INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS.--THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM.
Horace had not been long in Rome, after his return from Greece, before
he had made himself a name. With what he got from the booksellers, or
possibly by the help of friends, he had purchased a patent place in the
Quaestor's department, a sort of clerkship of the Treasury, which he
continued to hold for many years, if not indeed to the close of his
life. The duties were light, but they demanded, and at all events had,
his occasional attention, even after he was otherwise provided for.
Being his own--bought by his own money--it may have gratified his love
of independence to feel that, if the worst came to the worst, he had his
official salary to fall back upon. Among his friends, men of letters are
at this time, as might have been expected, found to be most conspicuous.
Virgil, who had recently been despoiled, like, himself, of his
paternal property, took occasion to bring his name before Maecenas, the
confidential adviser and minister of Octavius, in whom he had himself
found a helpful friend. This was followed up by the commendation of
Varius, already celebrated as a writer of Epic poetry, and whose tragedy
of "Thyestes," if we are to trust Quintilian, was not unworthy to rank
with the best tragedies of Greece. Maecenas may not at first have been
too well disposed towards a follower of the republican party, who
had not been sparing of his satire against many of the supporters and
favourites of Octavius. He sent for Horace, however (B.C. 39), and any
prejudice on this score, if prejudice there was, was ultimately got
over. Maecenas took time to form his estimate of the man, and it was
not till nine months after their first interview that he sent for Horace
again. When he did so, however, it was to ask him to consider himself
for the future among the number of his friends. This part of Horace's
story is told with admirable brevity and good feeling in the Satire from
which we have already quoted, addressed to Maecenas (B. I. Sat. 6) a few
years afterwards.
"Lucky I will not call myself, as though
Thy friendship I to mere good fortune owe.
No chance it was secured me thy regards,
But Virgil first, that best of men and bards,
And then kind Varius mentioned what I was.
Before you brought, with many a faltering pause,
Dropping some few brief words (for bashfulness
Robbed me of utterance) I did not profess
That I was sprung of lineage old and great,
Or used to canter round my own estate
On Satureian barb, but what and who
I was as plainly told. As usual, you
Brief answer make me. I retire, and then,
Some nine months after, summoning me again,
You bid me 'mongst your friends assume a place:
And proud I feel that thus I won your grace,
Not by an ancestry long known to fame,
But by my life, and heart devoid of blame."
The name of Maecenas is from this time inseparably associated with that
of Horace. From what little is authentically known of him, this much may
be gathered: He was a man of great general accomplishment, well versed
in the literature both of Greece and Rome, devoted to literature and
the society of men of letters, a lover of the fine arts and of natural
history, a connoisseur of gems and precious stones, fond of living in
a grand style, and of surrounding himself with people who amused him,
without being always very particular as to who or what they were. For
the indulgence of all these tastes, his great wealth was more than
sufficient. He reclaimed the Esquiline hill from being the public
nuisance we have already described, laid it out in gardens, and in the
midst of these built himself a sumptuous palace, where the Church of
Santa Maria Maggiore now stands, from which he commanded a superb view
of the country looking towards Tivoli. To this palace, salubrious from
its spacious size and the elevation of its site, Augustus, when ill,
had himself carried from his own modest mansion; and from its lofty
belvedere tower Nero is said to have enjoyed the spectacle of Rome in
flames beneath him. Voluptuary and dilettante as Maecenas was, he was
nevertheless, like most men of a sombre and melancholy temperament,
capable of great exertions; and he veiled under a cold exterior and
reserved manners a habit of acute observation, a kind heart, and,
in matters of public concern, a resolute will. This latent energy of
character, supported as it was by a subtle knowledge of mankind and a
statesmanlike breadth of view, contributed in no small degree to
the ultimate triumph of Octavius Caesar over his rivals, and to the
successful establishment of the empire in his hands. When the news of
Julius Caesar's assassination reached the young Octavius, then only
nineteen, in Apollonia, it has been said that Maecenas was in attendance
upon him as his governor or tutor. Be this so or not, as soon as
Octavius appears in the political arena as his uncle's avenger, Maecenas
is found by his side. In several most important negotiations he acted
as his representative. Thus (B.C. 40), the year before Horace was
introduced to him, he, along with Cocceius Nerva, negotiated with Antony
the peace of Brundusium, which resulted in Antony's ill-starred marriage
with Caesar's sister Octavia. Two years later he was again associated
with Cocceius in a similar task, on which occasion Horace and Virgil
accompanied him to Brundusium. He appears to have commanded in various
expeditions, both naval and military, but it was at Rome and in Council
that his services were chiefly sought; and he acted as one of the chief
advisers of Augustus down to about five years before his death, when,
either from ill health or some other unknown cause, he abandoned
political life. More than once he was charged by Augustus with the
administration of the civil affairs of Italy during his own absence,
intrusted with his seal, and empowered to open all his letters addressed
to the Senate, and, if necessary, to alter their contents, so as to
adapt them to the condition of affairs at home. His aim, like that of
Vipsanius Agrippa, who was in himself the Nelson and Wellington of the
age, seems to have been to build up a united and flourishing empire in
the person of Augustus. Whether from temperament or policy, or both,
he set his face against the system of cruelty and extermination which
disgraced the triumvirate. When Octavius was one day condemning man
after man to death, Maecenas, after a vain attempt to reach him on
the tribunal, where he sat surrounded by a dense crowd, wrote upon his
tablets, _Surge tandem, Carnifex_!--"Butcher, break off!" and flung
them across the crowd into the lap of Caesar, who felt the rebuke,
and immediately quitted the judgment-seat. His policy was that of
conciliation; and while bent on the establishment of a monarchy, from
what we must fairly assume to have been a patriotic conviction that
this form of government could alone meet the exigencies of the time, he
endeavoured to combine this with a due regard to individual liberty, and
a free expression of individual opinion.
At the time of Horace's introduction to him, Maecenas was probably
at his best, in the full vigour of his intellect, and alive with the
generous emotions which must have animated a man bent as he was on
securing tranquillity for the state, and healing the strife of factions,
which were threatening it with ruin. His chief relaxation from the
fatigues of public life was, to all appearance, found in the society of
men of letters, and, judging by what Horace says (Satires, I. 9),
the _vie intime_ of his social circle must have been charming. To
be admitted within it was a privilege eagerly coveted, and with good
reason, for not only was this in itself a stamp of distinction, but his
parties were well known as the pleasantest in Rome:--
"No house more free from all that's base,
In none cabals more out of place.
It hurts me not, if others be
More rich, or better read than me;
Each has his place."
Like many of his contemporaries, who were eminent in political life,
Maecenas devoted himself to active literary work--for he wrote much,
and on a variety of topics. His taste in literature was, however, better
than his execution. His style was diffuse, affected, and obscure; but
Seneca, who tells us this, and gives some examples which justify the
criticism, tells us at the same time that his genius was massive and
masculine (_grande et virile_), and that he would have been eminent for
eloquence, if fortune had not spoiled him. However vicious his own style
may have been, the man who encouraged three such writers as Virgil,
Propertius, and Horace, not to mention others of great repute, whose
works have perished, was clearly a sound judge of a good style in
others.
As years went on, and the cares of public life grew less onerous, habits
of self-indulgence appear to have grown upon Maecenas. It will probably
be well, however, to accept with some reserve what has been said against
him on this head. Then, as now, men of rank and power were the victims
of calumnious gossips and slanderous pamphleteers. His health became
precarious. Incessant sleeplessness spoke of an overtasked brain and
shattered nerves. Life was full of pain; still he clung to it with a
craven-like tenacity. So, at least, Seneca asserts, quoting in support
of his statement some very bad verses by Maecenas, which may be thus
translated:--
"Lame in feet, and lame in fingers,
Crooked in back, with every tooth
Rattling in my head, yet, 'sooth,
I'm content, so life but lingers.
Gnaw my withers, rack my bones,
Life, mere life, for all atones."
In one view these lines may certainly be construed to import the
same sentiment as the speech of the miserable Claudio in "Measure for
Measure,"--
"The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death."
But, on the other hand, they may quite as fairly be regarded as merely
giving expression to the tenet of the Epicurean philosophy, that however
much we may suffer from physical pain or inconvenience, it is still
possible to be happy. "We know what we are; we know not what we may be!"
Not the least misfortune of Maecenas was his marriage to a woman whom
he could neither live with nor without--separating from and returning
to her so often, that, according to Seneca, he was a thousand times
married, yet never had but one wife. Friends he had many, loyal and
devoted friends, on whose society and sympathy he leant more and more
as the years wore on. He rarely stirred from Rome, loving its smoke,
its thronged and noisy streets, its whirl of human passions, as Johnson
loved Fleet Street, or "the sweet shady side of Pall Mall," better than
all the verdure of Tivoli, or the soft airs and exquisite scenery of
Baiae. He liked to read of these things, however; and may have found as
keen a pleasure in the scenery of the 'Georgics,' or in Horace's little
landscape-pictures, as most men could have extracted from the scenes
which they describe.
Such was the man, ushered into whose presence, Horace, the reckless
lampooner and satirist, found himself embarrassed, and at a loss for
words. Horace was not of the MacSycophant class, who cannot "keep their
back straight in the presence of a great man;" nor do we think he had
much of the nervous apprehensiveness of the poetic temperament. Why,
then, should he have felt thus abashed? Partly, it may have been, from
natural diffidence at encountering a man to gain whose goodwill was
a matter of no small importance, but whose goodwill, he also knew by
report, was not easily won; and partly, to find himself face to face
with one so conspicuously identified with the cause against which he had
fought, and the men whom he had hitherto had every reason to detest.
Once admitted by Maecenas to the inner circle of his friends, Horace
made his way there rapidly. Thus we find him, a few months afterwards,
in the spring of B.C. 37, going to Brundusium with Maecenas, who
had been despatched thither on a mission of great public importance
(Satires, I. 6). The first term of the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius,
and Lepidus had expired at the close of the previous year. No fresh
arrangement had been made, and Antony, alarmed at the growing power of
Octavius in Italy, had appeared off Brundusium with a fleet of 300 sail
and a strong body of troops. The Brundusians--on a hint, probably, from
Octavius--forbade his landing, and he had to go on to Tarentum, where
terms were ultimately arranged for a renewal of the triumvirate. The
moment was a critical one, for an open rupture between Octavius and
Antony was imminent, which might well have proved disastrous to the
former, had Antony joined his fleet to that of the younger Pompey,
which, without his aid, had already proved more than a match for the
naval force of Octavius.
To judge by Horace's narrative, all the friends who accompanied Maecenas
on this occasion, except his coadjutor, Cocceius Nerva, who had three
years before been engaged with him on a similar mission to Brundusium,
were men whose thoughts were given more to literature than to politics.
Horace starts from Rome with Heliodorus, a celebrated rhetorician, and
they make their way very leisurely to Anxur (Terracina), where they are
overtaken by Maecenas.
"'Twas fixed that we should meet with dear
Maecenas and Cocceius here,
Who were upon a mission bound,
Of consequence the most profound;
For who so skilled the feuds to close
Of those, once friends, who now were foes?"
This is the only allusion throughout the poem, to the object of the
journey. The previous day, Horace had been baulked of his dinner, the
water being so bad, and his stomach so delicate, that he chose to fast
rather than run the risk of making himself ill with it. And now at
Terracina he found his eyes, which were weak, so troublesome, that he
had to dose them well with a black wash. These are the first indications
we get of habitual delicacy of health, which, if not due altogether to
the fatigues and exposure of his campaign with Brutus, had probably been
increased by them.
"Meanwhile beloved Maecenas came,
Cocceius too, and brought with them
Fonteius Capito, a man
Endowed with every grace that can
A perfect gentleman attend,
And Antony's especial friend."
They push on next day to Formiae, and are amused at Fundi (Fondi) on the
way by the consequential airs of the prefect of the place. It would
seem as if the peacock nature must break out the moment a man becomes a
prefect or a mayor.
"There having rested for the night,
With inexpressible delight
We hail the dawn,--for we that day
At Sinuessa, on our way
With Plotius, [1] Virgil, Varius too,
Have an appointed rendezvous;
Souls all, than whom the earth ne'er saw
More noble, more exempt from flaw,
Nor are there any on its round
To whom I am more firmly bound.
Oh! what embracings, and what mirth!
Nothing, no, nothing, on this earth,
Whilst I have reason, shall I e'er
With a true genial friend compare!"
[1] Plotius Tucca, himself a poet, and associated by Virgil with Varius
in editing the Aeneid after the poet's death.
Next day they reach Capua, where, so soon as their mules are unpacked,
away
"Maecenas hies, at ball to play;
To sleep myself and Virgil go,
For tennis-practice is, we know,
Injurious, quite beyond all question,
Both to weak eyes and weak digestion."
With these and suchlike details Horace carries us pleasantly on with
his party to Brundusium. They were manifestly in no hurry, for they took
fourteen days, according to Gibbon's careful estimate, to travel 378
Roman miles. That they might have got over the ground much faster,
if necessary, is certain from what is known of other journeys. Caesar
posted 100 miles a-day. Tiberius travelled 200 miles in twenty-four
hours, when he was hastening to close the eyes of his brother Drusus;
and Statius (Sylv. 14, Carm. 3) talks of a man leaving Rome in the
morning, and being at Baiae or Puteoli, 127 miles off, before night.
"Have but the will, be sure you'll find the way.
What shall stop him, who starts at break of day
From sleeping Rome, and on the Lucrine sails
Before the sunshine into twilight pales?"
Just as, according to Sydney Smith, in his famous allusion to the
triumphs of railway travelling, "the early Scotchman scratches himself
in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly
before the setting sun."
Horace treats the expedition to Brundusium entirely as if it had been a
pleasant tour. Gibbon thinks he may have done so purposely, to convince
those who were jealous of his intimacy with the great statesman, "that
his thoughts and occupations on the event were far from being of a
serious or political nature." But it was a rule with Horace, in all his
writings, never to indicate, by the slightest word, that he knew any
of the political secrets which, as the intimate friend of Maecenas, he
could scarcely have failed to know. He hated babbling of all kinds.
A man who reported the private talk of friends, even on comparatively
indifferent topics,--
"The churl, who out of doors will spread
What 'mongst familiar friends is said,"--
(Epistle I. v. 24), was his especial aversion; and he has more than once
said, only not in such formal phrase, what Milton puts into the mouth of
his "Samson Agonistes,"
"To have revealed
Secrets of men, the secrets of a friend,
How heinous had the fact been! how deserving
Contempt, and scorn of all, to be excluded
All friendship, and avoided as a blab,
The mark of fool set on his front!"
Moreover, reticence, the indispensable quality, not of statesmen merely,
but of their intimates, was not so rare a virtue in these days as in our
own; and as none would have expected Horace, in a poem of this kind,
to make any political confidences, he can scarcely be supposed to have
written it with any view to throwing the gossips of Rome off the scent.
The excursion had been a pleasant one, and he thought its incidents
worth noting. Hence the poem. Happily for us, who get from it most
interesting glimpses of some of the familiar aspects of Roman life and
manners, of which we should otherwise have known nothing. Here, for
example, is a sketch of how people fared in travelling by canal in those
days, near Rome. Overcrowding, we see, is not an evil peculiar to our
own days.
"Now 'gan the night with gentle hand
To fold in shadows all the land,
And stars along the sky to scatter,
When there arose a hideous clatter,
Slaves slanging bargemen, bargemen slaves;
'Ho, haul up here! how now, ye knaves,
Inside three hundred people stuff?
Already there are quite enough!'
Collected were the fares at last,
The mule that drew our barge made fast,
But not till a good hour was gone.
Sleep was not to be thought upon,
The cursèd gnats were so provoking,
The bull-frogs set up such a croaking.
A bargeman, too, a drunken lout,
And passenger, sang turn about,
In tones remarkable for strength,
Their absent sweethearts, till at length
The passenger began to doze,
When up the stalwart bargeman rose,
His fastenings from the stone unwound,
And left the mule to graze around;
Then down upon his back he lay,
And snored in a terrific way."
Neither is the following allusion to the Jews and their creed without
its value, especially when followed, as it is, by Horace's avowal,
almost in the words of Lucretius (B. VI. 56), of what was then his
own. Later in life he came to a very different conclusion. When the
travellers reach Egnatia, their ridicule is excited by being shown or
told, it is not very clear which, of incense kindled in the temple there
miraculously without the application of fire.
"This may your circumcisèd Jew
Believe, but never I. For true
I hold it that the Deities
Enjoy themselves in careless ease;[1]
Nor think, when Nature, spurning Law,
Does something which inspires our awe,
'Tis sent by the offended gods
Direct from their august abodes."
[1] So Tennyson, in his "Lotus-Eaters:"--
"Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind."
See the whole of the passage.
Had Horace known anything of natural science, he might not have gone so
far to seek for the explanation of the seeming miracle.
Gibbon speaks contemptuously of many of the incidents recorded in this
poem, asking, "How could a man of taste reflect on them the day after?"
But the poem has much more than a merely literary interest; thanks to
such passages as these, and to the charming tribute by Horace to his
friends previously cited.
Nothing can better illustrate the footing of easy friendship on which
he soon came to stand with Maecenas than the following poem, which must
have been written before the year B.C. 32; for in that year Terentia
became the mistress of the great palace on the Esquiline, and the
allusion in the last verse is much too familiar to have been intended
for her. Horace, whose delicacy of stomach was probably notorious, had
apparently been the victim of a practical joke--a species of rough
fun to which the Romans of the upper classes appear to have been
particularly prone. It is difficult otherwise to understand how he could
have stumbled at Maecenas's table on a dish so overdosed with garlic
as that which provoked this humorous protest. From what we know of the
abominations of an ordinary Roman banquet, the vegetable stew in this
instance must have reached a climax of unusual atrocity.
"If his old father's throat any impious sinner
Has cut with unnatural hand to the bone,
Give him garlic, more noxious than hemlock, at dinner.
Ye gods! the strong stomachs that reapers must own!
"With what poison is this that my vitals are heated?
By viper's blood--certes, it cannot be less--
Stewed into the potherbs; can I have been cheated?
Or Canidia, did she cook the villainous mess?
"When Medea was struck by the handsome sea-rover,
Who in beauty outshone all his Argonaut band,
This mixture she took to lard Jason all over,
And so tamed the fire-breathing bulls to his hand.
"With this her fell presents she dyed and infected,
On his innocent leman avenging the slight
Of her terrible beauty, forsaken, neglected,
And then on her car, dragon-wafted, took flight.
"Never star on Apulia, the thirsty and arid,
Exhaled a more baleful or pestilent dew,
And the gift, which invincible Hercules carried,
Burned not to his bones more remorselessly through.
"Should you e'er long again for such relish as this is,
Devoutly I'll pray, wag Maecenas, I vow,
With her hand that your mistress arrest all your kisses,
And lie as far off as the couch will allow."
It is startling to our notions to find so direct a reference as that in
the last verse to the "reigning favourite" of Maecenas; but what are we
to think of the following lines, which point unequivocally to Maecenas's
wife, in the following Ode addressed to her husband (Odes, II. 12)?
"Would you, friend, for Phrygia's hoarded gold,
Or all that Achaemenes' self possesses,
Or e'en for what Araby's coffers hold,
Barter one lock of her clustering tresses,
While she stoops her throat to your burning kiss,
Or, fondly cruel, the bliss denies you,
She would have you snatch, or will, snatching this
Herself, with a sweeter thrill surprise you?"
If Maecenas allowed his friends to write of his wife in this strain,
it is scarcely to be wondered at if that coquettish and capricious lady
gave, as she did, "that worthy man good grounds for uneasiness."