20.
Shakespeare, 13.
Sosh, 54, 71.
Steele, 37, 39.
Stoics, II.
St. Beuve, 51.
Tarentum, 24, 65, 72.
Telephus, 66.
Tennyson, 9, 51, 80, 81.
Terentia, 15, 64.
Thackeray, 37, 59, 81.
Tiberius Nero, 39, 74, 75.
Tibullus, 28, 41, 65.
Tibur, 17, 19, 20, 72.
Vacuna, 21.
Varius, 14, 27.
Varus, 20.
Via Sacra, 25, 26.
Virgil, 14, 28, 38, 44.
Wickham, Dean, 47, 79.
Wordsworth, 22, 24, 75.
Xanthius, 66.
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