to let him have some monument of his poetical talent, to celebrate the
emperor's name as he had done that of Maecenas. Virgil replied in a
brief letter, saying, "As regards my 'Aeneas,' if it were worth your
listening to, I would willingly send it. But so vast is the
undertaking that I almost appear to myself to have commenced it from
some defect in understanding; especially since, as you know, other and
far more important studies are needed for such a work." In the year
B.C. 24, we learn from the poet Propertius, that Virgil was then busy
at the task, and in all probability the former may have heard it read
by its author. The old Latin commentators preserve several striking
notices of Virgil's habit of reading or reciting his poems, both while
he was composing them and after they were completed, and especially of
the remarkable beauty and charm of the poet's rendering of his own
words and its powerful effect upon his hearers. "He read," says
Suetonius, "at once with sweetness and with a wonderful fascination;"
and Seneca had a story of the poet Julius Montanus saying that he
himself would attempt to steal something from Virgil if he could first
borrow his voice, his elocution, and his dramatic power in reading;
for the very same lines, said he, which when the author himself
read them sounded well, without him were empty and dumb. He read to
Augustus the whole of his "Georgics," and on another occasion three
books of the "Aeneid," the second, the fourth, and the sixth, the last
with an effect upon Octavia not to be forgotten, for she was present
at the reading, and at those great lines about her own son and his
premature death, which begin "_Tu Marcellus cris_," it is said that
she fainted away and was with difficulty recovered. She rewarded the
poet munificently for this tribute to her son's memory. For three
years longer he worked steadily on the poem, and in B.C. 19 he
resolved to go to Greece and devote three entire years to polishing
and finishing the work. He got as far as Athens, where he met Augustus
returning from the East, and determined to go back to Italy in his
company. He fell ill, however, during a visit to Megara, the voyage
between Greece and Italy did not improve his health and he died a few
days after landing at Brundisium, in the year B.C. 19. His body was
transferred to Naples, and he was buried near the city at Puteoli. By
his will he left some property to his friends Varius and Nicca, with
the injunction that they should burn the unfinished epic. The
injunction was never carried out, by the express command of the
emperor, who directed Varius to publish the poem without any additions
of any kind. An order carefully executed, for as the "Aeneid" stands
there are numerous imperfect lines.
This epic poem on the foundation of Rome by a colony from Troy is
based on an old Latin tradition, and is modelled on the form of the
poems of Homer. The first six books remind the student of the
adventures of Ulysses in the "Odyssey," while the last six books,
recounting the contest of the Trojan settlers under Aeneas with the
native inhabitants under their King Latinus, follow the style of the
battle-pieces of the "Iliad." The most striking and original part of
the plan of the poem is the introduction of Carthage and the
Carthaginian queen, on whose coasts Aeneas, in defiance of all
chronology, is described as suffering shipwreck. The historic conflict
between Rome and Carthage, when Hannibal and his cavalry rode from one
end of Italy to another, and encamped under the walls of Rome itself,
left an indelible impression on the imagination of the Romans. The war
with Carthage was to them all that the Arab invasion was to Spain, or
the Saracen hordes to Eastern Europe. It was the first great struggle
for empire in times of which history holds record, between the East
and the West, between the Semitic and Aryan races, and Virgil, with
consummate skill, took the opportunity of predicting the future
rivalry between Rome and Carthage, and the ultimate triumph of the
former power. All through the poem there are allusions to the history
of Rome, and to the descent of the Julian house from the great Trojan
hero. The hero Aeneas, himself, is rather an insipid character, but, on
the other hand, Dido is painted with great force, truth, and
tenderness. The visit to Carthage gives occasion for the narrative of
the fall of Troy in the second and third books, while the sixth book,
describing the landing in Italy and the hero's descent to the infernal
regions, has been regarded as containing the esoteric teaching of the
ancient mysteries, and has influenced deeply the belief of the
Christian world. Virgil lived, it may be said, at the parting of the
ways. The old gods, who were goodly and glad, had become discredited;
the world was no longer young, no longer fresh and fair and hopeful;
it had passed through ages of war and misery, it was harassed by
doubt, the general feeling was what we would now call pessimistic, and
a resigned melancholy, a keen sense of there being something wrong in
the universe, can be felt in every line of Virgil, and there are tears
in his voice.
In person Virgil was tall, his complexion dark, and his appearance
that of a rustic. He was modest, retiring, loyal to his friends. The
liberality of Maecenas and Augustus had enriched him, and he left a
considerable property and a house on the Esquiline Hill. He had troops
of friends, all the accomplished men of the day; he was quite free
from jealousy and envy, and of amiable temper. No one speaks of him
except in terms of affection and esteem. He used his wealth liberally,
supporting his parents generously, and his father, who became blind in
his old age, lived long enough to hear of his son's fame and feel the
effects of his prosperity.
HORACE
By J. W. MACKAIL
(65-8 B.C.)
[Illustration: Horace.]
Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Horace], Latin poet and satirist, was born
near Venusia, in Southern Italy, on December 8, 65 B.C. His father was
a manumitted slave, who as a collector of taxes or an auctioneer had
saved enough money to buy a small estate, and thus belonged to the
same class of small Italian freeholders as the parents of Virgil.
Apparently Horace was an only child, and as such received an education
almost beyond his father's means; who, instead of sending him to
school at Venusia, took him to Rome, provided him with the dress and
attendance customary among boys of the upper classes, and sent him to
the best masters. At seventeen or eighteen he proceeded to Athens,
then the chief school of philosophy, and one of the three great
schools of oratory, to complete his education; and he was still there
when the murder of Julius Caesar, March 15, 44 B.C., rekindled the
flames of civil war.
In the autumn of this year, Brutus, then propraetor of Macedonia,
visited Athens while levying troops. Horace joined his side; and such
was the scarcity of Roman officers, that though barely twenty-one, and
totally without military experience, he was at once given a high
commission. He was present at the battle of Philippi, and joined in
the general fight that followed the republican defeat; he found his
way back to Italy, and apparently was not thought important enough for
proscription by the triumvirate. His property, however, had been
confiscated, and he found employment in the lower grade of the civil
service to gain a livelihood.
It was at this period that poverty, he says, drove him to make verses.
His earliest were chiefly satires and personal lampoons; but it was
probably from some of his first lyrical pieces, in which he showed a
new mastery of the Roman language, that he became known to Varius and
Virgil, who in or about 38 B.C. introduced him to Maecenas, the
confidential minister of Octavianus and a munificent patron of art and
letters. The friendship thus formed was uninterrupted till the death
of Maecenas, to whose liberality Horace owed release from business and
the gift of the celebrated farm among the Sabine Hills.
From this time forward his life was without marked incident. His
springs and summers were generally spent at Rome, where he enjoyed the
intimacy of nearly all the most prominent men of the time; his autumns
at the Sabine farm, or a small villa which he possessed at Tibur; he
sometimes passed the winter in the milder seaside air of Baiae. Maecenas
introduced him to Augustus, who, according to Suetonius, offered him a
place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as
the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradually acquired the
position of poet-laureate; and his ode written to command for the
celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C., with the official odes
which followed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the
glories of the Augustan age, mark the highest level which this kind of
poetry has reached.
On November 27, 8 B.C., he died in his fifty-seventh year. Virgil had
died eleven years before. Tibullus and Propertius soon after Virgil.
Ovid, still a young man, was the only considerable poet whom he left
behind; and with his death the Augustan age of Latin poetry ends.
The following is the list of Horace's works arranged according to the
dates which have been most plausibly fixed by scholars. Some of the
questions of Horatian chronology, however, are still at issue, and to
most of the dates now to be given the word "about" should be prefixed.
The first book of Satires ten in number, his earliest publication,
appeared 35 B.C. A second volume of eight satires, showing more
maturity and finish than the first, was published 30 B.C.; and about
the same time the small collection of lyrics in iambic and composite
metres, imitated from the Greek of Archilochus, which is known as the
Epodes. In 19 B.C., at the age of forty-six, he produced his greatest
work, three books of odes, a small volume which represents the long
labor of years, and which placed him at once in the front rank of
poets. About the same time, whether before or after remains uncertain,
is to be placed his incomparable volume of epistles, which in grace,
ease, good sense and wit mark as high a level as the odes do in
terseness, melody, and exquisite finish. These two works are Horace's
great achievement. The remainder of his writings demand but brief
notice. They are the "Carmen Seculare;" a fourth book of odes, with
all the perfection of style of the others, but showing a slight
decline in freshness; and three more epistles, one, that addressed to
Flores, the most charming in its lively and grateful ease of all
Horace's familiar writings; the other two, somewhat fragmentary essays
in literary criticism. One of them, generally known as the "Ars
Poetica," was perhaps left unfinished at his death.
In his youth Horace had been an aristocrat, but his choice of sides
was perhaps more the result of accident than of conviction, and he
afterward acquiesced without great difficulty in the imperial
government. His acquiescence was not at first untempered with regret;
and in the odes modern critics have found touches of veiled sarcasm
against the new monarchy and even a certain sympathy with the abortive
conspiracy of Murena in 22 B.C. But as the empire grew stronger and
the advantages which it brought became more evident--the repair of the
destruction caused by the civil wars, the organization of government,
the development of agriculture and commerce, the establishment at home
and abroad of the peace of Rome--his tone passes into real enthusiasm
for the new order.
Horace professed himself a follower of the doctrines of Epicurus,
which he took as a reasonable mean between the harshness of stoicism
and the low morality of the Cyrenaics. In his odes, especially those
written on public occasions, he uses, as all public men did, the
language of the national religion. But both in religion and in
philosophy he remains before all things a man of the world; his satire
is more of manners and follies than of vice or impiety; and his
excellent sense keeps him always to that "golden mean" in which he
sums up the lesson of Epicurus. As a critic he shows the same general
good sense, but his criticisms do not profess to be original or to go
much beneath the surface. In Greek literature he follows Alexandrian
taste; in Latin he represents the tendency of his age to undervalue
the earlier efforts of the native genius and lay great stress on the
technical finish of his own day.
[Illustration: Virgil, Horace and Varius, at the House of Maecenas.]
From his own lifetime till now Horace has had a popularity unexampled
in literature. A hundred generations who have learned him as
school-boys have remembered and returned to him in mature age as to a
personal friend. He is one of those rare examples, like Julius Caesar
in politics, of genius which ripens late and leaves the more enduring
traces. Up to the age of thirty-five his work is still crude and
tentative; afterward it is characterized by a jewel finish, an
exquisite sense of language which weighs every word accurately and
makes every word inevitable and perfect. He was not a profound
thinker; his philosophy is rather that of the market-place than of the
schools, he does not move among high ideals or subtle emotions. The
romantic note which makes Virgil so magical and prophetic a figure at
that turning-point of the world's history has no place in Horace; to
gain a universal audience he offers nothing more and nothing less
than what is universal to mankind. Of the common range of thought and
feeling he is perfect and absolute master; and in the graver passages
of the epistles, as in the sad and noble cadence of his most fatuous
odes, the melancholy temper which underlay his quick and bright humor
touches the deepest springs of human nature. Of his style the most
perfect criticism was given in the next generation by a single phrase,
_Horatii curiosa felicitas_, of no poet can it be more truly said, in
the phrase of the Greek dramatist Agathon, that "skill has an
affection for luck and luck for skill." His poetry supplies more
phrases which have become proverbial than the rest of Latin literature
put together. To suggest a parallel in English literature we must
unite in thought the excellences of Pope and Gray with the easy wit
and cultured grace of Addison.
Horace's historical position in Latin literature is this: on the one
hand, he carried on and perfected the native Roman growth, satire,
from the ruder essays of Lucilius, so as to make Roman life from day
to day, in city and country, live anew under his pen; on the other
hand, he naturalized the metres and manner of the great Greek lyric
poets, from Alcaeus and Sappho downward. Before Horace Latin lyric
poetry is represented almost wholly by the brilliant but technically
immature poems of Catullus; after him it ceases to exist. For what he
made it he claims, in a studied modesty of phrase but with a just
sense of his own merits, an immortality to rival that of Rome.
DANTE
By ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
(1265-1321)
[Illustration: Dante.]
In this paper I will give a rapid sketch of Dante's life, and then
will try to point to some of the features of a poem which must ever
take its place among the supremest efforts of the human intellect,
side by side with Homer's "Iliad," and Virgil's "Aeneid," and Milton's
"Paradise Lost," and the plays of Shakespeare; and which is not less
great than any of these in its immortal and epoch-making significance.
Dante was born in 1265, in the small room of a small house in
Florence, still pointed out as the Casa di Dante. His father,
Aldighieri, was a lawyer, and belonged to the humbler class of
burgher-nobles. The family seems to have changed its name into
Alighieri, "the wing-bearers," at a later time, in accordance with the
beautiful coat of arms which they adopted--a wing in an azure field.
Dante was a devout, beautiful, precocious boy, and his susceptible
soul caught a touch of "phantasy and flame" from the sight of
Beatrice, daughter of Folco de' Portinari, whom he saw clad in crimson
for a festa. From that day the fair girl, with her rosy cheeks, and
golden hair, and blue eyes, became to the dreamy boy a vision of
angelic beauty, an ideal of saintly purity and truth. But while he
cherished this inward love he continued to study under his master,
Brunetto Latini, and acquired not only all the best learning, but also
all the most brilliant accomplishments of his day. He had never
breathed a word of his love to Beatrice; it was of the unselfish,
adoring, chivalrous type, which was content to worship in silence.
Beatrice was wedded to another, and shortly afterward, in 1289, she
died. So far from causing to Dante any self-reproach, he regarded his
love for her as the most ennobling and purifying influence of his
life--a sort of moral regeneration. Beatrice became to him the type of
Theology and Heavenly truth. Nor did his love in any way interfere
with the studies or activities of his life. His sonnets early gained
him fame as a poet, and the lovely portrait of him--painted by Giotto,
on the walls of the Bargello, at the age of twenty-four side by side
with Brunetto Latini and Corso Donati, and holding in his hand a
pomegranate, the mystic type of good works--shows that he was already
a man of distinction, and a favorite in the upper classes of
Florentine society. He began to take an active part in politics, and
in 1295 was formally enrolled in the Guild of Physicians and
Apothecaries. On June 11, 1289, he fought as a volunteer in the battle
of Campaldino. Amid these scenes of ambition and warfare he fell away
for a time from his holiest aspirations. From theology he turned to
purely human and materialist philosophy; from an ideal of pure love to
earthlier defilements. It was perhaps with a desire to aid himself in
the struggle against life's temptations that he seems to have become a
member of the Tertiary Order of St. Francis of Assisi, for whom he had
a passionate admiration. The Tertiaries did not abandon the secular
life, but wore the cord of the order, and pledged themselves to lives
of sanctity and devotion. Legend says that by his own desire he was
buried in the dress of a Franciscan Tertiary. Yet there is evidence
that he felt the inefficacy of any external bond. Experience taught
him that the serge robe and the binding cord might only be the
concealment of the hypocrite; and that they were worse than valueless
without the purification of the heart. In the eighth Bolgia of the
eighth circle of the "Inferno" he sees the givers of evil counsel, and
among them Guido da Montefeltro, who, toward the close of his life had
become a Cordelier or Franciscan Friar, hoping to make atonement for
his sins. But tempted by Boniface VIII. with a promise of futile
absolution, he gave him advice to take the town of Palestrina by "long
promises and scant fulfilments." Trusting in the Pope's absolution,
and not in the law of God, he was one of those who--
"Dying put on the weeds of Dominic,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised,"
and believed that St. Francis would draw him up by his cord even from
the pit of hell. But when he dies, though St. Francis comes to take
him, one of the Black Cherubim of hell seizes and claims him, truly
urging that absolution for an _intended_ sin is a contradiction in
terms, since absolution assumes penitence. Again, among the hypocrites
in the sixth Bolgia, Dante sees men approach in dazzling cloaks, of
which the hoods cover their eyes and face, like those worn by the
monks of Cologne; but he finds that they are crushing weights of
gilded lead--splendid semblance and agonizing, destroying reality.
Again, when the two poets, Dante and Virgil, came to the Abyss of
Evil-pits (Malebolge), down which the crimson stream of Phlegethon
leaps in "a Niagara of blood," he is on the edge of the Circle of
Fraud in all its varieties, down which they are to be carried on the
back of Geryon, the triple-bodied serpent-monster, who is the type of
all human and demonic falsity. And how is that monster to be evoked
from the depth? Dante is bidden to take off the cord which girds
him--the cord with which he had endeavored in old days to bind the
spotted panther of sensual temptation--and to fling it into the void
profound. He does so, and the monster, type of the brutal and the
human in our nature when both are false, comes swimming and circling
up from below. "The outward form"--symbolized by the cord--"when
associated with unreality, only attracts the worst symbol of
unreality." Once more, ere he begins to climb the steep terraces of
the hill of Purgatory and true repentance, he has to be girt with a
far different cord, even with a humble rush, the only plant
which--because it bows to the billows and the wind--will grow among
the beating waves of the sea which surrounds the mountain of
Purgatory. That cord of rush is the type, not of outward profession,
but of humble sincerity.
Dante, in his characteristic way, does not pause to explain any of
these symbols to us. He leaves them to our own thought, but they all
point to the one great lesson that God needs not the service of
externalism, but the preparation of the heart.
In 1292, probably at the wish of his friends, Dante married Gemma
Donati. She bore him seven children in seven years, and there is
nothing to show that she was not a true and faithful wife to him,
though it is quite probable, from his absolute silence respecting her,
that the deepest grounds of sympathy hardly existed between them.
About the time of his marriage he plunged more earnestly into
politics, and became one of the Priori of Florence. He felt himself
that a change for the worse had passed over his life. It was no longer
so pure, so simple, so devout as it once had been. In the year 1300,
the year of the Great Jubilee which had been preached by Pope Boniface
VIII., he was in the mid-path of life, and was lost, as he
allegorically describes it at the beginning of the "Inferno," in a
wild and savage wood. He was hindered from ascending the sunny hill of
heavenly aims by the speckled panther of sensuality, the gaunt, gray
wolf of avaricious selfishness, and the fierce lion of wrath and
ambitious pride. But he was restored to hope and effort by a vision of
Beatrice, which seems to have come to him before his Easter communion,
and fixed in his mind the purpose of writing about Beatrice--in her
ideal aspect of Divine Truth--"what never was writ of woman."
As a statesman, Dante, like most of the Florentines, was at this time
a Guelph, and an adherent of the papal party, though in later years he
became, by mature conviction, a Ghibelline, and placed his hopes for
Italy in the intervention of the emperor. The disputes between the
Guelphs and Ghibellines were complicated by the party factions of Neri
and Bianchi, and by the influence of Dante the leaders of both
factions were banished from the city, and among them his dearest
friend, Guido Cavalcanti. At this time Pope Boniface encouraged
Charles of Valois to enter Florence with an army. Dante resisted the
proposal, and was sent as an ambassador to Rome. During his absence a
decree of banishment was passed upon him. The Neri faction triumphed.
The house of Dante was sacked and burned. He never saw Florence more.
The news of his sentence reached him in Siena, in April, 1302, and
from that time began the last sad phases of his life, the long, slow
agony of his exile and bitter disappointment. Disillusioned, separated
from his wife, his children, the city of his love, he wandered from
city to city, disgusted with the baseness alike of Guelphs and
Ghibellines, feeling how salt is the bread of exile, and how hard it
is to climb another's stairs. "Alas," he says, "I have gone about like
a mendicant, showing against my will the wounds with which fortune
hath smitten me. I have indeed been a vessel without sail and without
rudder, carried to divers shores by the dry wind that springs from
poverty." In 1316 he did indeed receive from ungrateful Florence an
offer of return, but on the unworthy conditions that he should pay a
fine and publicly acknowledge his criminality. He scorned such
recompense of his innocence after having suffered exile for well-nigh
three lustres. "If," he wrote, "by no honorable way can entrance be
found into Florence, there will I never enter. What? Can I not from
every corner of the earth behold the sun and the stars? Can I not
under every climate of heaven meditate the sweetest truths, except I
first make myself a man of ignominy in the face of Florence?"
Looking merely at outward success, men would have called the life of
Dante a failure and his career a blighted career. But his misery was
the condition of his immortal greatness. He endured for many a year
the insults of the foolish and the company of the base, and on earth
he did not find the peace for which his heart so sorely yearned. He
died in 1321, at the age of fifty-six, of a broken heart, and lies,
not at the Florence which he loved, but at Ravenna, near the now
blighted pine woods, on the bleak Adrian shore. But if he lost himself
he found himself. He achieved his true greatness, not among the bloody
squabbles of political intrigue, but in the achievement of his great
works, and above all of that "Divine Comedy," which was "the
imperishable monument of his love of Beatrice, now identified with
Divine Philosophy--his final gift to humanity and offering to God."