PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY.--HORACE'S VIEWS OF A
HEREAFTER.--RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS.--BELIEF IN THE PERMANENCE OF HIS
OWN FAME.
"When all looks fair about," says Sir Thomas Browne, "and thou seest
not a cloud so big as a hand to threaten thee, forget not the wheel
of things; think of sudden, vicissitudes, but beat not thy brains to
foreknow them." It was characteristic of an age of luxury that it should
be one of superstition and mental disquietude, eager to penetrate the
future, and credulous in its belief of those who pretended to unveil its
secrets. In such an age astrology naturally found many dupes. Rome was
infested with professors of that so-called science, who had flocked
thither from the East, and were always ready, like other oracles, to
supply responses acceptable to their votaries. In what contempt Horace
held their prognostications the following Ode (I. 11) very clearly
indicates. The women of Rome, according to Juvenal, were great believers
in astrology, and carried manuals of it on their persons, which they
consulted before they took an airing or broke their fast. Possibly on
this account Horace addressed the ode to a lady. But in such things, and
not under the Roman Empire only, there have always been, as La Fontaine
says, "_bon nombre d'hommes qui sont femmes_." If Augustus, and his
great general and statesman Agrippa, had a Theogenes to forecast their
fortunes, so the first Napoleon had his Madame Lenormand.
"Ask not--such lore's forbidden--
What destined term may be
Within the future hidden
For us, Leuconöe.
Both thou and I
Must quickly die!
Content thee, then, nor madly hope
To wrest a false assurance from Chaldean horoscope.
"Far nobler, better were it,
Whate'er may be in store,
With soul serene to bear it,
If winters many more
Jove spare for thee,
Or this shall be
The last, that now with sullen roar
Scatters the Tuscan surge in foam upon the rock-bound shore.
"Be wise, your spirit firing
With cups of tempered wine,
And hopes afar aspiring
In compass brief confine,
Use all life's powers;
The envious hours
Fly as we talk; then live to-day,
Nor fondly to to-morrow trust more than you must or may."
In the verses of Horace we are perpetually reminded that our life is
compassed round with darkness, but he will not suffer this darkness to
overshadow his cheerfulness. On the contrary, the beautiful world, and
the delights it offers, are made to stand out, as it were, in brighter
relief against the gloom of Orcus. Thus, for example, this very gloom
is made the background in the following Ode (I. 4) for the brilliant
pictures which crowd on the poet's fancy with the first burst of Spring.
Here, he says, oh Sestius, all is fresh and joyous, luxuriant and
lovely! Be happy, drink in "at every pore the spirit of the season,"
while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup flashes
ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed mansion, and
filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to swell their
joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas! too soon; but
the golden present is yours, so drain it of its sweets.
"As biting Winter flies, lo! Spring with sunny skies,
And balmy airs; and barks long dry put out again from shore;
Now the ox forsakes his byre, and the husbandman his fire,
And daisy-dappled meadows bloom where winter frosts lay hoar.
"By Cytherea led, while the moon shines overhead,
The Nymphs and Graces, hand-in-hand, with alternating feet
Shake the ground, while swinking Vulcan strikes the sparkles fierce
and red From the forges of the Cyclops, with reiterated beat.
"'Tis the time with myrtle green to bind our glistening locks,
Or with flowers, wherein the loosened earth herself hath newly
dressed, And to sacrifice to Faunus in some glade amidst the rocks
A yearling lamb, or else a kid, if such delight him best.
"Death comes alike to all--to the monarch's lordly hall,
Or the hovel of the beggar, and his summons none shall stay.
Oh, Sestius, happy Sestius! use the moments as they pass;
Far-reaching hopes are not for us, the creatures of a day.
"Thee soon shall night enshroud; and the Manes' phantom crowd,
And the starveling house unbeautiful of Pluto shut thee in;
And thou shalt not banish care by the ruddy wine-cup there,
Nor woo the gentle Lycidas, whom all are mad to win."
A modern would no more think of using such images as those of the last
two verses to stimulate the festivity of his friends than he would of
placing, like the old Egyptians, a skull upon his dinner-table, or of
decorating his ball-room with Holbein's "Dance of Death." We rebuke our
pride or keep our vanities in check by the thought of death, and our
poets use it to remind us that
"The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things."
Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality he
seems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of the flying
hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life on this side
the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more noble, than the
life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly the general
belief. _"Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit, Luridaque evictos
effugit umbra rogos,_"--
"The Manes are no dream; death closes not
Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade
Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires,"
says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be
no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades--in the "_domus
exilis Plutonia_;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead across
the Styx; in the "_judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretas piorum_"--the
"Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields serene" (Odes, II. 13).
But this after-life was a cold, sunless, unsubstantial thing, lower
in quality and degree than the full, vigorous, passionate life of this
world. The nobler spirits of antiquity, it hardly need be said, had
higher dreams of a future state than this. For them, no more than for
us, was it possible to rest in the conviction that their brief and
troubled career on earth was to be the "be all and the end all" of
existence, or that those whom they had loved and lost in death became
thenceforth as though they had never been. It is idle to draw, as is
often done, a different conclusion from such phrases as that after
death we are a shadow and mere dust, "_pulvis et umbra sumus_!" or from
Horace's bewildered cry (Odes, I. 24), when a friend of signal nobleness
and purity is suddenly struck down--"_Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor
urget_?"--"And is Quinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that
knows no waking?" We might as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not
believe in a life after death because he makes Prospero say--
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was an
immortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed,--who, as a rule, is
wisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, however much
it may have engaged his speculations,--has gleams not unlike those
which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III. 2) of
"_Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat iter via_"--
"Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars
Who never should have died,
A pathway cleaves among the stars,
To meaner souls denied."
But they are only gleams, impassioned hopes, yearnings of the
unsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mystery
of life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us, to
make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for what it
has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal future, in which no
single faculty of enjoyment should be left.
Take from life the time spent in hopes or fears or regrets, and how
small the residue! For the same reason, therefore, that he prized life
intensely, Horace seems to have resolved to keep these consumers of its
hours as much at bay as possible. He would not look too far forward even
for a pleasure; for Hope, he knew, comes never unaccompanied by her twin
sister Fear. Like the Persian poet, Omar Khayyám, this is ever in his
thoughts--
"What boots it to repeat,
How Time is slipping underneath our feet?
Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?".
To-day--that alone is ours. Let us welcome and note what it brings, and,
if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our
eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of
an irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on your
heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the
best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows
that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never learn that
as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glories between
To-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter, and draw us, as the
wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?" Horace would have
hailed a brother in the philosopher of New England.
Even in inviting Maecenas to his Sabine farm (Odes, III. 29), he does
not think it out of place to remind the minister of state, worn with
the cares of government, and looking restlessly ahead to anticipate its
difficulties, that it may, after all, be wiser not to look so far ahead,
or to trouble himself about contingencies which may never arise. We
must not think that Horace undervalued that essential quality of
true statesmanship, the "_animus rerum prudens_" (Odes, IV. 9), the
forecasting spirit that "looks into the seeds of Time," and reads the
issues of events while they are still far off. He saw and prized the
splendid fruits of the exercise of this very power in the growing
tranquillity and strength of the Roman empire. But the wisest may
over-study a subject. Maecenas may have been working too hard, and
losing under the pressure something of his usual calmness; and Horace,
while urging him to escape from town for a few days, may have had it in
view to insinuate the suggestion, that Jove smiles, not at the common
mortal merely, but even at the sagacious statesman, who is over-anxious
about the future--"_ultra fas trepidat_"--and to remind him that, after
all,
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may."
Dryden's splendid paraphrase of this Ode is one of the glories of our
literature, but it is a paraphrase, and a version closer to the original
may be more appropriate here:--
"Scion of Tuscan kings, in store
I've laid a cask of mellow wine,
That never has been broached before.
I've roses, too, for wreaths to twine,
And Nubian nut, that for thy hair
An oil shall yield of fragrance rare.
* * * * *
"The plenty quit, that only palls,
And, turning from the cloud-capped pile
That towers above thy palace halls,
Forget to worship for a while
The privileges Rome enjoys,
Her smoke, her splendour, and her noise.
"It is the rich who relish best
To dwell at times from state aloof;
And simple suppers, neatly dressed,
Beneath a poor man's humble roof,
With neither pall nor purple there,
Have smoothed ere now the brow of care.
* * * * *
"Now with his spent and languid flocks
The wearied shepherd seeks the shade,
The river cool, the shaggy rocks,
That overhang the tangled glade,
And by the stream no breeze's gush
Disturbs the universal hush.
"Thou dost devise with sleepless zeal
What course may best the state beseem,
And, fearful for the City's weal,
Weigh'st anxiously each hostile scheme
That may be hatching far away
In Scythia, India, or Cathay.
"Most wisely Jove in thickest night
The issues of the future veils,
And laughs at the self-torturing wight
Who with imagined terrors quails.
The present only is thine own,
Then use it well, ere it has flown.
"All else which may by time be bred
Is like a river of the plain,
Now gliding gently o'er its bed
Along to the Etruscan main,
Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast,
Uprooted trees, and boulders vast,
"And flocks, and houses, all in drear
Confusion tossed from shore to shore,
While mountains far, and forests near
Reverberate the rising roar,
When lashing rains among the hills
To fury wake the quiet rills.
"Lord of himself that man will be,
And happy in his life alway,
Who still at eve can say with free
Contented soul, 'I've lived to-day!
Let Jove to-morrow, if he will,
With blackest clouds the welkin fill,
"'Or flood it all with sunlight pure,
Yet from the past he cannot take
Its influence, for that is sure,
Nor can he mar or bootless make
Whate'er of rapture and delight
The hours have borne us in their flight.'"
The poet here passes, by one of those sudden transitions for which he is
remarkable, into the topic of the fickleness of fortune, which seems to
have no immediate connection with what has gone before,--but only seems,
for this very fickleness is but a fresh reason for making ourselves, by
self-possession and a just estimate of what is essential to happiness,
independent of the accidents of time or chance.
"Fortune, who with malicious glee
Her merciless vocation plies,
Benignly smiling now on me,
Now on another, bids him rise,
And in mere wantonness of whim
Her favours shifts from me to him.
"I laud her whilst by me she holds,
But if she spread her pinions swift,
I wrap me in my virtue's folds,
And, yielding back her every gift,
Take refuge in the life so free
Of bare but honest poverty.
"You will not find me, when the mast
Groans 'neath the stress of southern gales,
To wretched prayers rush off, nor cast
Vows to the great gods, lest my bales
From Tyre or Cyprus sink, to be
Fresh booty for the hungry sea.
"When others then in wild despair
To save their cumbrous wealth essay,
I to the vessel's skiff repair,
And, whilst the Twin Stars light my way,
Safely the breeze my little craft
Shall o'er the Aegean billows waft."
Maecenas was of a melancholy temperament, and liable to great depression
of spirits. Not only was his health at no time robust, but he was
constitutionally prone to fever, which more than once proved nearly
fatal to him. On his first appearance in the theatre after one of these
dangerous attacks, he was received with vehement cheers, and Horace
alludes twice to this incident in his Odes, as if he knew that it had
given especial pleasure to his friend. To mark the event the poet laid
up in his cellar a jar of Sabine wine, and some years afterwards he
invites Maecenas to come and partake of it in this charming lyric (Odes,
I. 20):--
"Our common Sabine wine shall be
The only drink I'll give to thee,
In modest goblets, too;
'Twas stored in crock of Grecian delf,
Dear knight Maecenas, by myself,
That very day when through
The theatre thy plaudits rang,
And sportive echo caught the clang,
And answered from the banks
Of thine own dear paternal stream,
Whilst Vatican renewed the theme
Of homage and of thanks!
Old Caecuban, the very best,
And juice in vats Calenian pressed,
You drink at home, I know:
My cups no choice Falernian fills,
Nor unto them do Formiae's hills
Impart a tempered glow."
About the same time that Maecenas recovered from this fever, Horace made
a narrow escape from being killed by the fall of a tree, and, what to
him was a great aggravation of the disaster, upon his own beloved farm
(Odes, II. 13). He links the two events together as a marked coincidence
in the following Ode (II. 17). His friend had obviously been a prey to
one of his fits of low spirits, and vexing the kindly soul of the poet
by gloomy anticipations of an early death. Suffering, as Maecenas did,
from those terrible attacks of sleeplessness to which he was subject,
and which he tried ineffectually to soothe by the plash of falling water
and the sound of distant music, [Footnote: Had Horace this in his mind
when he wrote _"Non avium citharoeque cantus somnum reducent_?"--(Odes,
III. 1.) "Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre, Shall his lost
sleep restore."] such misgivings were only too natural. The case was
too serious this time for Horace to think of rallying his friend into
a brighter humour. He may have even seen good cause to share his fears;
for his heart is obviously moved to its very depths, and his sympathy
and affection well out in words, the pathos of which is still as fresh
as the day they first came with comfort to the saddened spirits of
Maecenas himself.
"Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears?
Why, oh Maecenas, why?
Before thee lies a train of happy years:
Yes, nor the gods nor I
Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust,
Who art my stay, my glory, and my trust!
"Ah, if untimely Fate should snatch thee hence,
Thee, of my soul a part,
Why should I linger on, with deadened sense,
And ever-aching heart,
A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine?
No, no, one day shall see thy death and mine!
"Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath;
Yes, we shall go, shall go,
Hand link'd in hand, whene'er thou leadest, both
The last sad road below!
Me neither the Chimaera's fiery breath,
Nor Gyges, even could Gyges rise from death,
"With all his hundred hands from thee shall sever;
For in such sort it hath
Pleased the dread Fates, and Justice potent ever,
To interweave our path. [1]
Beneath whatever aspect thou wert born,
Libra, or Scorpion fierce, or Capricorn,
"The blustering tyrant of the western deep,
This well I know, my friend,
Our stars in wondrous wise one orbit keep,
And in one radiance blend.
From thee were Saturn's baleful rays afar
Averted by great Jove's refulgent star,
"And His hand stayed Fate's downward-swooping wing,
When thrice with glad acclaim
The teeming theatre was heard to ring,
And thine the honoured name:
So had the falling timber laid me low,
But Pan in mercy warded off the blow,
"Pan who keeps watch o'er easy souls like mine.
Remember, then, to rear
In gratitude to Jove a votive shrine,
And slaughter many a steer,
Whilst I, as fits, an humbler tribute pay,
And a meek lamb upon his altar lay."
[1] So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:--
"He was my friend, the truest friend on earth;
A strong and mighty influence joined our birth."
What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen, did
happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas "first deceased;" and Horace,
like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph,
"For a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died."
But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, which must
have been about the year B.C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine. Maecenas
lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, we may
believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when his pulse
was low, and his heart sick and weary.
Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing Books I.
and II., which he gave to the world (B.C. 24). The first of these Odes,
like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. They had
for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately in
circulation several years before. That they should have met with success
was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Rome must have
felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of a more recent
time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which was their ideal,
into their native verse; and a feeling of national pride must have
helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his ear upon the
lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayed to imitate
them in their own tongue,--a mistake as great as for Goethe or Heine to
have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into the language of Herrick
or of Burns. But Horace was preserved from perseverance in this mistake
by his natural good sense, or, as he puts it himself, with a fair poetic
licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome's great founder Quirinus warning him
in a dream, that
"To think of adding to the mighty throng
Of the great paragons of Grecian song,
Were no less mad an act than his who should
Into a forest carry logs of wood."
These exercises may not, however, have been without their value in
enabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into his
native verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if we
except Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was the last.
"Of lyrists," says Quintilian, "Horace is alone, one might say, worthy
to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full of playful
delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as well as in
expression, shows a most happy daring." Time has confirmed the verdict;
and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words of one of our
greatest scholars:--
"Horace's style," says Mr H. A. J. Munro, in the introduction to his
edition of the poet, "is throughout his own, borrowed from none who
preceded him, successfully imitated by none who came after him. The
Virgilian heroic was appropriated by subsequent generations of poets,
and adapted to their purposes with signal success. The hendecasyllable
and scazon of Catullus became part and parcel of the poetic heritage of
Rome, and Martial employs them only less happily than their matchless
creator. But the moulds in which Horace cast his lyrical and his
satirical thoughts were broken at his death. The style neither of
Persius nor of Juvenal has the faintest resemblance to that of their
common master. Statius, whose hendecasyllables are passable enough,
has given us one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode, which recall the bald and
constrained efforts of a modern schoolboy. I am sure he could not have
written any two consecutive stanzas of Horace; and if he could not, who
could?"
Before he published the first two books of his Odes, Horace had fairly
felt his wings, and knew they could carry him gracefully and well. He no
longer hesitates, as he had done while a writer of Satires only (p. 55),
to claim the title of poet; but at the same time he throws himself, in
his introductory Ode, with a graceful deference, upon the judgment of
Maecenas. Let that only seal his lyrics with approval, and he will feel
assured of his title to rank with the great sons of song:--
"Do thou but rank me 'mong
The sacred bards of lyric song,
I'll soar beyond the lists of time,
And strike the stars with head sublime."
In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book,
the poet gives way to a burst of joyous anticipation of future fame,
figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the then
known regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book several
years afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which,
unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. In
both he alludes to the lowliness of his birth, speaking of himself in
the former as a child of poor parents--"_pauperum sanguis parentum_;"
in the latter as having risen to eminence from a mean estate-"_ex humili
potens_." These touches of egotism, the sallies of some brighter hour,
are not merely venial; they are delightful in a man so habitually
modest.
"I've reared a monument, my own,
More durable than brass;
Yea, kingly pyramids of stone
In height it doth surpass.
"Rain shall not sap, nor driving blast
Disturb its settled base,
Nor countless ages rolling past
Its symmetry deface.
"I shall not wholly die. Some part,
Nor that a little, shall
Escape the dark Destroyer's dart,
And his grim festival.
"For long as with his Vestals mute
Rome's Pontifex shall climb
The Capitol, my fame shall shoot
Fresh buds through future time.
"Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came
Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde
Of rustic boors to sway, my name
Shall be a household word;
"As one who rose from mean estate,
The first with poet fire
Aeolic song to modulate
To the Italian lyre.
"Then grant, Melpomene, thy son
Thy guerdon proud to wear,
And Delphic laurels, duly won.
Bind thou upon my hair!"