p A (* 3 7 3 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries https://archive.org/details/odesepodesofhora01hora THE ODES AND EPODES OF HORACE Volume I INTRODUCTION, LIFE, AND ESSAYS The Life by Professor Smith in this work is from his edition of the Odes and Epodes in the College Series of Latin Authors , and is reprinted by permission of Professors Smith and Peck , the editors of the Series , and with the consent of the publishers , Ginn and Company . U( 30 AflOH jjan^ioiS .W .H .W ^ wwv\ HORACE Etching by W. H. W. Bicknell From an old print ZOAHOH JJ3M^I3l9 .W .H .W ^ ( HORACE Etching by W. H. W. Bic knell From an old print ) A list of one hundred and forty-seven cities and towns , showing the distribution of the Bibliophile Horace, will be found in the back of the Book of Epodes , Volume VI. An alphabetical Index of the translators is also printed in the same volume. >ES 8 EPODES ofO HORACE tept-eJfitaf Clement Lawrence Smith, )1M LlD 3 ) can of ^T^uftyofjif'h &jcienccj ~ anc/, ‘Profess orofXgtiit iro \\arVlird\x n i vcrslt vy ^^ 0 With Versions , 'Paraphrases cmj. escpl cLruLtory Notes fry eminent ^chola-rs^tatesmen aruj^cets Witfi an introduction by ^XeHBlSHOp 1 RZL/ 1 ND Issued by t&e Bibliophile Society jorNiembers ontys> BOSTON 1901 M.PYCE*190 1 Copyright , 1902 , by The Bibliophile Society All rights reserved 104648 PREFATORY NOTE No writer of antiquity has taken a stronger hold upon the modern mind than Horace. The causes of this are manifold, but three may be especially noted : his broad human sympathies, his vigorous common-sense, and his consum- mate mastery of expression. The mind must be either singularly barren or singularly cold to which Horace does not speak. The scholar, the statesman, the soldier, the man of the world, the town-bred man, the lover of the country, the thoughtful and the careless, he who reads much, and he who reads little, all find in his pages more or less to amuse their fancy, to touch their feelings, to quicken their observation, to nerve their convictions, to put into happy phrase the deductions of their experience. His poetical sentiment is not pitched in too high a key for the unimagina- tive, but it is always so genuine that the most imaginative feel its charm. His wisdom is i deeper than it seems, so simple, practical, and direct as it is in its application ; and his moral teaching more spiritual and penetrating than is apparent on a superficial study. He does not fall into the common error of didactic writers, of laying upon life more than it will bear ; but he insists that it shall at least bear the fruits of integrity, truth, honour, justice, self-denial, and brotherly charity. Over and above the mere literary charm of his works, too, — and herein, perhaps, lies no small part of the secret of his popularity, — the warm heart and thoroughly urbane nature of the man are felt instinctively by his readers, and draw them to him as to a friend. Hence it is that we find he has been a man- ual with men the most diverse in their natures, culture, and pursuits. Dante ranks him next after Homer. Montaigne, as might be ex- pected, knows him by heart. Fenelon and Bossuet never weary of quoting him. La Fon- taine polishes his own exquisite style upon his model ; and Voltaire calls him “ the best of preachers.’’ Hooker escapes with him to the fields to seek oblivion of a hard life, made harder by a shrewish spouse. Lord Chester- field tells us, “ When I talked my best I quoted 2 Horace.” To Boileau and to Wordsworth he is equally dear. Condorcet dies in his dun- geon with Horace open by his side ; and in Gibbon’s militia days, “ on every march,” he says, “in every journey, Horace was always in my pocket, and often in my hand.” And as it has been, so it is. In many a pocket, where this might least be expected, lies a well-thumbed Horace ; and in many a de- vout Christian heart the maxims of the gentle, genial pagan find a place near the higher teachings of a greater master. From Horace , by Sir Theodore Martin, in Ancient Classics for English Readers . 3 INTRODUCTION TO THE ODES AND EPODES BY ARCHBISHOP IRELAND Exegi monumentum acre perennius. With these proud words Horace launched his verses into the ages. In a moment of po- etic inspiration he had already foretold that all lands would hear him and his music. What the poet prophesied has come to pass. Far beyond the Bosphorus and the Rhone, beyond Gastulian sands and Hyperborean snows, his songs have been sung as of yore they were sung on the hills by the Tiber. What in his own day and in his own country he was for Augustus and Maecenas, for Pollio and Messala, for Vergil and Varius, that he has been in every age and every land for all who could appreciate a rare nature and love grace of fancy and beauty of language. Horace is immortal. Among men of the world he will ever be the S consummate poet ; among poets he will ever be the consummate man of the world. Horace was one of those choice spirits whose marvellous breadth of sympathy brings them into contact with every type of our com- mon human nature. Few poets have revealed themselves so fully in their musings as Horace has done — his personality is blended with his poetry — and his stanzas show him to us with all his rich and varied gifts of mind and heart as one of nature’s gentlemen. He was of lowly stock, and yet none of his lines are so touching as those that tell with deepest filial tenderness the praises of his father. Poverty drove him to make verses, but a native dignity of mind rendered him the peer of the haugh- tiest in the splendid society to which he won his way. Wealth and honours he could have had for the asking, but he prized the simple joys of a homely life above the splendour of monarchs and their courts. He is the poet of human nature. As we stroll with him along the Via Sacra, or lounge in the Campus Mar- tius, or pick our steps through the Suburra, or watch the tide of fashion roll along the Via Appia, we see Rome as Horace saw and loved it, and we see life in all its aspects through the 6 eyes of the shrewdest and kindliest observer of men and manners. Nothing escapes his notice, there is no theme that he does not discuss, no phase of character that he does not portray. His philosophy is the fruit of his own study of human ways that are ever the same, and his words with their wisdom of wide experience have a perennial freshness for every new generation and find application in a hundred incidents of our lives. Be the weather fair or foul, Horace is a pleasant companion. He is always genial and gentle, manly and candid, as ready to joke about the shield not over bravely left behind at Philippi as he is to smile at the follies and foibles of other men. As guide, philosopher, and friend, he is never tiresome. In easy chatty verses he gives les- sons in the art of living. His lessons are often told with a laugh, but are always replete with wisdom. They are expressed in language ever resonant of sweetest music. They are easily remembered, condensed as they are in few words, no one else being so faithful as Horace is to the poetic canon : “ In all your precepts be mindful to be brief.” Matter and form combine in Horace to make him the most readable and most quotable of the poets. 7 With Horace we live in Rome in the midst of men ; with him, also, we live amid the sweet sights and sounds of nature. Nature he loved with a love begotten of the days when the legendary doves covered him with leaves as he lay sleeping on the slope of the Apen- nines, Non sine dis animosus infans. Many odes of Horace are the daintiest of pictures of home life and of delicious land- scapes. Now we catch a glimpse of a blaz- ing hearth, while without the woodland boughs are groaning under their weight of snow, and Soracte afar off stands gleaming in its un- wonted mantle of white. Now we are lured to a spot by a babbling brook, where the gloomy pine and the white poplar love to twine their branches in affording a friendly shade. Whatever be his theme, be it grave or gay, Horace writes as one whose eyes are full of visions of crystal fountains, whose ears are haunted with the hum and murmur of the woods. Thus do we see Horace in all his moods. “ Age cannot wither nor custom stale his infi- nite variety.” Such a man could not but be blessed with friends, and to him his friends are 8 such that the world could not show souls more purely white : — animae quales neque candidiores terra tulit. No day is like the day that brings him a friend, no sorrow like the sorrow caused by the loss of a friend : — Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari capitis ? Praecipe lugubres cantus, Melpomene, cui liquidam pater vocem cum cithara dedit. Vergil he hails as part and parcel of his life — animae dimidium meae . With Maecenas, who so often left the palace on the Esquiline to share the Sabine fare of the poet, he pledged undying faith, and his impassioned words bear witness that no bootless oath he has sworn to travel with his dear knight the last dark jour- ney of life : — ibimus, ibimus, utcunque praecedes, supremum carpere iter comites parati. How closely knit his friends were to him we glean from the last words of Maecenas to Augustus : — Horatii Flacci ut mei memor este. It is not strange that the master of the world 9 himself should covet the friendship of the freedman’s son ; for if after the lapse of long ages the world loves Horace for his own sake, how much must they have loved him who could greet him as an honoured guest in their mansions, or share the coenae noctesque Deum in the simple home among the Sabine hills ? As a man among men, Horace is the per- sonal friend of each and every one of us ; as a poet, he is no less the lasting favourite of young and old. In the art of wedding “ per- fect music unto noble words,” he has never been surpassed. What a poet should be — quid alet formetque poetam — none knew better than Horace knew. To delight and to in- struct — such is the task assigned to those who are consecrated to the Muses, and well did Horace discharge the duty. It is chiefly on his odes that his fame will rest ; they are the monument more enduring than brass which he has reared to himself. For grace of words and music of metre these odes are unique in literature ; it is no exaggeration to say with Munro that their mould was broken at the author’s death. La Bruyere has well remarked that among all the expressions by which we may voice a single one of our io thoughts, there is in reality but one fitting expression. Of this truth Horace was keenly conscious, and he proved himself a master “ in fitting aptest words to things.” Hence the happy ease, the curiosa felicitas , of which Pe- tronius speaks, and which makes his verses the delight of the generations ; hence the matchless beauty of the phrases which like jewels gleam and glitter on every page. As we meet stanza after stanza sparkling in the odes, we cannot but think of some gem-engraver toiling with delicate touch and infinite pains to polish fragments of translucent stone. And to witch- ery of words Horace adds melody of rhythm. He is the minstrel who taught the world the power and sweetness of the Latin lyre. In his odes the voice of empire and of war yielded music undreamed of before, well worthy of the crown of Delphian bay that the poet claimed as his own. It is this twofold charm, grace of diction and melody of verse, that lends to the lyrics of Horace the power of clinging to the memory such as no other poetry possesses. But Horace was not content with winning the ear of the world ; he has also won the heart of the world. It is not enough, he tells us, to round off a verse : truth is the very breath of the poet's life : — Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons. The wisdom which Horace enshrined in words of incommunicable beauty deserves the poet's highest art. True it is that as we listen to the cry “ carpe diem” the oft-repeated call of Bacchanal philosophy, we are tempted to set down the lyrics as the gospel of frivolity, and to take their author at his word when he styles himself a porker of the Epicurean pen, — Epicuri de grege porcus. And it must be conceded that here and there his stanzas are marred with a grossness which not all their literary charm can redeem. It is, however, plain that Horace’s heart is not in such effu- sions. It is only as a poet that he trifles, — only when he sings for the sake of song. He is at his best, not when he urges us to pluck the blossoms of to-day, but when he pleads for the virtues that he loves and that all men should love. To be content with one's lot, to keep a rein upon passion, to be the thing one seems, to look for happiness within, not with- out, to be patient with the patience that makes all things easy, to face danger with 12 dauntless front, to retain a calm mind under the frowns as well as the smiles of fortune, to be ready to forego all in order to be free in thought and act, to make the golden mean one’s rule of life, to love peace, — that otium whose praises he so often celebrates, — Neque purpura venale nec auro, — these things does Horace sing more sweetly and persuasively than they were ever sung before. Such virtues are the abiding wisdom of life, and in words which we could not for- get even if we would, Horace never grows weary of expounding them. Nowhere does he find in pleasure the Summum Bonum of existence. Often, indeed, he touches the strings of his lyre as the bard of gaiety, — non praeter solitum levis , — but never does he present to us as his ideal the man who lounges in ease and affluence through life : — Non possidentem multa vocaveris recte beatum : rectius occupat nomen bead, qui deorum muneribus sapienter uti duramque callet pauperiem pad, peiusque leto flagitium timet ; non ille pro caris amicis aut patria timidus perire. l 3 Few poems in any language can surpass in sonorous dignity and grandeur of thought the description of the man of upright purpose who stands unmoved amid the ruins of a world. As we ponder such verses as these we feel that Horace is true to his own genius, not when he sings of roses and parsley-wreaths and wine-cups and all the soft dalliance of which these things are the symbols, but when he rises in lofty strain to chant the praises of virtue that ever keeps her robe unsullied, or to sing with infinite pathos the alarms and cares of life and the mournful lot of mortal- ity. As with all great poets, his “ sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought/’ and the music of such songs is but the echo of the music of the sentiment which they express. It is when Horace treats of religion and of fatherland that he seems to find themes most fitting for the mens divinior , and the os magna sonaturum of the true poet. Then it is that his genius, like the Dircean swan, soars into the skies and sweeps from heaven to heaven. He calls himself, indeed, — Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens ; — *4 but this is only the playful prelude to the more serious thought of One who “ can low- liest change and loftiest, bring down the mighty and lift up the weak.” If the hand be leal and spotless, the offering of meal and crackling salt is more grateful to heaven than the most elaborate sacrifice. Peoples, like in- dividuals, reap the consequences of their deeds. Religion is the very condition of an empire’s welfare, and from the neglect of the altar flow the worst ills of the nation : — Dis te minorem quod geris imperas : hinc omne principium, hue refer exitum. Di multa neglecti dederunt Hesperiae mala luctuosae. The law of God must be supreme in the commonwealth : — Regum timendorum in proprios greges reges in ipsos imperium est Iovis. In an age of religious decay — for the gods of Olympus were dead — the thoughts of Horace turned often and anxiously upon the necessity of religion as the basis of a nation’s greatness and prosperity. The patriotic odes which Horace be- queathed to the ages are poems of which any country might well be proud. They are filled l 5 with the sense of the grandeur of Rome and with the glory of Rome’s mighty men and mighty deeds. No one but a patriot could have written the line, — perhaps the noblest line in Latin literature : — Duke et decorum est pro patria mori. The spirit of the race that conquered the world breathes in the verses that tell of the days when Cincinnatus returned from his wars to his plough. The story of Regulus going back to Carthage to meet his doom is one of the most inspiring pictures in the annals of patriotism. The ode on the Ship of State is the finest political allegory in the pages of lit- erature. Horace was a profound student of his country and his time, and the laughing levity of his lighter themes often gives way to the strange sternness of his warnings as he predicts the decadence of the Roman people : Damnosa quid nos imminuit dies ! aetas parentum, peior avis, tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem. The poet who claims immortality must iden- tify himself with his country ; the verses of Horace are the echoes of the thoughts and aspirations of his age. As we read the odes 16 we see the mighty forces which were at work in the supreme moment of Rome's history, and there pass before our eyes in glittering array the personages who with the world for an audience played their part in the great drama. Caesar and Pompey and Cato and Maecenas and Brutus and Cleopatra are all there, not as mere phantoms of history but as creatures of flesh and blood, and the scenes in which they appeared are reproduced for us in the noblest forms of literature of which a majestic language was susceptible. The fascination which Horace exercises upon men of letters and men of the world is perennial. Dante and Voltaire, Bossuet and Pitt, Lytton and La Fontaine, Lessing and Gladstone, have vied with one another in their fealty to the Latin lyrist. The true poets of every land aspire to translate him, and it is only true poets that dare attempt to naturalise in their own language the elusive charm of his lines, the world of wisdom in his words, and the sweet cadences of his metres. To-day men of culture in every country love to loiter over his verses in their hours of literary lei- sure. l 7 Whatever our circumstances of life, be we legislators or warriors, churchmen or men of affairs, recluses or leaders of fashion, if only there is within us the sense of the true and beautiful ; whatever the numbers of our years, whether they still leave us with the fire and hopefulness of youth, or set us down amid the labours and cares of mature age, or speed us, even, towards the darkening shadows of the grave ; whatever the moods to which our soul is attuned, be they joyous or sad, be they frivolous or serious, be they such as to depress us nigh unto things cold and material, or exalt us into regions empyrean, — Horace comes to us, the friend, the teacher, the charmer. Hor- ace is, as no other can be, the poet of human- ity in all its phases, — and therein lies the secret of his undying fame and of the genial love which in every generation and under every sky attaches to his memory and his verse. And now, in the opening days of the Twen- tieth Century, the scholarship of the new world, of a world far removed by the “ es- tranging seas ” from the remotest lands that the poet’s fancy was able to descry, sets it- self forth to honour Horace, by an edition of 18 his “ Odes and Epodes,” to the preparation of which the learning and the artistic skill of the country have been convoked. It is a new wreath upon the brow of Horace, in new times, from the hands of a new people, who admire and love him no less than people of older lands and of older times admired and loved him. Truly is the prophecy fulfilled : — Usque ego postera crescam laude recens. John Ireland l 9 THE POET AT TWILIGHT Etched by W. H. W. Bicknell From an original painting by Howard Pyle THOIJIWT TA T304 3HT .w .h .w ^ a j y 4 q^awoH ^ wc>v\. LIFE AND WRITINGS BY CLEMENT LAWRENCE SMITH, LL. D. Our knowledge of the facts of Horace’s life is derived in part from a biography, ap- pended to certain manuscripts of his poems, which has been shown by conclusive evidence to be, in substance, the life of the poet which Suetonius wrote in his encyclopedic work, “ De Viris Illustribus.” There are briefer lives in some of the other manuscripts, and scattered notices in the scholia. But all these sources afford — beyond a few dates and facts — little information that we do not already possess, in fuller and more authentic form, in the poet’s own writings. To these we must go for an adequate understanding of his mind and char- acter. In the Satires and Epistles, and to a less degree in the Epodes, Horace takes the reader into his confidence and speaks of his circumstances and feelings with singular frank- ness. The Odes, too, contain much biograph- 21 ical material, but it is of a kind that must be used with caution. As a poet Horace claims the freedom of his craft, and frequently puts himself, for poetical effect, in situations which may perhaps reflect his mode of thought and feeling and even shadow forth his personal experiences, but must not be taken literally as autobiography. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on the 8th of December, b. c. 65, and died on the 27th of November, b. c. 8. It is important to observe the significance of these dates. Horace’s life began when the Romans were still living under the forms of the Republic ; when it closed the Empire was fully estab- lished. When our poet first saw the light, Cicero was planning his canvass for the consul- ship. His boyhood fell in the stormy decade of the “First Triumvirate” (b. c. 60-50), which formed the prelude of the Civil War. Horace was old enough to be interested in the later victories of Caesar in Gaul, and the de- struction of Crassus with his army at Carrhae in b. c. 53 may well have made a deep im- pression on a lad of twelve. The two decades of civil strife which followed were experiences of his youth and early manhood, and when 22 peace came with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra in b. c. 30, Horace was thirty-five years old. The remaining twenty-two years of his life belong to the first half of the prin- cipate of Augustus, the period of the growth and consolidation of his power under the guidance of his two great ministers, Agrippa and Maecenas, whose deaths, b. c. 12 and 8, were closely followed by that of Horace. Horace’s birthplace was Venusia, a colony planted for military purposes in the Samnite wars, high up on the northern slope of the Apennine range in Apulia, near the Lucanian border. It stood on a branch of the Aufidus, in that region a swift mountain stream, among the wooded hills which culminate in the lofty peak of Mt. Voltur. There the poet’s father by shrewdness and thrift had not only secured his own freedom — for he was born a slave — but had acquired a modest farm and an income which enabled him to educate his son. His occupation was that of a coactor , that is, a col- lector of money — whether of money due for taxes or for goods sold at auction, the cor- rupt text of the Suetonian biography leaves us in doubt. It is supposed by some that he had acted in this capacity as a public slave, 2 3 and on his manumission took the name of Horatius because Venusia belonged to the Horatian tribe. But we do not know that freedmen were ever so named ; from the ordi- nary practice in such cases we should assume that he had belonged to a master named Ho- ratius. Horace himself was born free, that is, he was born after his father’s manumission. His mother is nowhere mentioned. It may well be that he inherited from her his poetic nature ; but whether because she died in his infancy — which is probable — or from lack of personal force, she appears to have had little or no influence in moulding his charac- ter. His father’s influence, on the other hand, was of the utmost importance and value, as the poet himself acknowledges with warm gratitude. The elder Flaccus was a shrewd observer of men and manners. Horace was, it seems, his only son, and the child of his later years, when he had accumulated a fund of experience and practical wisdom, and when he was, moreover, in possession of a compe- tence which enabled him to lay aside his busi- ness and give his whole attention to the train- ing of his boy. He naturally knew nothing 24 of ethical theories, and he relied little on pre- cept alone. He sought to awaken his son’s moral perception by teaching him to observe good and bad in the world about him, to note the consequences of virtue and of vice in the actual lives of men, and to take to heart these examples and warnings in guiding his own life and guarding his reputation. The ethical code of the Venusian freedman was of a roughhewn sort. It was a coarse sieve, and allowed some things to pass which do not meet the test of our finer standards. He claimed, in fact, no more for his moral teaching than that it would keep his son from falling into ruinous courses during that critical period when he was not yet able to “ swim without cork.” But so far as it went it was sound and wholesome. And it was effective : Horace’s habitual self-control dur- ing the period of his life when we know him best, his dislike of passionate excess either of desire or fear, his temperance in conduct and language, his aversion to the grosser forms of vice, — these were the fruit of in- herited traits, fostered and strengthened by wise training. To the same training Horace attributes his habit of critical observation of 2 5 social phenomena, which led him to write satire. Horace’s mental development received no less careful attention. There was a school at Venusia, kept by one Flavius and resorted to by the sons of the local aristocracy, — “ great lads from great centurions sprung.” But Hor- ace’s father had higher views for his son, who had already, we may suppose, given promise of exceptional ability. Anxious to provide him with the best advantages, he determined to send him to Rome, “to receive the edu- cation which a knight or a senator gives to his sons.” But unlike a knight or a senator, the obscure freedman had no social connec- tions which would enable him to place his son under the charge of some family or friend ; and rather than entrust him to strangers or slaves, he determined to leave his farm and accompany the boy in person to the city. Here, too, he was unremitting in his watchful care. Horace has left us a pleasing picture of the devoted father, going round to all the lessons with his boy, whom he had fitted out with suitable dress and attendant slaves, so that he might hold up his head with the best of his school-fellows. 26 Horace was taken to Rome perhaps in his ninth or tenth year, and remained there pos- sibly until he was twenty ; the precise dates are not recorded. Of his teachers only one is known to us, Orbilius Pupillus, of Beneven- tum, an old cavalry soldier who had resumed his books when his campaigns were over, and at the age of fifty had set up a school in the capital in the year when Cicero was consul. He was a gruff old fellow, with a caustic tongue, and his ready resort to the rod Hor- ace remembered many years. The course of study which Horace pursued was presumably the ordinary course of the “ grammatical ” and “ rhetorical ” schools of the day, which aimed, first, at a mastery of the Latin tongue, and, secondly, at the cultivation of eloquence. With these ends in view the training — after the elements of reading, writing, and reckon- ing were acquired — was largely literary, and consisted mainly in a thorough study of Latin and Greek literature. Horace read Livius An- dronicus — probably his version of the Odys- sey — under the rod of Orbilius, and became familiar with the other old Roman poets, for whom he did not conceive, or did not retain, a very high admiration. He also read the 27 Iliad, as he informs us, and no doubt other Greek classics in prose and verse ; and these kindled in him a genuine enthusiasm, which kept him a devoted student of Greek letters, particularly of Greek poetry, all his life. With this taste developed by his studies in Rome, it was natural that Horace should be drawn into the current which at that day car- ried the more ambitious students to Athens, in quest of what we may call their university training in the schools of philosophy there. Horace attended the lectures of the Academic school, and the acquaintance which he shows with the doctrines of the other sects must have been acquired at this time. For speculative philosophy and the subtleties of dialectics he had little taste. The Roman, as a rule, felt the strongest attraction to philosophy on its ethical side, where it came nearest to the prac- tical problems of life ; and in Horace this ethical tendency was ingrained and was pecul- iarly strong. It was fostered by his father’s training ; it no doubt added zest, at this time, to his study of the various ethical systems of the Greeks ; it was confirmed as his mind and character matured, and impressed itself strongly on all his writings, even his lyrics. 28 In his later years he protested that his chief desire was to put aside poetry and devote the rest of his days to the study of the philosophy of life. In his philosophical views Horace was, like most of his countrymen who interested them- selves in the subject at all, eclectic ; he found something to his taste in this creed and in that, but declined to enroll himself as the dis- ciple of any school. Of his religious belief it is not possible to speak definitely, — probably it never crystallised into definite shape in his own mind. For a time he was a convert to the doctrine of Epicurus, — probably from reading Lucretius, whose poem was published in his boyhood, — and believed that there were gods, but that their serene existence was never troubled by any concern for the affairs of men. In one of his odes he professes to have been startled out of this “ crazy ” creed by the actual occurrence of what the Epicu- reans averred to be a physical impossibility, — a clap of thunder in a clear sky. It is not likely that this experience had the importance in actual fact which it appears to have in its lyrical setting ; Horace’s change of view was a matter of growth. But it was real. Other- 29 wise he would surely not have published this poem ; and there is, besides, plenty of evi- dence elsewhere in his works that in his ma- turer years he recognised a divine providence and control in human affairs. Horace’s ethi- cal views, too, were strongly tinged with Epi- cureanism, but here, as everywhere, he went to no extreme ; and, although he combats the Stoic theory and mocks at their ideal sage, he was at heart in sympathy with Stoic princi- ples in their substance and practical application to life, and he more than once holds up their ideal of virtue for its own sake, — though even virtue itself he will not exempt from his maxim “ nil admirari.” How far Horace pursued his study of the Greek poets along with his philosophy at Athens, we are not informed ; we may be sure that he gave them a large share of his atten- tion. The broad and intimate acquaintance with Greek poetry, which is the very life- blood of his own poetic achievement, was not the acquisition of a few years ; but his sojourn was long enough for the influences of the place to give a permanent bent to his literary taste. One of Horace’s marked characteristics as a poet is his freedom from Alexandrinism, 3 ° which in his youth dominated Roman educa- tion and Roman poetry. Alexandrine learn- ing, filtered through his Roman teachers, fur- nished him with his technical outfit as a poet, with a knowledge of the forms and categories and of the history of his art, and with the common stock of illustrative material, mytho- logical, astrological, and other. There is evi- dence also of his diligent study of some of the Alexandrine poets : he is indebted to them for many phrases and figures and turns of thought. This is especially apparent in his love poetry. But the same evidence shows that the Alexandrine poets who exerted this influence on his style were precisely those who, like Callimachus and Theocritus, were freest from the peculiar weakness of their school, — the sacrifice of freshness and good taste to formality and erudition. In the spirit and form of his verse Horace took as his models the older Greek poets ; and his loving study of these masters we may confi- dently date from his residence at Athens, where the older traditions still maintained themselves. The fashion of sending young men to get the finishing touches of their education at 3 1 Athens had grown up with the generation into which Horace was born. Cicero, who in his youth was eager to grasp every oppor- tunity for the best training, did not visit Greece at all until after he had entered on the practice of his profession ; Cicero’s son, who was just of Horace’s age, was now at Athens studying rhetoric and philosophy. There, too, Horace found a number of other young men of distinguished families, among them Vale- rius Messala, who traced his descent from the Valerius Poplicola who held with Brutus the first consulship of the Republic. On what terms Horace stood with these fellow-students we are left to conjecture ; but his genial nature and conversational gifts, combined with tact and good sense, must have drawn many to him. His friendship with Messala and many closer intimacies, to which his poems bear witness, date no doubt from this period. There was nothing out of the way in this association of the freedman’s son with the young nobles in common studies and literary interests. Aristocracy of birth has never aspired to monopolise the brain- work of the world, and youth and good- fellowship are not strenuous about social 3 2 distinctions. In the next stage of Horace’s career he found his position very different. In September, 44 b. c., six months after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus came to Athens, and for some months, while waiting for the turn of political events, de- voted himself to the schools of philosophy. His appearance created no little sensation. The Athenians, who lived largely in the tra- ditions of their past, welcomed “ the libera- tor ” with enthusiasm, and voted to set up his statue beside those of their own tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The young Romans were flattered by the accession of so illustrious a fellow-student, whose real inter- est in philosophy was well known ; and before the winter was over Brutus had enlisted a number of them in his service for the coming struggle with the triumvirs. Among these re- cruits was the young Cicero, who had already seen some service under Pompey. The most distinguished adherent was Messala, and the least distinguished, certainly, was Horace. It argues a high estimate on Brutus’ part of Horace’s intelligence and capacity, that he appointed this youth of one and twenty, with neither military experience nor family 33 influence to recommend him, to a place among his officers, and eventually gave him, as tribune, the command of a Roman legion. It was high promotion for the freedman’s son, and envious tongues were not slow to direct attention to the fact. Horace was in Brutus’ army the greater part of two years (b. c. 43 and 42). He is almost entirely silent about this experience, but from our knowledge of the movements of Brutus in those two campaigns we may gather that it gave him the opportunity to visit various places in Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, and many famous cities of Asia Minor, which he mentions in his poems in a way that implies personal acquaintance. He remained with Brutus to the end, and shared the victory and subsequent rout at Philippi. The sui- cide of his chief at once absolved him from further allegiance, and was a confession that the cause for which they had fought was irre- trievably lost. Horace was fain to accept the result, and while some of his friends held out and joined the standard of Sextus Pompeius, he followed the example and advice of Mes- sala and made his submission to the victors, who pardoned, or at least did not molest him. 34 It was not improbably on his homeward voyage from Greece after Philippi that Hor- ace came near being shipwrecked on the dangerous promontory of Palinurus, on the Lucanian coast ; the critical condition of the times may have been his motive for prefer- ring that roundabout way to the ordinary route. He returned to Rome in a depressed and bitter mood. His father was dead. His estate had been swept away in the confiscation of the territory of Venusia. The outlook was gloomy. He seems, however, to have saved some money from his two campaigns, and with this he purchased a clerkship in the Quaestors’ office, which yielded him a small income and, apparently, a good deal of leisure. Under these circumstances, poor in purse and still poorer in favour, Horace began life again at the age of twenty-three. He was thor- oughly cured of his aspirations for a public career. His short but severe experience had taught him that, however strong his interest in his country’s welfare, he had no taste for the practical business of war and politics ; and he had had enough of running counter to the popular prejudice against humble birth in high station. On the other hand, his training and 35 his knowledge of his own powers alike pointed to literature as the career most suitable and promising for him. That Horace had practised verse-writing in the course of his literary studies might be taken for granted. He confesses that at one time — it was probably while he was at Athens — he undertook to write poetry in Greek ; and these essays were not, it should seem, in the nature of school exercises, but serious efforts. This was by no means a new thing in Roman literature. The earliest Roman annals were written in Greek, and the same phenomenon had reappeared in the highly Hellenised culture of the Ciceronian period, when Roman writers occasionally used Greek for prose or verse, partly for the plea- sure of handling a language of so much richer capacity than their own, partly to reach a wider circle of appreciative readers. But Horace did not persist in an undertaking which his good sense presently convinced him was as futile as it was unpatriotic. At the time when Horace began his liter- ary career, Vergil, who was five years his senior, had published some youthful verses, and was beginning to be known as a sweet singer of pastoral scenes by the publication of his earliest Eclogues. The epic poet of the day was Varius Rufus, who won credit and favour by his poem on the death of Julius Caesar. He was a few years older than Vergil, who lived to rival him in epos ; but that was many years later. Asinius Pollio, who as governor of Cisalpine Gaul had recently won Vergil's gratitude by timely assistance, and who was afterwards eminent as an orator and a critic and patron of literature, had at this time at- tained some distinction as a writer of tragedy. Various other fields were diligently cultivated by writers of less note, or less known to us. Looking over the ground Horace thought he saw a field suited to his powers in Lucilian satire, which Varro Atacinus and some others had undertaken to revive, but in Horace’s opinion without success. The word satura appears to have meant originally a medley. It was used as the name of a variety performance on the rude stage of early times, consisting of comic songs and stories, with dance and gesticulation, to the accompaniment of the pipe. It found its way into literature as the title of a collection of what we should call “ miscellanies in verse : ” 37 Ennius (b. c. 239-169) employed it for this purpose, and his example was followed by Lucilius. The “ Saturae ” of Lucilius, who had been dead about sixty years when Horace began to write satire, were a series of tracts on every topic that it came into his head to dis- cuss, — personal, social, political, philosophi- cal, literary, philological. In form they were equally varied, — sometimes didactic, some- times narrative, or dramatic, or epistolary ; and they were written in a variety of metres. More than two thirds, however, of the thirty books were in dactylic hexameters, which Lu- cilius appears to have finally settled upon as most suitable for his purpose ; and this metre was used exclusively by his successors. And in spite of its heterogeneous variety of sub- jects, there were two features which gave dis- tinctive character to Lucilius’ work. One of these was the footing of personal and familiar intercourse on which he placed himself with his reader ; his tone was the tone of con- versation and his words the utterance of his own mind and heart, as if on the impulse of the moment. The other was that he entered on a field which Roman literature had not yet ventured to tread, but which thenceforth 38 became the peculiar province of satura , as it had been of the Old Comedy of the Greeks, — the criticism of contemporary manners and men. By inheritance and training a critical ob- server of the life about him, Horace justly deemed himself fitted to take up the task of Lucilius, whom he greatly admired in every- thing but the roughness of his literary work- manship. The unreserved personalities in which Lucilius indulged were no longer per- missible in Horace’s day, and he avoided them except in a few of his earlier satires. Politics, too, were forbidden ground. In other re- spects he adopted the method of his master, but in a kindlier spirit and rarely with any exhibition of personal feeling. His manner is that of the accomplished man of the world in familiar conversation, easy and self-possessed, witty but never flippant, discussing with keen insight and a quick sense of humour, but with the abundant charity of a man who knows his own shortcomings, and with a ground-tone of moral earnestness, the various phases of every- day life. He laughs at vice and folly ; but satire is essentially didactic, and ridicule is the weapon of a serious purpose. Horace never 39 speaks from the platform, or with any assump- tion of superior virtue : he talks as one of the crowd who has stopped to reflect on their common weaknesses, and he disarms resent- ment by sometimes turning the laugh against himself. There are some who esteem these “ talks ” ( sermones^y as he himself preferred to call them, the greatest of Horace’s achieve- ments. Certainly there are few works of classical antiquity in which literary art has brought us so near to ancient life. The sat- ires were written from time to time in the decade following Horace’s return to Rome (b. c. 41—31), and became more or less widely known before they were issued in collected form. The collection consisted of two books, of which the first was published about 35 or 34, and the second about 30, b. c. Horace constructed the hexameter of his satires with some care, and succeeded in re- conciling with the easy conversational tone a smoothness of rhythm which marked a great advance on the strong but rugged verses of his model Lucilius. But he hardly cared to claim for his satires the dignity of poetry. They are in their nature, he protests, and except for a certain recurrence of rhythm, 40 mere prose discourse. And meanwhile he was trying his hand at poetry based on Greek models, and was in fact touched with the ambition to strike out a new path for Latin literature in this field. His first effort was to reproduce in Latin the iambic rhythm which tradition said had been forged, as a weapon of wrath, by Archilochus of Paros, — the fact being that Archilochus, who lived in the seventh century b. c., had developed and per- fected the rhythm which had existed long be- fore him. The form which Horace adopted was a couplet, the second verse of which, as a sort of refrain, was called by metrical writers epodus (eVwSos, adjective ; cf. hra&eiv). This term was later extended in meaning, so that Horace’s collection of seventeen poems, all but one composed of epodic couplets, has come down to us under the title of epodes ( Epodon liber ). Horace himself called them only Iambi, which expresses their prevailing character and is sufficiently accurate, although other metres are combined with the iambic in some in- stances. The composition of the Epodes probably began as early as that of the Satires, possibly earlier, and was continued through the same 4i period. The sixteenth of the series, which displays at once remarkable mastery of form and immaturity of thought, was written in the first years after the poet’s return from Philippi ; the ninth celebrates the victory at Actium. The book was published about the same time as the second book of the Satires, b. c. 30. Horace says truly that he reproduced the spirit as well as the rhythms of Archilochus ; in some of his epodes he has certainly used the iambus as “ a weapon of wrath.” In others again he has descended to a depth of coarse- ness from which his later lyrics are, for the most part, happily free. These, the survivors perhaps of a larger number of their kind, be- long, we must suppose, to his earliest efforts, and tell of a dark period in his mental his- tory, — the first years after his return from Philippi, — when life went hard with him, and he was embittered and demoralised by associations which later, under more congenial influences, he was able to throw off. The most fortunate of these influences was his acquaintance with Varius and Vergil, who inspired him with warm admiration and re- gard ; and it was these friends who performed 42 for him the inestimable service of introducing him to Maecenas. Gaius Maecenas came of noble Etruscan stock. The Cilnii, once a powerful family of Arretium, were the most distinguished of his ancestors, and Tacitus (Ann. VI, 11) calls him Cilnius Maecenas ; but there is reason to believe that this was not his gentile name. He was born on the 13th of April in some year not far from 70 b. c., so that he was Horace’s senior by a few years. From our earliest knowledge of him he appears as the trusted friend and confidential minister of the triumvir Octavian, who sent him on several occasions to negotiate with Antony, — at Brundisium in b. c. 40, at Athens in 38, at Tarentum in 37. In b. c. 36, during his ab- sence in the war with Sextus Pompeius, and again in 31, on setting out for the final strug- gle with Antony, Octavian left Maecenas be- hind to watch over Rome and Italy with the power, if not the name, of the city prefect of regal times. This was as near as Maecenas ever came to holding public office. He stu- diously refrained from seeking or accepting political preferment, which would have raised him to the senatorial order, and remained all 43 his life an untitled “ knight.” He was a man in whom the most opposite qualities appeared to be reconciled. His capacity was unques- tioned, and on occasion he could display all necessary industry and vigour ; but ordinarily he lived a life of almost ostentatious indolence, and was self-indulgent to the point of effemi- nacy. Devoid of personal ambition, and appar- ently indifferent to politics, he was yet public- spirited and patriotic, and by sheer force of sagacity and tact he exercised for many years a powerful and a wholesome influence in shap- ing the policy of the government. His self- indulgence appears to have been due to his health, which was always delicate. He was subject to fever and sleeplessness, which in- creased as he grew older : we have the elder Pliny’s word for it that in the last three years of his life he did not sleep at all. Mae- cenas married Terentia, a sister (by adop- tion) of Licinius Murena, who was exe- cuted for conspiracy against the emperor in b. c. 23. She was a beautiful woman, who counted, the gossips said, Augustus himself among her lovers ; and her husband oscil- lated between furious jealousy and complete subjection to her fascination. He incurred 44 the emperor’s displeasure, when her brother’s conspiracy was detected, by letting her draw the secret from him. These jars produced no permanent estrangement between Augustus and his minister, but there were other circum- stances which inevitably caused Maecenas’ in- fluence to wane. When the rule of Augustus had become firmly established and began to take on the character of an hereditary mon- archy, the members of his own family natu- rally came into greater prominence in his councils. Among these was Agrippa, who had married his daughter Julia. Maecenas was outside the circle, and his relation with his chief could not be the same as before. Maecenas was a man of cultivated mind and taste, with a genuine appreciation of literature and enjoyment of the conversation of men of letters. He even wrote indifferent verses him- self. But he showed his love of literature in a much better way by bestowing upon it a liberal and — what was more to the purpose — a discriminating patronage. He did this in part as a measure of policy ; he saw that litera- ture might serve a useful purpose in reconcil- ing the nation to the new order of things. It was rare good fortune for Octavian to have a 45 minister who not only saw the wisdom of this policy, but had the taste and the tact to carry it out with success ; it was something more than good fortune for Maecenas that he won the gratitude and admiration of the two great- est poets of the age, and that his name from that day to this has been a synonym for patron of letters. Horace was introduced to Maecenas appar- ently in b. c. 39 ; but it was not till nine months after the first meeting that he was definitely admitted to his circle. It was prob- ably in b. c. 37 that Maecenas invited him, with Vergil and Varius, to accompany him on the journey to Brundisium, which he has humorously described in the fifth Satire. The acquaintance between the two men ripened gradually into a warm attachment. Maecenas found in Horace a man after his own heart, whose society gave him great content, and whose good sense and sound moral fibre were proof alike against servility and presumption. He won Horace’s gratitude by very substan- tial favours ; he won his affection by the tact and sincerity which made it plain that these favours were the gifts of a friend and not of a mere patron, and that only friendship 46 was exacted in return. Others were quick enough to point out the social inequality of the two men, and Horace was once more forced to hear ill-natured remarks about “ the freedman’s son ” ; but he comforted himself with the knowledge that however it might have been on the former occasion, when he was tribune in the army of Brutus, humble birth was not a matter to be considered against personal qualities in the choice of a friend, and that the distinguished favour which he enjoyed was not purchased by any unworthy compliances on his part. The balance of ob- ligation, in a material point of view, was enor- mously against him ; but he was ready, and frankly avowed his readiness, to resign all these advantages rather than surrender his own independence. And Maecenas accepted him on these terms. Chief of all the benefits that came to Hor- ace from this friendship was the gift of a farm in the Sabine hills, which he received from Maecenas about 33 B. c., not long after the publication of the first book of Satires. The precise situation of this estate has not been determined ; but it lay on the banks of the Digentia (now Licenza), a cold mountain 47 stream that flows directly south and joins the Anio about eight miles above Tibur (Tivoli). Near by was a shrine of the Sabine divinity Vacuna, which archaeologists have located with considerable probability at the village of Roc- cagiovane, about three miles up the valley on its western slope. Behind this point, within a distance of two or three miles, there are moun- tain peaks rising to a height of more than 3000 feet above the sea, one of which may have been Lucretilis; though that name is more commonly supposed to have designated the whole mountain mass lying between the Digentia and the more westerly tributaries of the Anio, the highest point of which, Monte Gennaro (or Zappi), rises above 4000 feet. At the junction of the valleys, on the Anio, was the market town of Varia (Vicovaro) where Horace’s five tenant-farmers carried their pro- duce to sell. In the country-house, which Horace himself appears to have built or re- modelled for his own use, he maintained an establishment of eight slaves, including pre- sumably the vilicus , who had charge of the whole estate. The environment of beauti- ful scenery, with abundance of shade, cool streams, and pure air — it was about 2000 48 feet above the sea-level — made the place ex- ceedingly attractive to a man like Horace, who was strongly susceptible to the impres- sions of Nature in her various aspects. He came into possession of his Sabine villa when he was a little over thirty years old, and from that time on he spent much of his life there, glad to escape from the feverish bustle of the city to his mountain retreat, not thirty miles away, but completely secluded and restful to both mind and body. To Maecenas’ generous gift he was indebted for a good deal more than the mere provision of an income which secured him against want for the rest of his days, though that too was all-important for a man of letters in that age. Through his intimacy with Maecenas Hor- ace came to the acquaintance and notice of Octavian, towards whom his feelings, in the course of this decade, underwent a complete change. Like many of the followers of Bru- tus and Cassius, who had remained quiescent or hostile during the harmonious supremacy of the triumvirs, Horace saw that when it became necessary to choose between Octavian and Antony, the best hopes of the country were bound up with the success of the former. 49 His change of heart was no doubt hastened by the influence of Maecenas, and in fact the pre- vailing influences at Rome set in that direc- tion. When the contest reached its crisis at Actium, Horace’s conversion was complete. He celebrated the victory and the death of Cleopatra — with true Roman spirit he was silent about Antony — with odes of triumph, and cordially accepted the result which placed the sole supremacy in the hands of the one man who could command peace. Towards Augustus personally, however, Horace was not inspired at this time, and probably not at any time, with any warmer feeling than patriotic admiration and gratitude. When Octavian returned to Rome and cele- brated his triple triumph in 29 B. c., — the year after Vergil completed his seven years’ labour on the Georgies, — Horace had pub- lished his two books of Satires and the Epodes. In each of these the opening poem was ad- dressed to Maecenas, which was equivalent to a dedication. Horace’s work in satire was not pursued further, at least in the same form. He had become deeply interested in lyrical composition, and his success in the Epodes had encouraged him to try his hand at more 5 ° complicated lyrical metres. He made careful studies in early Greek lyric, taking as his espe- cial models and guides the two great poets of Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho (about 600 b. c.). Just when Horace began to write what we call the Odes, but which he called simply Poems [carmina), it is not possible to say. In fact, the line of division between the Epodes and the Odes is a somewhat arbitrary one, and a few poems are found under each head that might equally well have been placed under the other. The earliest of the odes to which a date can be assigned with certainty is I, 37, written on receiving the news of the death of Cleopatra in b. c. 30. Possibly some were written before this, but probably not many. From this time on, for about seven years, Horace devoted himself with great zeal and industry, and almost to the exclusion of every other kind of literary work, to lyrical composi- tion. His mastery of form and fine rhythmi- cal sense had here their highest opportunity, and the result was a body of lyrics which in volume and variety and in perfection of finish was never equalled in Latin literature before or after. Catullus, a generation earlier, had written lyrics which in freshness and 5 1 spontaneity, and as direct and unaffected expres- sions of the poet’s personality, Horace himself could not equal. But Catullus had written chiefly in the easier lyrical metres, — iambics, Glyconics, and particularly the Phalaecean, his favourite rhythm. He tried the Sapphic strophe in only two poems — one of these a translation — and the Alcaic not at all. These two, with three Asclepiad strophes which Ca- tullus did not touch, were the rhythms that Horace developed most successfully, and, after many experiments with other forms, came to use almost exclusively. He also worked in accordance with strict metrical theories, for- mulated probably by the Roman philologians of the time, and not by Horace himself, whereas Catullus had allowed himself the full liberty of his Greek models as he found them, so that his verses sometimes, to the ears of later critics, had a touch of harshness. It was not unnatural that Horace should regard his own achievement, wrought out with much study and labour, as the first adequate and suc- cessful adaptation of the Lesbian rhythms to the Latin language, in comparison with which the slighter efforts of Catullus might be deemed to have gone, in point of artistic 5 2 workmanship, little beyond the point he had himself reached in his Epodes. And his claim, in this limited sense, must be allowed. But it is to be wished that he had accorded to the genius of his predecessor in lyric the same generous recognition which he gave to that of Lucilius in satire. Horace’s Odes, many of which are ad- dressed to one or another of his friends, were privately read and circulated long before they were published in collected form. The first publication, which embraced three books, dedicated in a fitting introductory ode to Maecenas, took place, according to almost conclusive internal evidence, in b. c. 23, when Horace had reached the age of forty-two. It was the gathered fruits of the best years of his life, when his mind had attained its full maturity and its spirit had not yet lost its freshness. The collection is arranged with some reference to the chronological order of composition, but with more to variety of sub- ject and pleasing sequence of rhythms. The odes range in quality from mere studies or ver- sions from the Greek to products of the poet’s matured skill and poems in which motive and thought are wholly Roman. Horace gave his 53 work to the world with the undisguised assur- ance of its immortality and his own. It did not immediately silence his detractors ; but it won its way surely, and he did not have to wait many years for a general verdict of approval from the reading public. With this achievement Horace’s ambition to make for himself a unique place in Roman literature was satisfied, or his lyric impulse was spent ; at any rate he wrote no more odes for some years. His old propensity for the study of life reasserted itself and found expression in a new series of sermones , as he calls them, indi- cating their close resemblance in subject and method, as they were identical in metre, with the Satires. In form they were Epistles, and this is the title under which they have come down to us. Some are letters in fact as well as in form, relating to personal matters, — one is a letter of introduction. Others contain some admixture of personal communication, while in many the insertion of a name is no more than a compliment or serves only to lend a certain personal interest to the discourse. It was a practice to which he had become habituated in the Odes, the influence of which on the Epistles is further apparent in a more 54 finished rhythm and a more compact and sen- tentious style than he had attained in the Sat- ires. The first series of Epistles was written in the years immediately following the publi- cation of the Odes, and was published in b. c. 20 or 19. The book, like its predecessors, was dedicated to Maecenas. In the epilogue of this first book of Epis- tles Horace has left a brief sketch of his own person and temper at the age of forty-four: “ short of stature, prematurely gray, quick to take offence, but quickly appeased.” He was stout as well as short ; but in his younger days, with black hair and the low forehead which the Romans admired, and an agreeable voice and smile, he was personally far from unattrac- tive. He enjoyed good health in his youth except that he was troubled with an affection of the eyes. But as he grew older his health began to fail, and he found it necessary to guard it carefully. In spite of the friendly reproaches of Maecenas, he spent a good part of the year away from the city, among the hills at his villa or at Tibur or Praeneste, or on the seashore at Baiae or Tarentum. He never married, nor was he ever taken possession of by an overmastering passion, 55 like his friend Tibullus and the other elegiac poets. Among all the feminine names that occur in his lighter odes only one appears to be real, — that of Cinara, of whom he speaks only after her early death. The Lydias and Lalages, and all the rest of the Greek ladies who figure in his love poems, are crea- tures of his fancy, or of the fancy of some Greek poet before him ; and if, as is no doubt to some extent true, the poems reflect the poet’s own experiences, they also show how lightly these experiences touched him. Hor- ace was not of a temperament to make a serious business of love ; and his artistic delin- eations of it are pretty, but they have not the ring of genuineness and true passion. Some- thing of the same sort must be said of his con- vivial odes. They must be taken as artistic productions, not as self-portraiture. Horace enjoyed good wine and was very sociable by disposition, and he no doubt often found him- self, especially in his younger days, in boister- ous company ; but by his whole nature and training excess of all kinds was distasteful to him, and it is impossible not to believe that his strong self-control rarely failed to assert itself here. The odes in which he enjoins 56 moderation in the use of wine reflect not only his rule but, we may confidently believe, his habitual practice. In the year 17 b. c. Horace’s eminence as a poet received the stamp of official recognition in his appointment to write a hymn to be sung at the Secular Games which Augustus celebrated in that year. His services as poet laureate were further called upon a few years later to celebrate in two odes the exploits of the Emperor’s stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus Nero, who had gained important successes against some of the Alpine tribes. In the mean time his reawakened lyrical activity had produced other odes, and in b. c. 13 , or per- haps a little later, he gathered these together and added a fourth book to the three already published. This was done, Suetonius tells us, to gratify the emperor, who wished the odes in honour of his stepsons to have a permanent place in Horace’s works. The “ Carmen Sae- culare” was not included in this book, but has been preserved separately. The fourth book of the Odes, unlike all of the poet’s previous publications, was not dedi- cated to Maecenas, and this circumstance has given rise to the suspicion that Horace was 57 guilty of neglecting his old friend, now that he had himself come into the sunshine of court favour, while his benefactor had with- drawn into the background, or was even under a cloud. But there is no sufficient ground for such an aspersion, and it is contradicted by what we know of Horace’s character and his ideals of life. Horace had long before this time come into entire sympathy, politically, with the government of Augustus. The em- peror was fully alive to the value of such an ally, and was ready to bestow upon him social favours and rewards of a more substantial sort. Both the one and the other were no doubt agreeable enough to the poet, and Horace was not the man to withhold the one favour he could bestow in return, — the service of his muse. There is nothing to show that his relations with the court went beyond this interchange of civilities. Horace had already won the prizes of life that he most valued, and court favour could add nothing that he really cared for. Nor is there any evidence of a close friendship between the poet and the emperor. The warmest expression of Hor- ace’s feeling towards Augustus is in the fifth ode of the fourth book ; but it is the warmth of loyal gratitude to the author of his coun- try’s peace, and not at all of personal affection. On the other hand we are told that the em- peror’s advances towards a closer relation, in inviting the poet to become his private secre- tary, were coldly received and the appoint- ment was declined. As to the new book of lyrics, Horace’s unerring tact would forbid him to dedicate to Maecenas a work that he had published at the request of the emperor ; the significant fact is that it is not dedicated to Augustus. Of his loyalty to Maecenas, which we should otherwise have no right to question, he reminds us in the eleventh ode ; and of Maecenas’ undiminished affection for the poet we have striking evidence in his dying mes- sage to the emperor, recorded by Suetonius : “Horati Flacci ut mei esto memor.” Suetonius further tells us that Augustus re- proached Horace not only for slighting his friendly advances, but for having left him, among so many friends addressed in his “ ser- mones,” conspicuous by his absence ; and that Horace absolved himself from this reproach by composing the poem which now stands at the head of the second book of Epistles. It is, in form, an epistle to the Emperor ; 59 in substance a review of Latin poetry, with a defence of the modern school, of which Varius and Vergil and Horace himself were the fore- most representatives, and with which the name of Augustus was destined to be permanently associated, against the disparagement of con- servative critics and their indiscriminate vene- ration of the old Roman poets. The second poem of this collection, an epistle to a young friend and man of letters, Julius Florus, is also mainly devoted to literary matters, and is especially interesting for its many allusions to Horace’s own literary career. Its general pur- port is that he has now come to a time of life when he must put aside poetry with other amusements of youth, and address himself to the “ rhythms and harmonies of real life.” For this reason its composition is assigned with great probability to the period immediately following the publication of the first book of the Epistles, when Horace’s lyrical muse was still silent, — say b. c. 19 or 18. The epistle to Augustus, on the other hand, was probably written at least as late as b. c. 14. These two epistles are followed in modern editions by the longest of Horace’s poems (476 hexameters), and the one that approaches 60 nearest to the character of a formal treatise. It is largely didactic, setting forth with much detail of precept and illustration the correct principles of poetry as an art ; and as early as the first century it was known under the title of “ Ars Poetica ” or “ De Arte Poetica liber.” It is, nevertheless, written in the form, and to a considerable extent preserves the character and tone, of an epistle, being addressed to three friends, a father and two sons, of the Piso family, and ostensibly designed for the special benefit of the elder of the two young men, who had literary aspirations. It is, moreover, for a formal treatise, very incomplete ; it deals with only one branch of poetry — the drama — with any degree of thoroughness, touching on the rest lightly or not at all. It seems probable, therefore, that the somewhat pre- tentious title “ Ars Poetica ” did not originate with Horace himself, but was given to the poem later, when it was issued separately, either for educational purposes or as material for learned commentary. The date of its composition is in dispute. Some place it as early as the first book of the Epistles, but the better view appears to be that it was written in the last years of the poet’s life. 61 Of Horace’s personal history in these last years we have no record. His health, as we have seen, had long been precarious, and he had not yet completed his fifty-seventh year when he died, in the latter part of Novem- ber, b. c. 8. He was buried on the Esqui- line, not far from the tomb of Maecenas, who had passed away only a few months before him. The favour which Horace had won from the best minds of his own time has been confirmed by the permanent verdict of posterity. His works at once took their place among the classics of Latin literature. By the beginning of the second century, as we know definitely from Juvenal, and undoubtedly long before (see Quint. I, 8, 6), they were used as school- books, and thus became a part of the literary outfit of the educated Roman. They contin- ued to be read to some extent through the middle ages, and since the revival of letters their popularity has been steadily maintained. Perhaps no ancient writer has won a warmer place in the personal regard of modern men, — and not only men of books, but men of affairs ; for the secret of his power is not merely, or perhaps so much, in the unrivalled 62 mastery of language and rhythm which lends such charm to his lyric poems, — still less in the force of poetical genius, in which his greatness does not pass unchallenged, but rather in the character which shines through his verses, of the keen but kindly, urbane, wise, genial observer of life. Horace’s poems became early the subject of learned criticism and interpretation. The oldest commentary that has come down to us is that of Pomponius Porphyrio, who is sup- posed to have written in the fourth century, perhaps earlier. At any rate, he lived at a time when the old Roman pagan customs had not yet died out, and he had access to still older authorities which are now lost ; so that his work is of great value to us. We also have a collection of scholia under the name of Helenius Aero, a distinguished gramma- rian who lived perhaps a century before Por- phyrio ; but although Aero unquestionably wrote a commentary on Horace, the one which now bears his name is a composite production, made up at a much later date by one or more unknown writers, who quote liberally from Porphyrio. If we may take the word of Jacques de 6 3 Crusque (better known by his Latinised name, Cruquius), professor at Bruges in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the oldest manu- script of Horace known to exist in modern times was preserved in the monastery of St. Peter at Blankenberg (Mons Blandinius), near Ghent, and presumably perished in the fire which consumed that institution in 1566. It was one of four codices which Cruquius had borrowed from the monastery and collated for his edition of Horace, which he first published in complete form in 1578. Although, there- fore, these Blandinian manuscripts are them- selves lost, we have in the edition of Cruquius a considerable number of readings from them ; and some of these are of a very striking char- acter. Cruquius regarded the manuscripts as of great value; three of them he assigned to the ninth century, while the other, which he called “ vetustissimus,” he thought might possibly date from the seventh. We have no means of revising this estimate. Keller and Holder, to whom we are indebted for the full- est existing critical apparatus of Horace, ques- tion the accuracy and even the good faith of Cruquius, and set little value on his manu- scripts. The majority of Horatian scholars, 64 however, dissent from this view and acquit Cruquius of any worse offence than careless- ness, while the “ Blandinius Vetustissimus ” is justly held to be of exceptional importance both on account of the excellence of some of its peculiar readings and because it represents a tradition in large measure independent of the great mass of Horatian manuscripts. Cru- quius also published in his edition a collection of scholia from his Blandinian manuscripts, the unknown writer or writers of which are commonly quoted as “ Commentator Cruquia- nus.” They are of no great value, being evidently derived, for the most part, from Aero and Porphyrio. The extant manuscripts of Horace, about two hundred and fifty in number, range in date from the eighth or ninth to the fifteenth century. The oldest is one now in the pub- lic library at Berne, written by a Scotch or Irish monk in the latter part of the eighth or early in the ninth century. We have nearly twenty in all which appear to have been writ- ten before the end of the tenth century. All of the manuscripts (except one at Gotha, which appears to be derived from the Blandinian recen- sion) come from a common archetype, which Keller thinks may have been written as early as the first or second century. No satisfactory classification has yet been discovered, which shall enable us to decide on disputed readings by the weight of manuscript testimony ; nor is it probable that the relations of the manu- scripts to one another can ever be sufficiently made out to establish such a classification. Owing to the practice in which copyists and revisers often indulged, of comparing their codex with one or more others, and borrow- ing readings from these at their discretion, the lines of tradition have become so confused that it is probably no longer possible to separate them. This appears in Keller’s attempted classification, in which an important manu- script will be found now in one class, now in another. Keller sets up three classes, and in general accepts the united testimony of two against the remaining one. His classes II and III may be said to be fairly made out, though their value is much impaired by the vacilla- tion of individual manuscripts. The case for his Class I is by no means so clear. The seri- ous problems of Horatian textual criticism involve, as a rule, the choice between two (seldom three) variants, each resting on good, 66 but not conclusive, manuscript support ; and the decision cannot be reached by any balan- cing of authorities, but calls for the exercise of sound judgment, trained by careful study of the poet’s mode of thought and habit of expression. 67 READING FROM HOMER Rome bred me first, she taught me Grammar Rules, And all the little Authors read in Schools. A little more than this learn’d Athens shew’d. And taught me how to separate Bad from Good. — Hor. Epist. 2, Lib. ii. Etching by W. H. W. BlC KNELL From the famous painting by Alma Tadema l H3MOH MOfl3 0tfICIA3H «aalu.fl iBmmBiO am jrignBi aria t l8ift am baid amo^ .aloorioS ni beai eiorijuA afnil aril IIb bnA « tb’warie anariiA b'mBal airii nfirfi aiom alnil A .booO moil bfi8 alBiBqaa ol v/ori am irfguBl bnA ,ii .aiJ / boston college 3 9031 01150053 104648 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. Books may be kept for two weeks unless other- wise specified by the Librarian. Two cents a day is charged for each book kept overtime. If you cannot find what you want, ask the Librarian who will be glad to help you. The borrower is responsible for books drawn in his name and for all accruing fines.