To understand how Horace came to be a great poet as well as an engaging
person, it is necessary to look beneath this somewhat commonplace
exterior, and to discern the spiritual man.
The foundations of literature are laid in life. For the production of
great poetry two conditions are necessary. There must be, first, an age
pregnant with the celestial fires of deep emotion. Second, there must be
in its midst one of the rare men whom we call inspired. He must be of
such sensitive spiritual fiber as to vibrate to every breeze of the
national passion, of such spiritual capacity as to assimilate the common
thoughts and moods of the time, of such fine perception and of such
sureness of command over word, phrase, and rhythm, as to give crowning
expression to what his soul has made its own.
For abundance of stirring and fertilizing experience, history presents
few equals of the times when Horace lived. His lifetime fell in an age
which was in continual travail with great and uncertain movement. Never
has Fortune taken greater delight in her bitter and insolent game, never
displayed a greater pertinacity in the derision of men. In the period
from Horace's birth at Venusia in southeastern Italy, on December 8,
B.C. 65, to November 27, B.C. 8, when
"M_ourned of men and Muses nine_,
T_hey laid him on the Esquiline_,"
there occurred the series of great events, to men in their midst
incomprehensible, bewildering, and disheartening, which after times
could readily interpret as the inevitable change from the ancient and
decaying Republic to the better knit if less free life of the Empire.
We are at an immense distance, and the differences have long since been
composed. The menacing murmur of trumpets is no longer audible, and the
seas are no longer red with blood. The picture is old, and faded, and
darkened, and leaves us cold, until we illuminate it with the light of
imagination. Then first we see, or rather feel, the magnitude of the
time: its hatreds and its selfishness; its differences of opinion,
sometimes honest and sometimes disingenuous, but always maintained with
the heat of passion; its divisions of friends and families; its
lawlessness and violence; its terrifying uncertainties and adventurous
plunges; its tragedies of confiscation, murder, fire, proscription,
feud, insurrection, riot, war; the dramatic exits of the leading actors
in the great play,--of Catiline at Pistoria, of Crassus in the eastern
deserts, of Clodius at Bovillae within sight of the gates of Rome, of
Pompey in Egypt, of Cato in Africa, of Caesar, Servius Sulpicius,
Marcellus, Trebonius and Dolabella, Hirtius and Pansa, Decimus Brutus,
the Ciceros, Marcus Brutus and Cassius, Sextus the son of Pompey, Antony
and Cleopatra,--as one after another
"S_trutted and fretted his hour upon the stage_,
A_nd then was heard no more_."
It is in relief against a background such as this that Horace's works
should be read,--the _Satires_, published in 35 and 30, which the poet
himself calls _Sermones_, "Conversations," "Talks," or _Causeries_; the
collection of lyrics called _Epodes_, in 29; three books of _Odes_ in
23; a book of _Epistles_, or further _Causeries_, in 20; the _Secular
Hymn_ in 17; a second book of _Epistles_ in 14; a fourth book of _Odes_
in 13; and a final _Epistle_, _On the Art of Poetry_, at a later and
uncertain date.
It is above all against such a background that Horace's invocation to
Fortune should be read:
G_oddess, at lovely Antium is thy shrine_:
R_eady art thou to raise with grace divine_
O_ur mortal frame from lowliest dust of earth_,
O_r turn triumph to funeral for thy mirth_;
or that other expression of the inscrutable uncertainty of the human
lot:
F_ortune, whose joy is e'er our woe and shame_,
W_ith hard persistence plays her mocking game_;
B_estowing favors all inconstantly_,
K_indly to others now, and now to me_.
W_ith me, I praise her; if her wings she lift_
T_o leave me, I resign her every gift_,
A_nd, cloaked about in my own virtue's pride_,
W_ed honest poverty, the dowerless bride_.
Horace is not here the idle singer of an empty day. His utterance may be
a universal, but in the light of history it is no commonplace. It is the
eloquent record of the life of Rome in an age which for intensity is
unparalleled in the annals of the ancient world.
And yet men may live a longer span of years than fell to the lot of
Horace, and in times no less pregnant with event, and still fail to come
into really close contact with life. Horace's experience was
comprehensive, and touched the life of his generation at many points. He
was born in a little country town in a province distant from the
capital. His father, at one time a slave, and always of humble calling,
was a man of independent spirit, robust sense, and excellent character,
whose constant and intimate companionship left everlasting gratitude in
the heart of the son. He provided for the little Horace's education at
first among the sons of the "great" centurions who constituted the
society of the garrison-town of Venusia, afterwards ambitiously took him
to Rome to acquire even the accomplishments usual among the sons of
senators, and finally sent him to Athens, garner of wisdom of the ages,
where the learning of the past was constantly made to live again by
masters with the quick Athenian spirit of telling or hearing new things.
The intellectual experience of Horace's younger days was thus of the
broadest character. Into it there entered and were blended the shrewd
practical understanding of the Italian provincial; the ornamental
accomplishments of the upper classes; the inspiration of Rome's history,
with the long line of heroic figures that appear in the twelfth _Ode_ of
the first book like a gallery of magnificent portraits; first-hand
knowledge of prominent men of action and letters; unceasing discussion
of questions of the day which could be avoided by none; and, finally,
humanizing contact on their own soil with Greek philosophy and poetry,
Greek monuments and history, and teachers of racial as well as
intellectual descent from the greatest people of the past.
But Horace's experience assumed still greater proportions. He passed
from the university of Athens to the larger university of life. The news
of Caesar's death at the hands of the "Liberators," which reached him as
a student there at the age of twenty-one, and the arrival of Brutus some
months after, stirred his young blood. As an officer in the army of
Brutus, he underwent the hardships of the long campaign, enriching life
with new friendships formed in circumstances that have always tightened
the friendly bond. He saw the disastrous day of Philippi, narrowly
escaped death by shipwreck, and on his return to Italy and Rome found
himself without father or fortune.
Nor was the return to Rome the end of his education. In the interval
which followed, Horace's mind, always of philosophic bent, was no doubt
busy with reflection upon the disparity between the ideals of the
liberators and the practical results of their actions, upon the
difference between the disorganized, anarchical Rome of the civil war
and the gradually knitting Rome of Augustus, and upon the futility of
presuming to judge the righteousness either of motives or means in a
world where men, to say nothing of understanding each other, could not
understand themselves. In the end, he accepted what was not to be
avoided. He went farther than acquiescence. The growing conviction among
thoughtful men that Augustus was the hope of Rome found lodgment also in
his mind. He gravitated from negative to positive. His value as an
educated man was recognized, and he found himself at twenty-four in
possession of the always coveted boon of the young Italian, a place in
the government employ. A clerkship in the treasury gave him salary,
safety, respectability, a considerable dignity, and a degree of leisure.
Of the leisure he made wise use. Still in the afterglow of his Athenian
experience, he began to write. He attracted the attention of a limited
circle of associates. The personal qualities which made him a favorite
with the leaders of the Republican army again served him well. He won
the recognition and the favor of men who had the ear of the ruling few.
In about 33, when he was thirty-two years old, Maecenas, the
appreciative counsellor, prompted by Augustus, the politic ruler, who
recognized the value of talent in every field for his plans of
reconstruction, made him independent of money-getting, and gave him
currency among the foremost literary men of the city. He triumphed over
the social prejudice against the son of a freedman, disarmed the
jealousy of literary rivals, and was assured of fame as well as favor.
Nor was even this the end of Horace's experience with the world of
action. It may be that his actual participation in affairs did cease
with Maecenas's gift of the Sabine farm, and it is true that he never
pretended to live on their own ground the life of the high-born and
rich, but he nevertheless associated on sympathetic terms with men
through whom he felt all the activities and ideals of the class most
representative of the national life, and past experiences and natural
adaptability enabled him to assimilate their thoughts and emotions.
Thanks to the glowing personal nature of Horace's works, we know who
many of these friends and patrons were who so enlarged his vision and
deepened his inspiration. Almost without exception his poems are
addressed or dedicated to men with whom he was on terms of more than
ordinary friendship. They were rare men,--fit audience, though few; men
of experience in affairs at home and in the field, men of natural taste
and real cultivation, of broad and sane outlook, of warm heart and deep
sympathies. There was Virgil, whom he calls the half of his own being.
There was Plotius, and there was Varius, bird of Maeonian song, whom he
ranks with the singer of the _Aeneid_ himself as the most luminously
pure of souls on earth. There was Quintilius, whose death was bewailed
by many good men;--when would incorruptible Faith and Truth find his
equal? There was Maecenas, well-bred and worldly-wise, the pillar and
ornament of his fortunes. There was Septimius, the hoped-for companion
of his mellow old age in the little corner of earth that smiled on him
beyond all others. There was Iccius, procurator of Agrippa's estates in
Sicily, sharing Horace's delight in philosophy. There was Agrippa
himself, son-in-law of Augustus, grave hero of battles and diplomacy.
There was elderly Trebatius, sometime friend of Cicero and Caesar, with
dry legal humor early seasoned in the wilds of Gaul. There were Pompeius
and Corvinus, old-soldier friends with whom he exchanged reminiscences
of the hard campaign. There was Messalla, a fellow-student at Athens,
and Pollio, soldier, orator, and poet. There were Julius Florus and
other members of the ambitious literary cohort in the train of Tiberius.
There was Aristius Fuscus, the watch of whose wit was ever wound and
ready to strike. There was Augustus himself, busy administrator of a
world, who still found time for letters.
It is through the medium of personalities like these that Horace's
message was delivered to the world of his time and to later generations.
How far the finished elegance of his expression is due to their
discriminating taste, and how much of the breadth and sanity of his
content is due to their vigor of character and cosmopolitan culture, we
may only conjecture. Literature is not the product of a single
individual. The responsive and stimulating audience is hardly less
needful than the poet's inspiration.
Such were the variety and abundance of Horace's experience. It was large
and human. He had touched life high and low, bond and free, public and
private, military and civil, provincial and urban, Hellenic, Asiatic,
and Italian, urban and rustic, ideal and practical, at the cultured
court and among the ignorant, but not always unwise, common people.
And yet, numbers of men possessed of experience as abundant have died
without being poets, or even wise men. Their experience was held in
solution, so to speak, and failed to precipitate. Horace's experience
did precipitate. Nature gave him the warm and responsive soul by reason
of which he became a part of all he met. Unlike most of his associates
among the upper classes to which he rose, his sympathies could include
the freedman, the peasant, and the common soldier. Unlike most of the
multitude from which he sprang, he could extend his sympathies to the
careworn rich and the troubled statesman. He had learned from his own
lot and from observation that no life was wholly happy, that the cares
of the so-called fortunate were only different from, not less real than,
those of the ordinary man, that every human heart had its chamber
furnished for the entertainment of Black Care, and that the chamber was
never without its guest.
But not even the precipitate of experience called wisdom will alone make
the poet. Horace was again endowed by nature with another and rarer and
equally necessary gift,--the sense of artistic expression. It would be
waste of time to debate how much he owed to native genius, how much to
his own laborious patience, and how much to the good fortune of generous
human contact. He is surely to be classed among examples of what for
want of a better term we call inspiration. The poet _is_ born. We may
account for the inspiration of Horace by supposing him of Greek descent
(as if Italy had never begotten poets of her own), but the mystery
remains. In the case of any poet, after everything has been said of the
usual influences, there is always something left to be accounted for
only on the ground of genius. It was the possession of this that set
Horace apart from other men of similar experience.
The poet, however, is not the mere accident of birth. Horace is aware of
a power not himself that makes for poetic righteousness, and realizes
the mystery of inspiration. The Muse cast upon him at birth her placid
glance. He expects glory neither on the field nor in the course, but
looks to song for his triumphs. To Apollo,
"L_ord of the enchanting shell_,
P_arent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs_,"
who can give power of song even unto the mute, he owes all his power and
all his fame. It is the gift of Heaven that he is pointed out by the
finger of the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, that he
breathes the divine fire and pleases men. But he is as perfectly
appreciative of the fact that poets are born and also made, and condemns
the folly of depending upon inspiration unsupported by effort. He calls
himself the bee of Matinum, industriously flitting with honeyed thigh
about the banks of humid Tibur. What nature begins, cultivation must
develop. Neither training without the rich vein of native endowment, nor
natural talent without cultivation, will suffice; both must be friendly
conspirators in the process of forming the poet. Wisdom is the beginning
and source of writing well. He who would run with success the race that
is set before him must endure from boyhood the hardships of heat and
cold, and abstain from women and wine. The gift of God must be made
perfect by the use of the file, by long waiting, and by conscious
intellectual discipline.
3. HORACE THE INTERPRETER
OF HIS TIMES