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HORACE
[Illustration: [_Bib. Nat., Paris._
HORACE.
From a bronze medallion of the period of Constantine.]
Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers
HORACE
by
REV. W. TUCKWELL, M.A.
Author of "Chaucer," Etc.
[Illustration]
London
George Bell & Sons
1905
Chiswick Press: Charles Whittingham and Co.
Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London.
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
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 himself in his
poems by the three names indifferently, but to us 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 unquestionably 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, 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 knowledge 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.)
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, 71).
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 goes to Oxford or to Cambridge:
the young Roman went to Athens. There we find Horace at about nineteen
years of age, learning Greek, and attending 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 very strenuous, always more practical
than speculative; he played with his teachers' systems, mocked at their
fallacies, assimilated their serious lessons.
[Illustration: _Alinari photo._] [_Palace of the Conservators, Rome._
BRUTUS.]
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 profligacy, the one pure member of a grossly
licentious 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 Conservators 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 lineaments of a grand but fatal destiny--we seem to penetrate
the character of the man whom Dante 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
confiscated in the proscription following on the defeat, he had to begin
the world again at twenty-four years old. He obtained some sort of
clerkship in a public office, and to eke out its slender emoluments he
began to write. What were his earliest 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 both the harshness of his
style and the scurrilous character of his verses. (Sat. I, x.) It has
been conjectured therefore that his earliest compositions were severe
personal lampoons, written for money and to order, which his maturer
taste destroyed. In any case his writings found admirers. 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 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 prevision 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 moderation of his address, the honied words
which averted anger, the dexterous reticence which disarmed suspicion,
he reconciled opposing factions, veiled arbitrary measures, impressed
alike on nobles and on populace the beneficence of imperial despotism,
while he kept its harshness out of sight. Far from parading his
extensive powers, he masked them by ostentatious humility, refusing
official promotion, contented with the inferior rank of "Knight,"
sitting in theatre and circus below men whom his own hand had raised
to station higher than his own. Absorbed in unsleeping political 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 words
which Seneca has ridiculed and La Fontaine 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 embalmed 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.
[Illustration: _Alinari photo._] [_Palace of the Conservators, Rome._
MAECENAS.]
To Horace, then, now twenty-seven years old, these imposing doors were
opened. The first interview was unsatisfactory; the young poet was
tongue-tied and stammering, the great man reserved and haughty: they
parted mutually dissatisfied. Nine months later Maecenas sent for 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, Tivoli.
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
Maecenas. To all Roman homes of quality and consequence clients were a
necessary adjunct: men for the most part humble and needy, who attended
to welcome the patron when issuing from his chamber in the morning,
preceded and surrounded 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 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; before 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 resented 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. III, 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.)
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 full 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 saddlebags 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,
sometimes 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 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 loveliest 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 Newdigate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, written, 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, understand how a poet's genius can, as Shakespeare
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 becomes 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. 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 valleys, which received the primal
outpourings of their muse, and are for ever vocal with its memories.
[Illustration: THE SITE OF HORACE'S VILLA.]
From M. Rotondo, eastward to the Licenza, and southward to the
high ground of Roccogiovine, stretched apparently the poet's not
inconsiderable demesne. Part of it he let off to five peasants on the
_métayage_ 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 cheerful 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
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, 1); and visitors to-day, drinking the juice of
the native grape at the little Roccogiovine inn, will be of opinion with
M. de Florac, 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.
Of the _beauty_ of his home he speaks always modestly; it may not
compare with Praeneste, Tarentum, Baiae; its _charm_ he is never weary
of extolling. Nowhere, he says, is the air sweeter and more balmy, in
summer temperate, warm in winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm,
tranquillity, 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. II, vi, 60); but after some months of
its placid joys the active social side of him would re-assert itself:
the welcoming friends of the great city, its brilliant talk, its rush of
busy life, recovered their attractiveness, 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, fragments of brick
or marble, overthrown entablatures, 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 restorations 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 gardens, 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
having, it is supposed, violated her vestal vow. We 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.
[Illustration: _Alinari photo._
THE ROMAN FORUM.]
Of his life in Rome Horace has given us a minute account (Sat. I, vi,
110, 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, inquiring 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 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 Caecuban 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 sumptuous meal, but spoiled by the host's tedious disquisitions 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 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. III, 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 happened 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 myself; are you afraid that to have appeared as my
friend will hurt you with posterity?" Such royal solicitations are a
command, and Horace responded by the longest and one amongst the most
admired of his Epistles (Ep. II, 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 disparagement 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); 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. III, 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 the Esquiline 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 survive 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. II, xvii.
THE SATIRES AND EPISTLES
Horace's poems are of two kinds; of one kind the Satires and Epistles,
of another the Odes and Epodes. Their order and dates of publication 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, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C.,
devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society
and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his
six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers
who followed him, Horace, Persius, 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 dogmatic 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, personalities,
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
culminating point and finish. He illustrates the extravagance of the day
by the spendthrift Clodius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from
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 to castigation 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 gastronomic 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
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, entreat 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 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 borrowed 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 Philippus, who amused
himself by enriching 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
judgement 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 listen 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,
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 lecturing, 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 sometimes gross:
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 ministering to the censoriousness of readers by names
genuine or well understood, must have bitterly offended the men thus
stigmatized or transparently indicated. This he admits regretfully in
his later Satires, throwing some blame on a practice 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-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, 100), whose stern exclusiveness of faith was
beginning to excite 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).[1] 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 household and habits of Maecenas.
Horace's friend Fuscus meets them; the poet nods and winks, imploring
him to interpose a rescue. Cruel Fuscus 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 poet quotes in his joy from
the rescue of Hector in the Iliad, "Thus Apollo bore me from the fray."
In this Satire, which was admirably imitated 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 benignant wit of Thackeray.
[Footnote 1: 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 elocution.]
* * * * *
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 addressed to friends.
"Sermons" he calls them himself as he called the Satires, and their
motive is mostly the same; like those, they are Conversations, only with
absent correspondents instead of with present interlocutors, real or
imagined. He follows in them the old theme, the art of living, the
happiness of moderation and contentment; preaching easily as from
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 vigorous 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 repents his benefactions
or demands sacrifice of freedom in exchange for them, he had better take
them back: yet a remonstrance so disarming, 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 admiration 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 his friend Septimius 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 masterpiece
of delicate solicitation, St. Paul's Epistle to Philemon. It is cited by
Steele in the "Spectator" as a model of epistolary tact ("Spectator,"
No. 493); we cannot improve upon his translation:
"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 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 considerations, 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."