CHAPTER II. RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI.--EARLY POEMS
CHAPTER III. INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS.--THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM
CHAPTER IV. PUBLICATION OF FIRST BOOK OF SATIRES.--HIS FRIENDS.--
RECEIVES THE SABINE FARM FROM MAECENAS
CHAPTER V. LIFE IN ROME.--HORACE'S BORE.--EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE ROMAN
DINNERS
CHAPTER VI. HORACE'S LOVE-POETRY
CHAPTER VII. HORACE'S POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS.--HIS PRAISES OF
CONTENTMENT
CHAPTER VIII. PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY.--HORACE'S VIEWS OF A
HEREAFTER.--RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS--BELIEF IN THE
PERMANENCE OF HIS OWN FAME
CHAPTER IX. HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS--HIS LOVE OF
INDEPENDENCE
CHAPTER X. DELICACY OF HORACE'S HEALTH.--HIS CHEERFULNESS--LOVE OF
BOOKS.--HIS PHILOSOPHY PRACTICAL.--EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS.
--DEATH
PREFACE.
No writer of antiquity has taken a stronger hold upon the modern
mind than Horace. The causes of this are manifold, but three may be
especially noted: his broad human sympathies, his vigorous common-sense,
and his consummate mastery of expression. The mind must be either
singularly barren or singularly cold to which Horace does not speak. The
scholar, the statesman, the soldier, the man of the world, the town-bred
man, the lover of the country, the thoughtful and the careless, he who
reads much, and he who reads little, all find in his pages more or
less to amuse their fancy, to touch their feelings, to quicken their
observation, to nerve their convictions, to put into happy phrase the
deductions of their experience. His poetical sentiment is not pitched in
too high a key for the unimaginative, but it is always so genuine that
the most imaginative feel its charm. His wisdom is deeper than it seems,
so simple, practical, and direct as it is in its application; and his
moral teaching more spiritual and penetrating than is apparent on a
superficial study. He does not fall into the common error of didactic
writers, of laying upon life more than it will bear; but he insists that
it shall at least bear the fruits of integrity, truth, honour, justice,
self-denial, and brotherly charity. Over and above the mere literary
charm of his works, too--and herein, perhaps, lies no small part of the
secret of his popularity--the warm heart and thoroughly urbane nature of
the man are felt instinctively by his readers, and draw them to him as
to a friend.
Hence it is that we find he has been a manual with men the most diverse
in their natures, culture, and pursuits. Dante ranks him next after
Homer. Montaigne, as might be expected, knows him by heart. Fenelon
and Bossuet never weary of quoting him. La Fontaine polishes his own
exquisite style upon his model; and Voltaire calls him "the best of
preachers." Hooker escapes with him to the fields to seek oblivion of a
hard life, made harder by a shrewish spouse. Lord Chesterfield tells us,
"When I talked my best I quoted Horace." To Boileau and to Wordsworth he
is equally dear. Condorcet dies in his dungeon with Horace open by his
side; and in Gibbon's militia days, "on every march," he says, "in every
journey, Horace was always in my pocket, and often in my hand." And
as it has been, so it is. In many a pocket, where this might be least
expected, lies a well-thumbed Horace; and in many a devout Christian
heart the maxims of the gentle, genial pagan find a place near the
higher teachings of a greater master.
Where so much of a writer's charm lies, as with Horace, in exquisite
aptness of language, and in a style perfect for fulness of suggestion
combined with brevity and grace, the task of indicating his
characteristics in translation demands the most liberal allowance from
the reader. In this volume the writer has gladly availed himself,
where he might, of the privilege liberally accorded to him to use the
admirable translations of the late Mr Conington, which are distinguished
in all cases by the addition of his initial. The other translations are
the writer's own. For these it would be superfluous to claim indulgence.
This is sure to be granted by those who know their Horace well. With
those who do not, these translations will not be wholly useless, if they
serve to pique them into cultivating an acquaintance with the original
sufficiently close to justify them in turning critics of their defects.
QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS.
BORN, A.U.C. 689, B.C. 65. DIED, A.U.C. 746, B.C. 8.
CHAPTER I.
BIRTH.--EDUCATION.--CAMPAIGN WITH BRUTUS AND CASSIUS.
Like the two greatest lyrists of modern times, Burns and Béranger,
Horace sprang from the ranks of the people. His father had been a slave,
and he was himself cradled among "the huts where poor men lie." Like
these great lyrists, too, Horace was proud of his origin. After he had
become the intimate associate of the first men in Rome--nay, the bosom
friend of the generals and statesmen who ruled the world--he was at
pains on more occasions than one to call attention to the fact of his
humble birth, and to let it be known that, had he to begin life anew,
he was so far from desiring a better ancestry that he would, like Andrew
Marvell, have made "his destiny his choice." Nor is this done with the
pretentious affectation of the parvenu, eager to bring under notice the
contrast between what he is and what he has been, and to insinuate his
personal deserts, while pretending to disclaim them. Horace has no such
false humility. He was proud, and he makes no secret that he was so, of
the name he had made,--proud of it for himself and for the class from
which, he had sprung. But it was his practice, as well as his settled
creed, to rate at little the accidents of birth and fortune. A
stronger and higher feeling, however, more probably dictated the
avowal,--gratitude to that slave-born father whose character and careful
training had stamped an abiding influence upon the life and genius of
his son. Neither might he have been unwilling in this way quietly to
protest against the worship of rank and wealth which he saw everywhere
around him, and which was demoralising society in Rome. The favourite of
the Emperor, the companion of Maecenas, did not himself forget, neither
would he let others forget, that he was a freedman's son; and in his own
way was glad to declare, as Béranger did of himself at the height of his
fame,
"Je suis vilain, et très vilain."
The Roman poets of the pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlike Horace,
were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his great predecessors in lyric
poetry, were men of old and noble family Virgil, born five years before
Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of good property. Tibullus,
Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six, fourteen, and twenty
years his juniors, were all of equestrian rank. Horace's father was a
freed-man of the town of Venusia, the modern Venosa. It is supposed that
he had been a _publicus servus_, or slave of the community, and took
his distinctive name from the Horatian tribe, to which the community
belonged. He had saved a moderate competency in the vocation of
_coactor_, a name applied both to the collectors of public revenue
and of money at sales by public auction. To which of these classes he
belonged is uncertain--most probably to the latter; and in those days of
frequent confiscations, when property was constantly changing hands,
the profits of his calling, at best a poor one, may have been unusually
large. With the fruits of his industry he had purchased a small farm
near Venusia, upon the banks of the Aufidus, the modern Ofanto, on the
confines of Lucania and Apulia, Here, on the 8th of December, B.C. 65,
the poet was born; and this picturesque region of mountain, forest, and
river, "meet nurse of a poetic child," impressed itself indelibly on his
memory, and imbued him with the love of nature, especially in her rugged
aspect, which remained with him through life. He appears to have left
the locality in early life, and never to have revisited it; but when he
has occasion to describe its features (Odes, III. 4), he does this with
a sharpness and truth of touch, which show how closely he had even then
begun to observe. Acherontia, perched nest-like among the rocks, the
Bantine thickets, the fat meadows of low-lying Forentum, which his
boyish eye had noted, attest to this hour the vivid accuracy of his
description. The passage in question records an interesting incident in
the poet's childhood. Escaping from his nurse, he has rambled away
from the little cottage on the slopes of Mount Vultur, whither he had
probably been taken from the sultry Venusia to pass his _villeggiatura_
during the heat of summer, and is found asleep, covered with fresh
myrtle and laurel leaves, in which the wood-pigeons have swathed him.
"When from my nurse erewhile, on Vultur's steep,
I stray'd beyond the bound
Of our small homestead's ground,
Was I, fatigued with play, beneath a heap
Of fresh leaves sleeping found,--
"Strewn by the storied doves; and wonder fell
On all, their nest who keep
On Acherontia's steep,
Or in Forentum's low rich pastures dwell,
Or Bantine woodlands deep,
"That safe from bears and adders in such place
I lay, and slumbering smiled,
O'erstrewn with myrtle wild,
And laurel, by the god's peculiar grace
No craven-hearted child."
The incident thus recorded is not necessarily discredited by the
circumstance of its being closely akin to what is told by Aelian of
Pindar, that a swarm of bees settled upon his lips, and fed him with
honey, when he was left exposed upon the highway. It probably had some
foundation in fact, whatever may be thought of the implied augury of the
special favour of the gods which is said to have been drawn from it
at the time. In any case, the picture of the strayed child, sleeping
unconscious of its danger, with its hands full of wild-flowers, is
pleasant to contemplate.
In his father's house, and in those of the Apulian peasantry around
him, Horace became familiar with the simple virtues of the poor, their
industry and independence, their integrity, chastity, and self-denial,
which he loved to contrast in after years with the luxury and vice of
imperial Rome. His mother he would seem to have lost early. No mention
of her occurs, directly or indirectly, throughout his poems; and
remarkable as Horace is for the warmth of his affections, this could
scarcely have happened had she not died when he was very young. He
appears also to have been an only child. This doubtless drew him closer
to his father, and the want of the early influences of mother or sister
may serve to explain why one misses in his poetry something of that
gracious tenderness towards womanhood, which, looking to the sweet and
loving disposition of the man, one might otherwise have expected to find
in it. That he was no common boy we may be very sure, even if this were
not manifest from the fact that his father resolved to give him a higher
education than was to be obtained under a provincial schoolmaster. With
this view, although little able to afford the expense, he took his son,
when about twelve years old, to Rome, and gave him the best education
the capital could supply. No money was spared to enable him to keep his
position among his fellow-scholars of the higher ranks. He was waited on
by several slaves, as though he were the heir to a considerable fortune.
At the same time, however, he was not allowed either to feel any shame
for his own order, or to aspire to a position which his patrimony
was unable to maintain. His father taught him to look forward to some
situation akin to that in which his own modest competency had been
acquired; and to feel that, in any sphere, culture, self-respect,
and prudent self-control must command influence, and afford the best
guarantee for happiness. In reading this part of Horace's story, as
he tells it himself, one is reminded of Burns's early lines about his
father and himself:--
"My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border,
And carefully he bred me up in decency and order.
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing,
For without an honest manly heart no man was worth regarding."
The parallel might be still further pursued. "My father," says Gilbert
Burns, "was for some time almost the only companion we had. He conversed
familiarly on all subjects with us as if we had been men, and was at
great pains, while we accompanied him in the labours of the farm, to
lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend to increase our
knowledge, or confirm us in virtuous habits." How closely this resembles
the method adopted with Horace by his father will be seen hereafter.
[Footnote: Compare it, too, with what Horace reports of "Ofellus the
hind, Though no scholar, a sage of exceptional kind," in the Second
Satire of the Second Book, from line 114 to the end.]
Horace's literary master at Rome was Orbilius Pupillus, a grammarian,
who had carried into his school his martinet habits as an old soldier;
and who, thanks to Horace, has become a name (_plagosus Orbilius_,
Orbilius of the birch) eagerly applied by many a suffering urchin
to modern pedagogues who have resorted to the same material means of
inculcating the beauties of the classics. By this Busby of the period
Horace was grounded in Greek, and made familiar, too familiar for his
liking, with Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, Attius, Livius Andronicus, and
other early Latin writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to
one who had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorous
style of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care that
he should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, in which
music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But, what
was of still more importance during this critical period of the future
poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he enjoyed
the advantages of his father's personal superintendence and of a careful
moral training. His father went with him to all his classes, and, being
himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour, he gave the
boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attention to the
follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around him,
showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates of reason and
common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences to the good name
and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions. The method he
pursued is thus described by Horace (Satires, I. 4):--
"Should then my humorous vein run wild, some latitude allow.
I learned the habit from the best of fathers, who employed
Some living type to stamp the vice he wished me to avoid.
Thus temperate and frugal when exhorting me to be,
And with the competence content which he had stored for me,
'Look, boy!' he'd say,' at Albius' son--observe his sorry plight!
And Barrus, that poor beggar there! Say, are not these a sight,
To warn a man from squandering his patrimonial means?'
When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans;
'Sectanus, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswear
Intrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere;
'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught.
The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be
sought,
The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold
The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old,
And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name.
When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your
frame,
You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won
And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done,
Hard it might be--'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can
quote'--
And then as model pointed to some public man of note.
Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you
One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too,
Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?'
And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread
Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint,
So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint
They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those
Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes."
Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the kindly
humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical and
didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved
through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the rugged
maxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly but
echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his
own Ofellus, and the elders of the race--not, let us hope, altogether
bygone--of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as
"Religious men, who give to God and men their dues,"--the Apulian
freedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered from
books, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation
and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace
to his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had
occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this
admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that father's
character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as occurring
in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family and vast
wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poet which was
afterwards to ripen into a lifelong friendship.
"Yet if some trivial faults, and these but few,
My nature, else not much amiss, imbue
(Just as you wish away, yet scarcely blame,
A mole or two upon a comely frame),
If no man may arraign me of the vice
Of lewdness, meanness, nor of avarice;
If pure and innocent I live, and dear
To those I love (self-praise is venial here),
All this I owe my father, who, though poor,
Lord of some few lean acres, and no more,
Was loath to send me to the village school,
Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule,--
Centurions, and the like,--were wont to swarm,
With slate and satchel on sinister arm,
And the poor dole of scanty pence to pay
The starveling teacher on the quarter-day;
But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome,
There to be taught all arts that grace the home
Of knight and senator. To see my dress,
And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no less
Than patrimonial fortunes old and great
Had furnished forth the charges of my state.
When with my tutors, he would still be by,
Nor ever let me wander from his eye;
And, in a word, he kept me chaste (and this
Is virtue's crown) from all that was amiss,
Nor such in act alone, but in repute,
Till even scandal's tattling voice was mute.
No dread had he that men might taunt or jeer,
Should I, some future day, as auctioneer,
Or, like himself, as tax-collector, seek
With petty fees my humble means to eke.
Nor should I then have murmured. Now I know,
More earnest thanks, and loftier praise I owe.
Reason must fail me, ere I cease to own
With pride, that I have such a father known;
Nor shall I stoop my birth to vindicate,
By charging, like the herd, the wrong on Fate,
That I was not of noble lineage sprung:
Far other creed inspires my heart and tongue.
For now should Nature bid all living men
Retrace their years, and live them o'er again,
Each culling, as his inclination bent,
His parents for himself, with mine content,
I would not choose whom men endow as great
With the insignia and seats of state;
And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes,
Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise,
In thus refusing to assume the care
Of irksome state I was unused to bear."
The education, of which Horace's father had laid the foundation at Rome,
would not have been complete without a course of study at Athens, then
the capital of literature and philosophy, as Rome was of political
power. Thither Horace went somewhere between the age of 17 and 20. "At
Rome," he says (Epistles, II. ii. 23),
"I had my schooling, and was taught
Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought;
At classic Athens, where I went ere long,
I learned to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong,
And search for truth, if so she might be seen,
In Academic groves of blissful green." (C.)
At Athens he found many young men of the leading Roman
families--Bibulus, Messalla, Corvinus, the younger Cicero, and
others--engaged in the same pursuits with himself, and he contracted
among them many enduring friendships. In the political lull which ensued
between the battle of Pharsalia (B.C. 48) and the death of Julius Caesar
(B.C. 44), he was enabled to devote himself without interruption to the
studies which had drawn him to that home of literature and the arts. But
these were destined before long to be rudely broken. The tidings of that
startling event had been hailed with delight by the youthful spirits,
some of whom saw in the downfall of the great Dictator the dawn of a new
era of liberty, while others hoped from it the return to power of the
aristocratic party to which they belonged. In this mood Brutus found
them when he arrived in Athens along with Cassius, on their way to take
command of the Eastern provinces which had been assigned to them by the
Senate. Cassius hurried on to his post in Syria, but Brutus lingered
behind, ostensibly absorbed in the philosophical studies of the schools,
but at the same time recruiting a staff of officers for his army from
among the young Romans of wealth and family whom it was important he
should attach to his party, and who were all eagerness to make his
cause their own. Horace, infected by the general enthusiasm, joined his
standard; and, though then only twenty-two, without experience, and with
no special aptitude, physical or mental, for a military life, he was
intrusted by Brutus with the command of a legion. There is no reason to
suppose that he owed a command of such importance to any dearth of men
of good family qualified to act as officers. It is, therefore, only
reasonable to conclude, that even at this early period he was recognised
in the brilliant society around him as a man of mark; and that Brutus,
before selecting him, had thoroughly satisfied himself that he possessed
qualities which justified so great a deviation from ordinary rules,
as the commission of so responsible a charge to a freedman's son. That
Horace gave his commander satisfaction we know from himself. The line
(Epistles, I. xx. 23), "_Me primis urbis belli placuisse domique_,"--
"At home, as in the field, I made my way,
And kept it, with the first men of the day,"--
can be read in no other sense. But while Horace had, beyond all doubt,
made himself a strong party of friends who could appreciate his genius
and attractive qualities, his appointment as military tribune excited
jealousy among some of his brother officers, who considered that the
command of a Roman legion should have been reserved for men of nobler
blood--a jealousy at which he said, with his usual modesty, many years
afterwards (Satires, I. vi. 45), he had no reason either to be surprised
or to complain.
In B.C. 43, Brutus, with his army, passed from Macedonia to join Cassius
in Asia Minor, and Horace took his part in their subsequent active and
brilliant campaign there. Of this we get some slight incidental glimpses
in his works. Thus, for example (Odes, II. 7), we find him reminding his
comrade, Pompeius Varus, how
"Full oft they sped the lingering day
Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay,
With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair."
The Syrian spikenard, _Malobathrum Syrium_, fixes the locality. Again,
in the epistle to his friend Bullatius (Epistles, I. 11), who is
making a tour in Asia, Horace speaks of several places as if from vivid
recollection. In his usual dramatic manner, he makes Bullatius answer
his inquiries as to how he likes the places he has seen:--
"_You know what Lebedos is like_; so bare,
With Gabii or Fidenae 'twould compare;
Yet there, methinks, I would accept my lot,
My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot,
Stand on the cliff at distance, and survey
The stormy sea-god's wild Titanic play." (C.)
Horace himself had manifestly watched the angry surges from the cliffs
of Lebedos. But a more interesting record of the Asiatic campaign,
inasmuch as it is probably the earliest specimen of Horace's writing
which we have, occurs in the Seventh Satire of the First Book. Persius,
a rich trader of Clazomene, has a lawsuit with Rupilius, one of Brutus's
officers, who went by the nickname of "King." Brutus, in his character
of quaestor, has to decide the dispute, which in the hands of the
principals degenerates, as disputes so conducted generally do, into a
personal squabble. Persius leads off with some oriental flattery of the
general and his suite. Brutus is "Asia's sun," and they the "propitious
stars," all but Rupilius, who was
"That pest,
The Dog, whom husbandmen detest."
Rupilius, an old hand at slang, replies with a volley of rough sarcasms,
"such as among the vineyards fly," and
"Would make the passer-by
Shout filthy names, but shouting fly"--
a description of vintage slang which is as true to-day as it was then.
The conclusion is curious, as a punning allusion to the hereditary fame
of Brutus as a puller-down of kings, which it must have required some
courage to publish, when Augustus was omnipotent in Rome.
"But Grecian Persius, after he
Had been besprinkled plenteously
With gall Italic, cries, 'By all
The gods above, on thee I call,
Oh Brutus, thou of old renown,
For putting kings completely down,
To save us! Wherefore do you not
Despatch this King here on the spot?
One of the tasks is this, believe,
Which you are destined to achieve!'"
This is just such a squib as a young fellow might be expected to dash
off for the amusement of his brother officers, while the incident which
led to it was yet fresh in their minds. Slight as it is, one feels sure
its preservation by so severe a critic of his own writings as Horace was
due to some charm of association, or possibly to the fact that in it
he had made his first essay in satire. The defeat of Brutus at Philippi
(B.C. 42) brought Horace's military career to a close. Even before this
decisive event, his dream of the re-establishment of liberty and the
old Roman constitution had probably begun to fade away, under his actual
experience of the true aims and motives of the mass of those whom Brutus
and Cassius had hitherto been leading to victory, and satiating with
plunder. Young aristocrats, who sneered at the freedman's son, were
not likely to found any system of liberty worthy of the name, or to use
success for nobler purposes than those of selfish ambition. Fighting
was not Horace's vocation, and with the death of Brutus and those
nobler spirits, who fell at Philippi rather than survive their hopes
of freedom, his motive for fighting was at an end. To prolong a contest
which its leaders had surrendered in despair was hopeless. He did not,
therefore, like Pompeius Varus and others of his friends, join the party
which, for a time, protracted the struggle under the younger Pompey.
But, like his great leader, he had fought for a principle; nor could
he have regarded otherwise than with horror the men who had overthrown
Brutus, reeking as they were with the blood of a thousand proscriptions,
and reckless as they had shown themselves of every civil right and
social obligation. As little, therefore, was he inclined to follow the
example of others of his distinguished friends and companions in arms,
such as Valerius Messalla and Aelius Lamia, who not merely made their
peace with Antony and Octavius, but cemented it by taking service in
their army.