Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN FHE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE ORACE AND THE ELEGIAC POETS SELL A R HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.C\ r THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE BY W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D. LATE PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH AND FORMERLY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD HORACE AND THE ELEGIAC POETS WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR BY ANDREW LANG, M.A. AND A PORTRAIT AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M DCCC XCII PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY Stack Anne* EDITOR'S PREFACE THE manuscript of Mr. Sellar's book was entrusted to me at the end of last year, and the duty of seeing it through the press undertaken, in accordance with his wishes. The chapters on Horace, and the four chapters on the Elegiac Poets, ending with the criticism of the poetry of Propertius, are complete. The chapter on the Odes of Horace (from the middle of Section II. p. 148, ' If Horace lived,' &c., to the end, p. 1 98) has had less of the author's revision than the others : the manuscript, however, is per- fectly clear and continuous. The rest of the Horace and the four chapters of the Elegiac Poets were written out for the printers by Mr. Sellar. The passage on the birthplace of Propertius was sent by the author to the Classical Review, and appeared in November 1890. The chapter on Ovid (Elegiac Poets, chapter V) is not in the same condition as the rest of the book. It represents the notes made by Mr. Sellar for chapters on the same scale as the others. These notes leave some parts of the subject untouched the biography of Ovid, for example, and his later poems. It might have been possible to sup- plement this chapter from the essay on Ovid contributed by Mr. Sellar to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the vi EDITORS PREFACE. publishers of the Encyclopaedia, Messrs. Adam and Charles Black, generously gave permission to make use of it for the present volume. But it was thought better, in the end, to add nothing to the notes left by Mr. Sellar, except the merely formal modifications necessary in order to complete or to arrange some of the more fragmentary passages. The proofs of Mr. Sellar's book have been read by Professor Butcher and Mr. J. W. Mackail. Of my private debt, for help and advice, this is not the place for me to speak. W. P. KER. LONDON, 10 October, 1891. CONTENTS HORACE CHAPTER I. LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HORACE PAGE Horace as representative of the Augustan age i The permanent charm of his writings 4 Biographical sources .......... 6 The Sabellian race : Venusia 9 Horace's father 1 1 Education in Rome and Athens 13 Horace in the army of Brutus 15 II. HORACE'S LITERARY LIFE. [First Period: from 41 B.C. to 29 B.C.] His return to Rome 20 Friendship with Virgil and Varius : introduction to Maecenas . . 21 Maecenas and his influence on Horace 22 Journey to Brundisium . . . 26 Life in Rome : the Epodes and Satires 27 III. [Second Period: from 29 B.C. to 19 B.C.] Horace and the Monarchy 29 The Sabine farm 30 The Odes, Books i-iii 32 The Epistles, Book i . . 33 Death of Virgil - . - - 34 viii CONTENTS. IV. " [Third Period: from 19 B.C. to 8 B.C.] PAGE Carmen Seculare 34 The Odes, Book iv 35 The Epistles, Book ii, and Ars Poetica 35 Date of the Ars Poetica 3 6 Horace in closer relations with the court of Augustus .... 38 Death of Maecenas 39 Death of Horace . 39 V. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. Horace's sincerity . . . . . 39 Irony . . . . . -4 Independence of spirit . . . 41 Horace's masters : Lucilius . 42 Aristippus 43 Relations to society : the management of life . . . . . -44 Influences in Horace's poetry 47 His tastes in art and literature 48 CHAPTER II. THE SATIRES. I. The Satires and Epistles the expression of Horace's familiar moods . . 51 Horace's purpose in the Satires 52 Difference in character between the first and the second book . . . 53 II. THE SATIRES. BOOK I. Horace's earlier manner in the Satires 53 Sat. i. 7 the earliest in date . . . . . ... . 53 Humours of the camp of Brutus 54 Tigellius and his allies (i. a) 54 The journey to Brundisium (i. 5) (imitated from Lucilius) ... 55 Canidia (i. 8) . . . . .56 Horace's self-defence (i. 4, 6, and 10) 57 Apology for Satire (i. 4) _.; . . .57 Horace on Lucilius (i. 10) . .58 His answer to his detractors (i. 6) ........ 59 Horace's dramatic manner : the encounter in the Via Sacra (i. 9) . .60 CONTENTS. ix PAGE Ethical discourses (Sermones) (i. i and 3) 60 Stoicism criticised .61 Discontent : the malady of the time and its remedy .... 62 The progress of Satire -63 III. THE SATIRES. BOOK II. Interval between the two books : change of view 64 Dramatic character of the second book : Horace's personages ... 65 Prologue to the second book 66 Satires on luxury of the table 66 The yeoman Ofellus, ' wise without the rules ' (ii. 2) .... 67 Gastronomy as a fine art : Catius (ii. 4) ...... 68 The banquet of Nasidienus (ii . 8) 69 Dialogue on baseness (ii. 5) . . . . . . . . .70 Town and Country (ii. 6) . . . . . . . .71 Ethical discussions : Damasippus and Davus (ii. 3 and 7) . . -72 IV. Place of the Satires in Augustan literature 74 Scope of satire in the Augustan age 75 Horace and Lucilius 76 Horace's distinction as a satirist : his moderation and truth to nature . 79 Style of the Satires . . . " 81 The Horatian hexameter ....... 82 , CHAPTER III. HORACE AS A MORALIST. EPISTLES. BOOK I. The Epistles included in the term Sermones 85 The Epistles distinguished from the Satires by more definite ethical purpose 86 The epistolary form in earlier poetry 87 Advantages of the form as used by Horace 88 The shorter Epistles . . . 89 Resemblances between Epistles and Odes : letter to Tibullus ... 90 to Iccius, Aristius Fuscus, the ' villicus,' Bullatius : the wise enjoyment of life 91 to Julius Florus : public virtue 92 Maecenas in town 92 The didactic element in the longer Epistles 93 The Prologue to Maecenas : philosophic culture 94 CONTENTS. Epistle to Lollius on the formation of character 95 ' Nil admirari ' , , . 95 True and apparent happiness (i. 16) . ... . . .96 Worldly wisdom (i. 17 and 1 8) . ...., .96 Horace on his critics and imitators (i. 19) . . . . - -97 Epilogue : his estimate of himself . 97 Ethical value of the Epistles . . , . , . . . 9 8 Relation between Horace and his readers . . . .98 Poetical value of the Epistles 99 The Epistles an original addition to poetic forms 101 CHAPTER IV. HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC. EPISTLES. BOOK II. ARS POETICA. The Epistle to Augustus i 2 The Epistles to Julius Floras and to the Pisos 103 The Epistle to Augustus a defence of poetry IO 3 Criticism of the older Latin poets . , . . .104 Perfection to be learned from the Greeks IO 5 The literary temperament . . 1O " The Epistle to Julius Floras : its date I 7 Horace's account of his poetical and critical powers .... 109 The cultivation of style . . . . . .109 Ethical teaching in this Epistle: Horace's final message to his generation IIQ The Ars Poetica , II Its sources and contents . . ITI The cultivation of Roman tragedy . . . . .112 Education of the Poet IT 3 The Ars Poetica not a systematic didactic poem . . . .114 Its main object to protest against careless workmanship in literature : difference in value between Horace's rales for tragedy and his original advice to authors - TI 5 Horace's literary ideals . . . . ... .116 CHAPTER V. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. THE EPODES. Horace's imitations of Archilochus IJ 8 ' Iambi ' of Catullus . . . "9 Horace's iambic couplets . , , . , . . . .119 CONTENTS. xi PAGE Date of the Epodes : their subjects 1 20 The enemies of spciety . . . .121 Political Epodes: Epod. 16 a lament after the civil wars: its poetical character . . . . . . . . t ; .122 Cleopatra : Epod. 9 . . . . . . . . . .123 The more gentle poems among the Epodes : Maecenas : the virtue of wine . . . .,>.. . . . 125 Praise of a country life : Epod. 2 : difficulty of the last four lines . .126 The Epodes not fully representative of Horace's mind at the time when they were written . . . t . . . . . .129 Catullus, Horace, and Martial .130 CHAPTER VI. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. THE ODES. Various aspects of the Odes 132 Graver and lighter moods . . . . . . . . 133 Horace and the Greek lyric poets : Alcaeus 134 Earlier and later Odes 135 The first book of Odes : imitations of Greek poets 1 36 Predominance of the lighter themes . . . . . . 137 The second book reflective and didactic 138 The third book : culmination of Horace's lyrical faculty . . .139 The fourth book and the Carmen Seculare ...... 140 Books i-iii a complete series 140 Date of publication : difficulties in regard to certain Odes . . . 141 Virgil (i. 3) 141 Eastern victories (ii. 9) 143 Marcellus ............ 144 Murena (iii. 19, etc.) 144 Books i-iii probably published in 23 or 22 B.c 146 II. Horace a poet of culture : Greek element in the Odes .... 146 Horace's study of the older Greek poets and neglect of the Alexandrians 147* Intellectual and artistic movements in the Augustan age . . . 148 National element in the Odes : the ideal of Rome 149 Three chief kinds of Ode to be considered : (i ) the national, religious, and ethical Odes; (2) the lighter poems in the Greek manner, tpojTtica. and ffv^TTormd ; (3) the occasional poems of Horace's own life and experience 150 xii CONTENTS. ra. PACE The national, religious, philosophical, and ethical Odes . . . .151 Earlier political poems : 'Caesaris ultor' (i. 2) 151 The Saviour of the State ( i. 12) ; Cleopatra (i. 37) ; lament over civil wars (i. 35, ii. i) 152 The great national Odes of Book Hi ( 1-6) 152 Horace's lyrical art at its best in the best years of the Augustan age (27-23 B.C.) \ , . -. . . .153 The mission of Rome and Augustus 154 Political anxieties : warning and reproof (iii. 5 and 6) . . . .155 The need for reformation (iii. 24) 156 Apotheosis of the Emperor (iii. 25) 156 Odes of the Fourth Book on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus : the glories of the rule of Augustus 156 Changes in the national feeling as expressed by Horace : three stages : the longing for peace after the civil wars ; faith in the high destiny of Rome; glorification of the Emperor 158 The religious revival : Horace and the national religion . . . .158 Association of religion with the political ideals of Horace . . .160 The deification of the Emperor ........ 161 Rustic beliefs and holiday observances 162 Natural piety 163 Horace's graver philosophy 163 Horace and Lucretius . . . . . . . . . .164 The highest good 167 IV. The poems of love and wine 168 General character of Horace's lighter poems : his heroines . . . 169 Praise of wine 173 V. Horace's occasional poems 1 74 Their likeness to the Epistles : Horace's friends 175 His respect for rank : urbanity 1 76 Degrees of friendship . . . . . . . . . .177 Horace's most intimate feelings expressed in the praise of his favourite places in Italy . . . . . . . . . .178 Influence of Nature in the poetry of Horace 1 79 His artistic life 181 VI. Horace's style 182 Progress of his art . . . 183 Forms of verse - . . . . 1 84 CONTENTS. xiii PAGE The Sapphic and Alcaic measures 185 Varieties of the Asclepiad 1 86 ' Curiosa felicitas': characteristics of his phrases 192 Imaginative force of his diction 194 The reflective element in his lyrical poetry 195 Horace and Catullus .......... 196 Law and impulse 197 THE ELEGIAC POETS CHAPTER I. ROMAN ELEGY. Horace on elegiac poetry 201 ' Querimonia ' : ' voti sententia compos ' . . . . . . . 202 The earliest Greek elegy allied to lyric poetry 202 Early Greek elegiac poets : Mimnermus 203 Antimachus of Colophon : the Alexandrian elegiac poets : Philetas . 204 Callimachus 205 The earlier Roman elegy : Ennius and Lucilius 206 The elegies of Catullus .......... 207 The elegiac poetry of the Augustan age related to Alexandrian elegy as the pastorals of Virgil to those of Theocritus : cultivation of amatory poetry 208 Quintilian's four elegiac poets of Rome Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid ............ 209 Common aims and methods of the elegiac poets ' 210 The poetry of pleasure : ' dulcedo otii ' 211 The perfection of Roman elegy in Tibullus and Ovid . . . .212 Change of literary taste : the circle of Maecenas and the circle of Messalla 213 Messalla and Tibullus . . . .214 Exceptional character of Propertius and his poetry : Ovid the representa- tive of his age . . . . . . . . . .215 The ' bondage ' of love as represented by these poets : decay of fortitude . 216 Roman strength subdued by Italian ' mollitia ' 217 Roman elegiac poetry the best product of the great age of Roman literature 218 Value of the elegiac poets : their rendering of personal feeling and experience . . . 219 Their mastery of verse 219 xiv CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. CALLUS, TIBULLUS, LYGDAMUS, SULPICIA. I. PAGE Cornelius Gallus and his fortunes : ' Lycoris ' . . . . .221 Place of Gallns in Roman literature : his character : Gallus and Virgil . 222 Gallus styled ' durior ' by Quintilian, in comparison with Tibullus and Propertius *.. 223 II. Albius Tibullus 223 His life 224 Tibullus and Horace : identity of Horace's 'Albius' (Od. i. 23, Ep. i. 4) with Albius Tibullus the poet 225 His delineation of himself in the elegies 231 The first book : his home ' patrii lares ' 232 Messalla's Aquitanian campaign, B. c. 30 233 Delia 233 Messalla's mission to the East : Tibullus detained by illness in Corcyra . 234 Return to Rome : estrangement of Delia 235 Messalla's triumph (i. 7) 236 The second book : Nemesis 236 Materials and character of the poetry of Tibullus 237 Melancholy 238 The spirit of Italy : love of the country : resemblances to Virgil . .239 Love of peace 240 Friendship for Messalla 240 Tibullus and the greatness of Rome : an exceptional passage (ii. 5). . 241 Relation of Tibullus to other poets : affinities with Virgil . . . 242 Elegy brought to perfection by Tibullus 243 Versification, style, and diction 244 Idyllic passages 246 Relation of Tibullus to his contemporaries and to the Empire . . . 247 His rank among poets 248 in. Lygdamus : the author of six elegies in the third book ascribed to Tibullus : a member of the circle of Messalla . . . . .250 Problems regarding Lygdamus . . . . . . , 251 Lygdamus and Neaera . 252 Character of the poems, and of the author . . . . . 253 CONTENTS. xv IV. PAGE The Panegyric on Messalla, in hexameters : its value as an illustration of the taste of the time 254 V. Sulpicia 256 Eleven poems relating to the fortunes of Sulpicia : six of these by Sulpicia herself 256 The story of Sulpicia and Cerinthus 257 Value of the poems 258 CHAPTER III. PROPERTIUS : LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. Varying estimates of Propertius 260 Fortunes of his poetry in different ages 261 His biography : founded chiefly on his own statements .... 262 Problems of his biography 263 Dates of his poems 265 The birthplace of Propertius 268 Interpretation of the passages in which his birthplace is referred to . . 269 His early life and recollections . . . . . . . .276 The siege of Perusia 377 Propertius taken to Rome by his mother 278 Studies and friends : Tullus if'' . 279 Bassus, Lynceus, and Ponticus : Gallus : Paetus 280 Cynthia 281 The record of the first book ' Cynthia Monobiblos ' . . . .284 Publication of the first book : Propertius recognised by Maecenas . .286 The second book : protestations and reproaches 286 The third book : disillusion 286 Cynthia in the fourth book 287 The fourth book probably left unfinished at the death of Propertius . 288 Poetical ambition : relation of Propertius to other poets . . . .289 The Roman Callimachus : Horace's estimate of Propertius . . . 290 Character 291 CHAPTER IV. THE ART AND GENIUS OF PROPERTIUS. The poet's claim to be the first Latin representative of Alexandrian elegy 293 ' Querimonia ' : 'lacrimae' 294 xvi CONTENTS. PACE ' Cynthia Monobiblos ' : artistic excellence of the first book . . . 295 The second book 34 elegies : reasons for and against subdivision of the book 296 Themes of the second book : want of chronological or artistic sequence : Prologue to Maecenas : Epilogue praise of Virgil .... 297 The third book more orderly and less passionate : new motives . . 298 The fourth book, containing two sets of poems : projected series on the antiquities of Rome 300 Elegies on various subjects : Cynthia's ghost 301 Arethusa : Cornelia . 302 Defects of the antiquarian poems : variety and interest of the others . 303 Manner of Propertius . . . . . . . . . 304 Imagery and diction 305 Verse 306 The strength of Propertius : the temper of his poetry . . . .310 The thought of death . . . . . . . . . .311 Lament for Paetus 312 Paetus and Lycidas 313 Lament for Marcellus . . . . . . . . . .314 Gloom and terror of the grave : ' sunt aliquid Manes ' . . . . 315 Descriptive passages : the City . . . . . . . 315 Nature in lonely places : the mountains 316 ' Vesani murmura ponti ' .. . 317 The solitudes of Nature associated with the romance of Greek mytho- logy 3 1 ? Milanion in Arcadia : Ariadne : Andromeda : Antiope . . . .318 Hylas : imaginative value of mythology. ...... 319 National themes : Cleopatra . 319 Roman myths and ritual .321 Estimate of the art and genius of Propertius 322 CHAPTER V. OVID. I. AMORES. Want of seriousness in Ovid's love poetry : the Amores .... 324 ' Musa genialis ' : the elegy on Tibullus an exception among the lighter poems . . . . . . 325 Corinna .'.-.- . . . 326 Subjects treated in the Amores . 328 Spirit of the Amores ........... 329 CONTENTS. xvii II. HEROIDES. PAGE Two sources of interest in Ovid's poetry knowledge of Roman society, and exuberance of fancy ......... 330 The Heroides : matter and form of Ovid's heroic epistles : their rhetorical and modern character . . . . . . . . -331 Spurious epistles -. 332 Ovid's heroines 333 Picturesque, romantic, and pathetic elements in the Heroides . . . 334 Style 335 III. ARS AMANDI. Publication of the Ars Amandi 335 Roman society : the pursuit of pleasure ....... 336 Ovid's didactic poem .......... 337 His purpose in the Ars Amandi 338 Ovid's theory of life .......... 339 Excellence of the poem as representative of the time, and of the author's genius : Ovid's wit, vivacity, and sane judgment .... 340 Picturesque and fanciful passages 342 IV. METAMORPHOSES. Ovid's recognition of his twofold power, as a poet of society, and an imaginative artist (Amores iii. i) : the Muses of Elegy and Tragedy. 342 Ovid's essay in tragedy : the Medea 343 Failure of tragedy in Rome 344 Ovid's strength and weakness in dealing with mythological and heroic subjects: his imaginative revival of old stories 345 Mythology in the Greek poets 346 Greek mythology in Latin literature : spontaneity and freshness of Ovid's work 347 The Gods in Ovid's poetry : their loss of majesty : want of reverence in the Metamorphoses .......... 349 The Fauns and Nymphs 350 Cultivation of epic poetry by Ovid's contemporaries .... 350 Ovid's own estimate of his poem : his renunciation of the strict epic form 351 Plan of the Metamorphoses 351 Ingenuity of the structure 352 Imperial sentiment employed to give unity to the poem .... 353 Motives of the stories : love and adventure : scenes of war : occasional exaggeration of repulsive details 354 b xviii CONTENTS. PAGE The battle of the Centaurs 3=5 Predominance of rhetoric : unimaginative precision : absence of mystery and sublimity 356 Ovid's congenial ground : Arcadia : the loves of the Gods . . . 358 The Palace of the Sun : Phaethon : power of description : command of poetical associations . . . . . . . . . 358 Psychological insight 360 Romance and pathos : Cadmus and Harmonia : the sea-idyll of Ceyx and Alcyone : Baucis and Philemon : Ovid's homelier passages : humanity of the Metamorphoses , . . . . . .361 MEMOIR OF W. Y. SELLAR ANDREW LANG W. Y. S. 1890 WHERE nineteen summers' festal feet had gone, The darkness gathers round thee, laid alone ; And there, unchanged, unshadowed, lie with thee Kindness and Truth and Magnanimity. J. W. M. WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. To the last work of Mr. Sellar, it has been thought well to prefix a brief introductory memoir. As his nephew, his pupil, and one who found in his house another home, I attempt to tell, very briefly, the uneventful story of his life. By the aid of letters 1 , and the reminiscences of friends, it would not be difficult to fill a volume with Mr. Sellar's biography. But it is improbable that he, who was absolutely devoid of literary self-consciousness and vanity, would have cared to be remembered, except in the affection of his friends and in the gratitude of his pupils. It must suffice, therefore, to give with brevity all that the readers of his books may find it desirable to know about the Author of the ' Roman Poets of the Republic.' Mr. Sellar was born at Morvich in Sutherland on Feb. 22, 1825, being the son of Mr. Patrick Sellar and his wife, whose maiden name was Craig. The name of Sellar is very common in Oxfordshire, and it is not impossible that a progenitor of the family, which had long been settled in Elgin, came north with the Cromwellian forces. Mr. Sellar's father was an agent, or Factor, of the Suther- land family. In middle life he purchased the estates of Ardtornish and Acharn, on the Sound of Mull. His 1 Mr. Sellar wrote full and interesting letters to many of his friends : in these it was his habit to express the thoughts that most interested him at the moment. Here they would be out of place ; nor is it certain that he would have cared for their publication. xxii MEMOIR OF children were seven boys and two girls, Mr. William Young Sellar being his fourth child, and third son. Their childhood was passed at Morvich, a house of the Duke of Sutherland's, near the river Fleet, not far from Golspie. Morvich is pleasantly situated beneath high crags, and close to a burn flowing into the Fleet, wherein the children learned their first lessons in trout-fishing, being afterwards promoted to salmon and sea-trout in the river. The elder Mr. Sellar was a man of great energy, and expected great energy and industry from others. His wife was a lady who can never be mentioned without affection by any who were fortunate enough to know her, above all by any of her numerous descendants. With her, kindness was a passion : her generosity, hospitality, and sympathy were unbounded, and she had a great love of literature, which she retained into advanced old age. In such a home, where there were plenty of brothers to play with, and where sport abounded to an extent now unknown, Mr. Sellar's childhood must have passed happily. But the home life of his childhood was ex- tremely brief. At the early age of seven, he was sent with his brother, Mr. Patrick Plenderleith Sellar, his senior by little more than two years, to the junior class, or ' Gytes,' of the Edinburgh Academy. Among the children there he was probably the youngest, though he was to take, with ease, the foremost place in their studies. The Edinburgh Academy, a large plain building stand- ing in sufficient ' yards ' on the north side of the slope of the new town, was founded in 1824. The first head master, or Rector, was the Rev. Dr. Williams, formerly Vicar of Lampeter, and a friend of Lockhart's. Sir Walter Scott, himself the chief glory of the High School, had taken a great part in founding the new Classical Academy. Through Lockhart he became acquainted with Dr. Wil- liams, whom, though Scott was not fond of schoolmasters, WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxiii he liked and respected. Williams gave him some of the materials for 'The Betrothed,' and it was he who read the service over the grave in Dryburgh. In opening the school, on October i, 1824, Scott naturally deprecated any suspicions of prejudice against that ancient institution, the High School. He quoted Dr. Johnson's remark, that, of learning, ' every man in Scotland had a mouthful, but no man a bellyful.' The Directors were anxious to wipe off this reproach, to make the pupils begin Greek earlier, and 'prosecute it to a greater extent' than had been usual in Scotland. Sir Walter himself, as we know, began Greek late at school, was at a disadvantage in it when he went to the University, and did not 'prosecute it' at all. The Edinburgh Academy is a day-school. At that time, and in the time of the present writer, the boys went up from class to class by seniority, getting a remove every year. Through their whole course they were under the same master with whom they started, and from the fifth class to the seventh they also studied with the Rector. This scheme has glaring disadvantages. A boy of parts who is indifferent to medals and prizes bound in calf, has no stimulus to ambition. He cannot, or then, at least, he could not, gain a remove by industry or ability. Moreover, the master who can keep in order, and teach the Latin Grammar to, a mob of disorderly ' gytes,' may be sadly to seek in more advanced studies. The school used to open at nine o'clock, and, with two breaks of a quarter of an hour, boys went from class-room to class- room till three in the afternoon. Preparation, if done at all, was done at home, under the superintendence of tutors often quite amusingly incompetent. The young Sellars did not suffer, at least, from ignorant private instructors. They lived in the house of one of the masters, Mr. Andrew Carmichael, who has left a xxiv MEMOIR OF reputation for minute and anxious accuracy. At his establishment life was far from joyous ; and the drudgery was extreme. Games were forbidden, especially cricket, a pastime which Mr. Sellar, in later life, was very fond of watching at Lord's, and at which he played a good deal when a Fellow of Oriel. But at school he was not permitted to relax his mind with amusements. His father considered it a positive duty that he should be head-boy, or dux, as it was called, of his class, and Mr. Carmichael assuredly refuted Dr. Johnson by giving him his bellyful of learning. Thus urged, Mr. Sellar, after conquering his chief competitor, his brother, won and retained the place of dux, and, at the early age of fourteen, gained the gold medal as head of the school, besides accumulating almost all the other prizes. His Greek Iambics appear to myself remarkable productions for a boy of his age, but, at the University, he discovered that extreme and original elegance in composition was not his forte. ' Don't you think, Sellar, you may have a genius for mathematics? ' his tutor asked him (as he used to tell), after considering a very elaborate essay in Greek verse. Of the Edinburgh Academy, in spite of his regard and esteem for Dr. Williams, Mr. Sellar did not retain a very happy memory. With a natural disposition to enjoy life, and with an appetite for work which would have been easily contented, with a keen enjoyment of literature, and a heart ardent in friendship, the boy was kept to a dull and plodding course of study. The strange thing is that his mind was not out worn in youth, that he did not become a pedant, or turn in distaste from scholar- ship. He sometimes attributed the frequent ill-health of his later life to the years of incessant strain at school. But then his holidays were always delightful, and he was saved from results which often follow too strenuous application by his native vigour and his sense of humour. WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxv Of the masters at the Edinburgh Academy he had some cheerful recollections. The teacher of Mathematics was Dr. Gloag, the Keate of the northern seminary. Dr. Gloag, who still survived and thrashed in my own time, was immensely appreciated by the boys as a practical humorist. Boys forgive, and even enjoy, a great deal that is not agreeable at the time, from an unaffected and energetic person of sterling honesty. 'Menzies was looking at the clock, was he? He thought to escape,' he would remark, when the hour was almost ended, and some terrible proposition was making havoc in the class ' Tak' it, Menzies.' Then the unlucky boy would come to grief, and would have the little, stumpy, broken pointer rattling on his shins, or would be sent 'behind the board,' to copy out the proposition at full length. From the Edinburgh Academy, Mr. Sellar went, before he was fifteen, to Glasgow University. The College build- ings were then an old, black, and malodorous pile in a crowded and squalid part of the town. Lectures used to begin at 7.30 in the morning, and, to an industrious and punctual student, Glasgow was a place of hard work, and of no pleasure. Fortunately, Mr. Sellar found, in the Greek Chair, Mr. Edmund Law Lushington, then a young professor of twenty-seven years. Probably the Scottish universities have never enjoyed a teacher in all respects so admirable, and so inspiring, as Mr. Lushington. To read under him was to gain a new conception of what scholarship might be, and, in him, was. The range of his knowledge lives in one's memory as almost miraculous; his accuracy was of the finest Cambridge pattern : it was as if some such Greek as Longinus had been reborn to teach his native tongue in Scotland. As Mr. Lushington is, fortunately, still with us, it would be unbecoming to dilate on the rare personal qualities and charms which endeared him to his pupils, and on the occasional touch xxvi MEMOIR OF of irony which shewed that dulness could annoy even his temper *. Under the Greek Professor, Mr. Sellar improved his scholarship, and, no doubt, acquired that sound and earnest taste for and love of the literature of Greece which dis- tinguished him. He also enjoyed Mr. Lushington's personal friendship, which remained with him, as true and admiringly affectionate as ever, to the close of his life. From Professor Ramsay, also, he learned much in Latin literature and Latin antiquities, and the friendship between these two was continued, after Mr. Ramsay's death, with his nephew and successor, who at present holds the Chair of ' Humanity.' The chief prizes at Glasgow are the Snell Exhibitions to Balliol, which were then worth about 120 a year. They were not awarded, like the prizes in the Lectures, by the votes of the students, a curious method which works with remarkable accuracy, but were given to distinguished students. Adam Smith, Lockhart, and Sir William Hamilton had all been Snell Exhibitioners. The foundation has been most serviceable to young Scots, and the biographer himself is 'more especially bound to pray' for John Snell, Esq. Mr. Sellar obtained this Exhibition at the early age of seventeen. After some months of study with his friend, the Rev. Mr. Dobson, Head Master of Cheltenham College, he won the Balliol Scholarship, which was then, and still is, a great object of ambition with schoolboys. He went up to Balliol after most of the men whom the late Principal Shairp commemorated in his poem. Northcote had gone, but Mr. Clough was still in Oxford, Mr. Matthew Arnold, 1 ' Mr. ,' said Mr. Lushington, to a pupil who had first blundered through the Greek of a passage, and then, with new false quantities, had massacred the English, ' Mr. , you have made more mistakes than the words admit of! WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxvii in the glory of his youth, Mr. Morier (Sir Robert Morier), Mr. Shairp, Sir Alexander Grant, the Editor of ' Aristotle's Ethics/ Mr. T. C. Sandars, and others. Here Mr. Sellar was in society which liked him well. Though still indus- trious, he did not, as at school, waste his youth on books and nothing but books. He rode, he played cricket and whist, in which he excelled. Among others of his acquaintances was Mr. George Lawrence, author of. ' Guy Livingstone.' But his chief friends at that time have already been men- tioned. Others were Mr. Poste, Bishop Patteson, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, Mr. Theodore Walrond, Sir Francis Sandford, and Mr. Cumin. Mr. Sellar was a friend of singular loyalty and ardency. The biographer well remembers how, some time after the death of Bishop Patteson, martyred in the South Seas, Mr. Sellar, at the mention of his name, was unable to subdue his emotion, and left the room. Once a friend with him was always a friend, and it often seemed as if the doings and the successes of those he loved were of more moment to him, and dearer to him, than his own. He was happy in retaining the affection of many of these college friends through all his life. But he survived Mr. Matthew Arnold, Sir Alexander Grant (Principal in his own University of Edinburgh), Mr. Walrond, and Mr. H. H. Lancaster, a friend of later date. Of all these, perhaps, Principal Shairp was the man who was nearest to his affections, unlike as they were in many ways. Among friends rather senior to Mr. Sellar at Oxford, doubtless Mr. Jowett, then a Tutor of Balliol, had most influence. Scotchmen are not, as a rule with many exceptions, favourable to sacerdotal ideas in religious matters. They are apt to think about such controversies as Newman was then engaged in, much what Charles Perrault thought of Pascal's discussions in the 'Lettres Provinciales,' that too much importance is assigned to them. The tendency among Mr. Jowett's pupils was xxviii MEMOIR OF rather in the direction of critical and philosophical thought. From Mr. Jowett, in particular, was expected some philosophical work, in place of which he has enriched the world by making Plato speak English. It is usual, at the Universities, for the pupils of some teacher to believe that 'he has the Secret,' a sanguine expectation which has often been disappointed. Mr. Jowett's ideas, however, were of considerable influence with Mr. Sellar, though less momentous to him than Mr. Jowett's friendship. In later life, at least, and with his juniors certainly, he was not wont to discuss Theological topics. He might, perhaps, have said Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument About it, and about : but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went. It is improbable that the Tractarian discussions and the Oxford movement interested him much more than they appear to have interested Mr. Matthew Arnold. Mr. Sellar took a distinguished degree, a First Class in the Classical Final Schools (there were then no Mode- rations), which included scholarship, history, and philo- sophy. He next won the Oriel Fellowship, at that time the most distinguished of those prizes (1850). His terms at Oriel were probably among the happiest periods of his life, as he had achieved complete academic success, and could now afford to look round, and choose his opening in the profession of education. Many a tired young fellow in the beautiful college gardens may have inwardly blessed pious founders, and said to himself, deus nobis haec otia fecit. Mr. Sellar was not cast for a college don, and did not linger late in the paradise of the academic Armida. For a short time he taught in the University of Durham, and thence went to assist his friend, Professor Ramsay, WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxix in the Latin Chair at Glasgow (1851-53). In the neigh- bourhood of Glasgow he met the lady whom he shortly afterwards married, Miss Eleanor Dennistoun, daughter of Mr. Dennistoun of Golf-hill. A happier marriage, and one which gave more happiness to a larger circle of people, was never made. It is impossible here to say more than that Mr. Sellar's home, wherever it might be, was henceforth a source of light, of mirth, of the friendliest hospitality to all old and to many new friends. The children who were born into the house did not lack the charm, the sympathetic kindness and the wit, which en- deared their mother to all who made her acquaintance. But the best parts of a man's life, the best for himself, for his work, and for the world, are those which a biographer dares hardly touch upon. The Greek Professor in the University of St. Andrews was at this time old, and suffering from the local malady of deafness. Mr. Sellar went from Glasgow to St. Andrews to act as his assistant in 1853-1859, and later succeeded him as Professor (1859-1863). St. Andrews has always been a small University, and the Colleges of St. Leonard's and St. Salvator probably did not contain more than two hundred students. The Greek Professor had to in- $truct his junior class in the rudiments of the language: in his second and senior class he was able to lead them to much higher things. Mr. Sellar, however, had leisure enough to write his two remarkable studies on Lucretius and Thucydides, in the volumes of Oxford Essays for 1855 and 1857. In the way of relaxation from study, St. Andrews was then peculiarly fortunate. There was a small but lively and learned society in the place. Mr. Ferrier, the author of ' Institutes of Metaphysics,' was then Professor of Moral Philosophy. He was a man of noble character and of striking appearance, the ideal of what a philosopher should xxx MEMOIR OF be. His wife and his family were remarkable for humour and social charm, and many famous people in literature visited the house of the daughter of Christopher North. Mr. Shairp was then Professor of Latin ; Mr. Veitch, now of Glasgow, taught Logic ; Principal Tulloch was at St. Mary's Hall, the Divinity College. They were very merry days at St. Andrews, and the Professors played Golf with more energy and enthusiasm, it must be admitted, than success. 'Ye may teach laddies Greek, Professor,' said a candid old caddie to Mr. Sellar, ' but gowf needs a heid.' At this time, Mr. Sellar's home, in the vacations, was at Harehead, a beautiful house situated where the battle of Philiphaugh ended, on a hill above the deep black pools of Yarrow, and within sight of Newark Castle. Here he had less opportunities of fishing and shooting, exercises very necessary to his health, than at Ardtornish, for that delightful place had been sold soon after the death of the elder Mr. Sellar. For many summers he had enjoyed the salmon and sea-trout fishing in the river and Loch Ari-Innes, at Ardtornish he had been visited by Mr. Tennyson, and other men of letters. But the new home all but made up for the loss of the older and still more beautiful one. It was here that the biographer first saw much of Mr. Sellar, or first remembers much of him, though he has a lively recollection of bungling in an attempt to land a sea-trout which he had hooked in the Aline. Mr. Sellar was at this time in the vigour of life ; tall, powerfully made, and an excellent walker. In his company and that of Mr. Lancaster, Dr. John Brown made his pilgrimage to Minchmoor, and the Bush above Traquair, celebrated by Mr. Shairp in the most musical of his poems. Dr. Brown immortalised Harehead, and the children, in his prose idyll of ' Minchmoor.' It seems but yesterday that the children, in their scarlet cloaks, were running on the green beside the Yarrow, and now their own children WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxxi are of the age that then they had, and Mr. Sellar, Dr. John Brown, Mr. Shairp and Mr. Lancaster are all gone from us. To us, as to Minstrel Burne, Yarrow is a sad place to revisit, and her dowie dens have more than ' a. pastoral melancholy.' There are new faces at Hangingshaw, the storms have thinned Black Andro : we are all changed, all but the changeless hills, and Yarrow, that, as he rolls along, still ' bears burden to the minstrel's song.' These were prob- ably Mr. Sellar's happiest years, nor was he idle, for he was engaged on his c Roman Poets of the Republic.' In 1 86 1, the present biographer went to St. Leonard's Hall, at St. Andrews, and was a member of Mr. Sellar's Greek class. Thus he can add his testimony to the general voice in which Mr. Sellar's pupils praise his power, and one may say his charm, as a teacher. He had the great gifts of keeping perfect order and of thoroughly interesting those who studied under him. He taught them that Greek was no mere dead language, but the speech of a living and immortal literature. His lectures on Thucydides were perhaps especially interesting, but to all his work he brought a peculiar and indefinable power of stimulating and elevating the mind. Some of his pupils came from English public schools, others from such Scotch institutions as the Edinburgh Academy, others from country schools, where perhaps the elemen- tary teaching had often been less copious and prolonged. It was extraordinary to see the advance which all who cared to work made under Mr. Sellar's instructions. His most distinguished pupil in these years (1861-62) was doubtless Mr. Wallace, now Professor of Moral Philo- sophy at Oxford, and Fellow of Merton College. Mr. Wallace was so easily our foremost scholar, that compe- tition with him was hardly to be dreamed of. But the stimulus of competition was needless to all who were able to feel the inspiration of Mr. Sellar's educational xxxii MEMOIR OF influence. It is not easy for his biographer to refrain from saying that, having come to St. Andrews with no purpose of working, he left it in another mind, and that to Mr. Sellar he owes the impulse to busy himself with letters. But similar expressions of affection and of gratitude to Mr. Sellar might be made, and indeed have been made, by very many of his students, who were not fortunate enough to see so much of him in private life. No less im- portant than his work as an author, important as that is, was his example as a scholar, and as a man ; his loyal, honourable, simple, and generous life. In 1863, to the great regret of St. Andrews, Mr. Sellar went to Edinburgh, to fill the Chair of Latin. While he was still a candidate for that post, appeared his first book, the fruit of some years of work, 'The Roman Poets of the Republic 1 .' This volume treats of Roman Poetry from the begin- ning of the literature to the death of Catullus. It is not, the biographer hopes, merely the partiality of a kinsman which makes him rank this work very highly. Perhaps there is not, in English, its companion, nor its equal, as an account of the national genius of Rome, of its debt to Greece, of its own original character and powers, of its expression in poetry, from the Saturnian na'iveti to Catullus's success in modulating Latin to the Grecian melodies. The style is thoughtful, scholarly, and, in contrast with a great deal of modern criticism of the antique, is remarkably sober. It is probable that an author who was writing to-day on the very origins of Roman literature, would deal more in comparisons with the popular and oral poetry of other peoples. But this is comparatively a recent study, though Wolf ex- pected much from it, and Mr. Sellar's tastes were not exactly antiquarian. Icelandic and Eskimo satiric songs, 1 Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh, 1863. WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxxiii for example, might have been made to illustrate the Fescennine verse. Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit. The custom still survives in the extreme North, but Mr. Sellar did not look so far afield, and these comparative exercises were then hardly in vogue. He did not elucidate the retention in memory of historical ballad traditions by the hymns of the Maoris. Opinions may differ as to the value of such rapprochements, but there can be little doubt as to their interest. The most excellent parts of the work, and the most popular, are doubtless the chap- ters on Lucretius and on Catullus. Lucretius has never found a more sympathetic and lucid interpreter : one more appreciative of what we may almost call his ' re- ligious earnestness,' of his criticism of life, of his delight in nature, and in the spectacle of the world. ( No other writer,' says Mr. Sellar, ' makes us feel with more reality the quickening of the spirit which is caused by the sun- rise or the early spring, by fine weather or fair and peaceful landscapes. The freshness of this feeling is one of the great charms of the poem, especially as a relief to the gloom and sadness of his thought on human life. . . No morbid or distempered fancies coloured the natural aspect which the world presented to his eyes and mind. . . His feeling is profoundly solemn, as well as infinitely tender. Above all the tumult of life, he hears incessantly the funeral dirge over some one departed, and the infant wail of a new-comer into the stormy sea of life mixtos vagitibns aegris Ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri.' Such was the favourite poet of Moliere. Like a good, but not an affectedly patriotic Scotsman, Mr. Sellar shewed the unity of great poetry, by passages in which the thought and language of Burns strangely and happily coincided with the c xxxiv MEMOIR OF inspirations both of Lucretius and Catullus. Of Catullus he wrote with a sympathy which may be called even affectionate and which he communicates to his readers. The biographer recalls, however, that Mr. Sellar did not approve of his own boyish criticism, that Catullus was to Horace as Tennyson to Moore. ' As a lyrical poet,' says Mr. Sellar, ' Catullus cannot indeed be placed on the same level with Horace. He wants altogether the variety and range of interest, the subtlety and irony, the meditative spirit and the moral strength, of the great and genial Augustan poet.' To appreciate Horace is not given to boys ; intelligence and love of him come with the maturer mind. And yet, one still has an instinct which tells one that, of the two lyrists, Catullus is a poet more poetical. Mr. Sellar's book would, in France, have given him probably a claim to membership of the Academy. In our own country, and in Germany, it was well received, and it remains 'a standard book,' as the phrase goes. The blending of literary appreciation with sound scholar- ship and dignity of style is singular in this age, when, if we do praise the classics, we 'praise them too much like Barbarians.' There is nothing freakish in the book, and an element of freakishness is apparent enough amidst the many and delightful excellences of Mr. Matthew Arnold's ' Lectures on the Translation of Homer.' In England (including Scotland), a sane and thorough criticism of ancient literature leads to no particular honours. But these were the last things that Mr. Sellar had in his mind. He was never heard to complain of criticism, nor, indeed, did he concern himself about it in the slightest degree. When he was appreciated, either by a reviewer, or when, for example, Dublin gave him an honorary degree, and the Athenaeum Club elected him as a member, through the Committee, without ballot, he was pleased, of course, but he never thought of desiring recognition. He loved WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxxv his studies entirely for their own sake : he dwelt with the great of old because he enjoyed their company. As he says about Catullus, 'though fastidious in his literary judgments, he was not only without a single touch of envy in his nature, but he felt a generous pride and pleasure in the fame and the accomplishments of his associates.' One of the last books which he read was a posthumous collection of Mr. Matthew Arnold's ' Essays,' including that on Tolstoi. 'There is nobody like him,' he said, as he laid them down. At this point, something may be said of Mr. Sellar's tastes in modern literature. He did not keep up an acquaintance with recent verse. When Mr. Swinburne first appeared, in 1865, he naturally fascinated the young, among whom the biographer was then numbered. But Mr. Sellar did not seem to be allured by the author of ' Atalanta in Calydon,' and Mr. Rossetti did not appeal to him. His ' ply was taken long ago.' Among his contemporaries, not including seniors like the Laureate, he most appreciated Mr. Matthew Arnold, and he would not allow Mr. Clough to be depreciated. When his bio- grapher began to rhyme, he looked at the performances dubiously. c Do you think they are as good as 's, now ? ' he asked. The author replied with confidence that he did not think much of them, but that he did think they were as good as 's, of whom, to be sure, Mr. Sellar was not an admirer. To Lord Tennyson's poems he was much attached, and he must have been among Mr. Browning's earliest readers, though he did not keep up with all the later works. Perhaps Wordsworth was his favourite English poet, and Sir Walter and Mr. Thackeray his favourite novelists. In the leisure of his last vacation he was engaged in a steady perusal of Mr. Dickens. He had, like many men of active mind, a great power of devouring novels for which, perhaps, nobody would c 2 xxxvi MEMOIR OF claim a high place in literature. M. Xavier de Monte'pin beguiled many of his hours ; a favourite was Le Medecin des Folks. To one or two popular and admired novelists he had rather a rooted objection, which gave rise to ani- mated discussions, but to no conversion on either side. Of modern novelists, he chiefly admired Mr. Norris. He thoroughly enjoyed Richard Feverel, on its first ap- pearance, and twenty years before the world discovered Mr. Meredith. It is fair to add that he was defeated by Diana of the Crossways. In French, German, and Italian he chiefly read works bearing on his own studies : the books of M. Gaston Boissier were often in his hands. Briefly, in literature he was a lover of what is sound, and has stood the test of time : he did not care to make new experiments, and was indifferent to a modern vogue. One literary taste of Mr. Sellar's was unusual in peaceful men of letters. He was extremely fond of reading military history, especially such books as Napier's ' Peninsular War.' His acquaint- ance with the details of battles and manoeuvres used to astonish soldiers, when, after specially preparing a subject for examination, they found that Mr. Sellar's knowledge of it exceeded their own. Mr. Sellar went to fill the Chair of Humanity at Edin- burgh in 1863 ; he was still Professor at his death in 1890. The course of his life in Edinburgh was happy but uneventful. He did his daily work at College ; he walked, rode, and played whist. He was surrounded by many friends, among whom were Dr. John Brown, and Sir Alex- ander Grant, who became Principal of the University. Others were of a younger generation, with whom he was brought acquainted by a brother to whom he was deeply attached, Mr. Alexander Craig Sellar. One of these was Mr. Henry Hill Lancaster, whose remarkable geniality and humour were particularly acceptable -to him. WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxxvii Mr. Lushington often came to Edinburgh from Glasgow, a welcome visitor, Mr. E. F. S. Piggott from London, and Professor Nichol of Glasgow was another companion. Dr. Harvey, at that time Rector of the Edinburgh Academy, Mr. Sellar's successor at St. Andrews, Professor Campbell, and Professor Jebb, were also among his more intimate associates. He was always fond of society, and enjoyed the friendly and kindly entertainments of the Northern town. His work with his classes he also enjoyed, and took particular pleasure in the successes of his pupils. The students were inclined to think him distant in his manner, which was merely the result of short-sightedness and its usual accompaniment, shyness. The short-sighted man is always addressing strangers by mistake, or failing to recognise acquaintances, and the memory of such ad- ventures makes him reserved. It was only very late in Mr. Sellar's career that students began to invite professors to suppers. An occasion of this sort gave him much pleasure, and he regretted that the custom had not come sooner into vogue. There may be scholars who would feel thrown away and isolated in a city so little academic as Edinburgh, but this was never Mr. Sellar's case. He could usually find a few friends interested in his own studies, and he did not by any means limit his own interests, but was an excellent talker on most themes, and good company for most men. On the Continent, in his almost yearly visits to Italy and to Switzerland, he met Mr. Alfred Benn, author of a work on Greek Philosophy, and enjoyed his vivacious learning and originality. Mr. Sellar contradicted the saying that we make no new friends after forty. His heart was always open to new friendships, though his taste rather rebelled against new books. The chief pleasure of his later years was the arrival of Mr. Butcher as Professor of Greek in Edinburgh. Many another aging man might have felt an unconscious jealousy xxxviii MEMOIR OF of so young a colleague ; of one so rich in learning, in vigour, in every amiable and attractive quality. But Mr. Sellar's attachment to Mr. Butcher resembled the affections of youth. In his Edinburgh vacations, when Harehead was given up, Mr. Sellar's family found, for a year, a beautiful home at Tullymet, some miles distant from Pitlochry, a house charmingly situated among woods, above an old-fashioned garden, with a wide and broken valley below. Here Mr. Jowett came, and many other guests ; here the bio- grapher gratefully remembers that he passed the happiest of all long vacations, reading Thucydides beneath the trees, while the squirrels chattered in the boughs, and the voices of the children, his friends of these days and of all days, called him to play from the distance. Among the things that can be done in life, the best is to make others happy. Of such good deeds the record is difficult to write, and must only be treasured in remem- brance. Yet, even in the briefest biography, there may be mention of what Mr. Sellar's hospitality and kindness and genial humour added to the well-being of his friends, and of his friends' friends ; not in Scotland alone, but wherever he and his found themselves. To have lived thus is, indeed, to have lived to some purpose, for, if all else were nothing but vanity, learning and taste, work and its rewards, love is not given in vain. After leaving Tullymet, Mr. Sellar passed a summer at Cray, near the Spital of Glenshee, in a country some- what bleak, but where the air was supposed to be keen and freshening. He was obliged henceforth to take thought about climates and atmospheres, for, in 1868 and 1869, his health suffered severely, and with him bad health often meant an access of melancholy. No unmixed good is given to us : his life might have seemed as fortunate as mortal life could be, happy in abundant WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xxxix leisure, provided with congenial work, enlivened by friend- ship, enriched by every domestic felicity, and free from all anxiety. But in ill health he saw the world in dark colours. To some extent his illness may have arisen from, or it may have caused, lack of interest in many things that had interested him of old. His sight was not very quick or keen, and he ceased to care for shoot- ing, while for modern fishing, and educated salmon and trout, he had been spoiled by the easier and more abundant sport of Morvern and Sutherland in old times. Nature gradually lost her old charm : buoyancy was no longer his, and he found it desirable to give up his work for a session, and to live abroad with his family, at Bonn, in Switzerland, and in the Black Forest. He was at St. Blasien in the Albthal with his family when the sudden rumours of war between France and Germany were first heard. The war broke out, a French invasion of Southern Germany was expected ; the able-bodied men went to their regiments, the horses were " requisitioned," and a rather melancholy autumn was passed in Switzer- land, on the heights above Zug, and at Engelberg. After Sedan Mr. Sellar came back to Edinburgh, and to his classes, which he did not again desert, except for part of a session when a return of indisposition induced him to seek the Riviera. His home in summer was now a cottage, gradually augmented with the additions which his hospi- tality required, on a hill above the brown waters of the Ken. Galloway is a country but little known to tourists, perhaps partly because its centre was untouched by Scott, partly because it is little crossed by railways. The landscape has all the charm and sentiment of the Border, with a Highland richness in colour and variety of outline. In the friendly Glen Kens, among the kindliest society of all ranks, Mr. Sellar wrote his Virgil, and the present volume, which completes his study of the Roman Poets of the xl MEMOIR OF Republic. Occasionally he visited the Continent, generally in spring, and especially interested himself in examining the birthplace of Propertius, and other scenes sacred to the Latin Muse. Of these twenty years, little is to be said, except that time brought its wonted griefs in the deaths of old friends, of Mr. Lancaster, Sir Alexander Grant, and Principal Shairp. All these caused him deep sorrow, and above all he suffered in the long illness and death of his youngest brother, Mr. Alexander Craig Sellar the Member for Partick, in whose political career he took a sympathetic interest. He himself never mixed much in politics. He was a Liberal, and the biographer re- members his defining Liberalism as ' the desire that every one should as much as possible have his full share of all that is best.' On the matter of Home Rule for Ireland he did not go with Mr. Gladstone and the majority of the Party. On the other hand, he was an extremely staunch Unionist, and was much consulted by his brother Mr. Craig Sellar, one of the Scottish leaders of the party. On platforms of any kind Mr. Sellar never appeared, though he was present at a political dinner given in Edinburgh to Mr. A. J. Balfour. His interest in politics was as keen and eager as if he had been, what he never was, an active politician. He was not among the men of letters who would have come under that law of Solon's against those who, in civil disputes, took neither side. They are never likely to be so powerful as to bring in a law against partisans of all sides. In 1877 Mr. Sellar published, with the Clarendon Press of Oxford, his most elaborate work, a volume on Virgil, as a first instalment of ' The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age.' He remarks that the characteristics of Virgil's art are not unlikely to be overlooked in an age which de- manded from the literature of the imagination 'a rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.' Such WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xli an age will perhaps find that Mr. Sellar's own essay on Virgil is less to its taste than a shorter study, rich in a rapid succession of brilliant and picturesque touches. If one's object were to inspire an English reader with a sudden desire to know more of Virgil, it is certain that the remarkable paper of Mr. F. W. H. Myers in his volume of 'Classical Essays' (Macmillan, 1883) would serve that particular purpose better. But if a student desires a full and exhaustive statement of all that is to be said about Virgil, about his life, about the political, social, and literary condition of his age, about his relations to the Greek poets and to older Latin poetry, then Mr. Sellar's volume is probably, or certainly, the most useful in our language. On reading it over again, one observes, perhaps, a certain languor in the style. The sentences are often too long, an effort is made to put too much into each period, and it cannot be said that ' bright speed ' or striking effects are the characteristics of the volume. Deep study, pro- found reflexion, and unexaggerated truthfulness of state- ment, are its merits. ' The word meditari, applied by Virgil to his earlier art, expresses the process through which his mind passed,' says Mr. Sellar, ' in acquiring its mastery over words. In appreciating the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation justissima tellus' The same word meditari applies well to Mr. Sellar's own method in the treatment of Virgil's art. He writes about it rather as a conscientious critic than as a poet, or with the charm of a poet. He had not very much interest in a subject which Mr. Myers has handled so well the posthumous fortunes of Virgil, as the Guide of Dante, as the magician of the Middle Ages, as the Prophet of the Gentiles. In one point the biographer finds himself differing from both these xlii MEMOIR OF critics, namely, in appreciation of Virgil's master in the romantic treatment of Love, Apollonius Rhodius. Mr. Myers tells us that Apollonius Rhodius ' shrouded in long- drawn sweetness the inanity of his soul.' Mr. Sellar says that, in painting the passion of Dido, it was com- paratively easy ' for Virgil to produce a more noble and vital impersonation than the Medea of Apollonius' ; and elsewhere, probably with Euripides, not Apollonius, in his mind, remarks that Dido 'satisfies modern feeling more legitimately than the representation of the cruel and treacherous rancour of Medea.' To others it may well seem that, after Nausicaa, no woman in ancient literature appeals to modern sentiment so powerfully as the Medea of Apollonius, with her passion, so sudden, so pure, so tender, and true, though, when thwarted, as destructive as a flame. Virgil's heroine was a widow, the hero of Apollonius was a maiden. Both portraits are masterpieces, but the Greek is the earlier, is the model, and is not the less great, as it is certainly the more original. But this apology for the neglected greatness of Apollonius Rhodius may be out of place. Next to the extreme thoroughness of Mr. Sellar's Virgil, perhaps its chief merit is the clear discernment of what is Roman and native, in the poet's genius. ' It was the peculiarity of the Roman mind to be capable of receiving deep and lasting impressions from other natures with which it came in contact, without sacrifice of the strong individuality of its own character. What Columella says of the Italian soil "curae mortalium obsequentis- simam esse Italiam, quae paene totius orbis fruges, adhibito studio colonorum^ ferre didicerit," might be said with equal truth of the Italian mind.' How this is ex- emplified in Virgil, how fruitfully the Greek seeds fell in the Italian soil of his genius, how Greek, yet with \vhat an original colour and flavour, were the fruits and flowers WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xliii that sprang from them, is the burden of the whole study. Virgil's is an art derived from the Alexandrian period of Greek literature, but enlarged, but enriched, but fortified by the consciousness of ' the greater freshness and vigour of the Roman genius, of the more vital force of their language, of their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and the blessing of breathing Italian air.' The charming character of Virgil himself is treated with much sympathy. ' If any one ever succeeded in securing that which Tacitus says "should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition," to leave after him "a happy memory of himself," that may be truly said of Virgil.' Yet, after being ' the whole world's darling,' Virgil had sunk to a lower place in human esteem, partly through the revival of Greek studies, the discovery of his masters, of poets greater than himself, partly through the disparaging estimate of Niebuhr and other German scholars. Mr. Sellar's 'Virgil' is a substantial and successful effort to give the poet his own place as 'one of the great interpreters of the secret of Nature, and of the meaning of human life,' especially of 'the change which was then preparing for the human spirit and for the nations of the future.' No more loyal service has been done to the great Italian, who himself foresaw and felt what the world saw far later, his own inability to put on the armour of Homer, to bend the Bow of Eurytus, and make the string that sang in battle, ring clear as the swallow's song. Above all, the critic ap- preciated the magic of Virgil's language, his ' sayings that affect the mind with a strange potency, of which perhaps no account can be given except that they make us feel, as scarcely any other words do, the burden of the mystery of life, and by their marvellous beauty, the reflexion, it may be, from some light dimly discerned or imagined beyond the gloom, they make it seem more easy to be borne. xliv MEMOIR OF Aut videt aut vidisse putat! So faint, yet so charmed and so holy, is the light in the Arician thicket, from the ' Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more.' Of Mr. Sellar's career, little remains to be told. In the summer of 1890 he had been in unusually good health, and was working very hard to complete this book, to which he gave all but the final touches. One evening in Septem- ber he caught what seemed nothing more serious than a slight chill, but his constitution was unable to rally. The illness declared itself as jaundice, with other complications. After many days of weakness and distress, the end came. He is buried in the churchyard of Dairy, on a grassy slope that takes the westering sun. The Ken flows by his grave, and by the tomb of the Covenanters who fell in the troublous times. ' It might make one in love with death to be buried in so sweet a place.' The scene is beautifully described by Mr. Sellar's pupil, Mr. Mackail : ' Here, where no lovelier ground Stands open to the mute perpetual sky ; The eternal mountains watching all around, The pastoral river always rippling by.' These are, shortly told, the chief incidents in the course of a scholar's life. Mr. Sellar was not well known to a very large circle. His shortness of sight made him some- what shy and reserved. Though deeply interested in the welfare of his students, both while they were with him, and in after life, he was not one of the Professors who attempt to live much with them in friendly familiarity, a task difficult to a man no longer young, and at no time de- monstrative. His reserve might have been, and probably often was, mistaken for haughtiness, no failing of his. His likings were by no means confined to men of his own order of intellect, and as he waxed older he seemed to become more tolerant, even of bores. At the same time a certain lassitude grew upon him ; fewer things appealed WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR. xlv to his interest : but he never lost interest in his friends. Their arrival, or any occurrence which was of moment to them, never found him indifferent. Among friends of his later years, in addition to those already spoken of, may be mentioned Professor Knight, Professor Ramsay, Mr. Mackail, Mr. W. P. Ker, who has seen this volume through the Press, Mr. Strachan Davidson, Mr. William Arnold, Mr. Charles Maconochie, and the daughters of Dr. Norman Macleod, one of whom, Miss Agnes Macleod, was with him in his last days. The most notable features in Mr. Sellar's character were simplicity, kindness, humour, frankness, loyalty, and a most delicate and lofty sense of honour. The charm of such a character, so free from thought of self, from vanity, pride, envy, display, it is difficult to express in words. All professions and pursuits have their besetting sins : a restless desire to be recognised, the attachment of undue importance to one's work, a tendency to jealousy and to petty criticism of others, are the besetting sins of the man of letters and of the scholar. From all these faults Mr. Sellar was so entirely free that it seemed as if, in his mind, they had no recognised existence. If he met a charlatan he smiled at him, but did not otherwise concern himself with pretenders and their performances. Among the best gifts of humour is, or should be, a clear sense of our own lack of importance ; a disposition not to be fretted by the unfriendly, nor elated by the sympathetic reception which the world may give to ourselves and to our work. This element of equanimity Mr. Sellar pos- sessed in full measure. To know him well was to love him, but so great and so genuine was his modesty that, with a heart full of affection and of longing for affection, he never guessed how much nor by how many he was loved. HORACE THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE. HORACE. CHAPTER I. LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HORACE. I. THE spirit of the Augustan Age survives in the verse of the five poets whose works remain, out of many which were written and enjoyed their share of popularity during the half century in which Augustus was master of the Roman world. The great prose-writer of the age, the historian Livy, tells us little directly about his own time. It is from him and Virgil that we best understand how the past career and great destiny of Rome impressed the imagination during the time of transition from the Re- public to the Empire. But of the actual life, and the spiritual and intellectual movement of the age, our best and almost our sole witnesses are the poets, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. These five poets are of very different value as representatives of their time. The three elegiac poets, although men of refined sensibility and culture, are, in comparison with Virgil and Horace, men of essentially lighter character, living for pleasure, making the life of pleasure the subject of their art, and 2 LIFE OF HORACE. [Cm I. showing little sympathy with the new ideas in the sphere of government, which were shaping the future of the world. The idea of Rome acting on their imagination was not that of the Rome of Ennius, of Virgil, and of Livy, but that of which one of their number writes, Mater et Aeneae constat in urbe sui. They came too late to feel deeply the change which was coming over the world. None of them lived in close in- timacy with the great minister who bore so large a part in shaping the policy of the new Empire, and in recon- ciling the old governing class to the change. They had neither the profound feeling and serious imagination of Virgil, nor the many-sided versatility and strong reflective vein which made Horace the most complete representative and interpreter of his age. It is to Virgil and Horace that the Augustan era owes its rank among the great eras of poetry. Virgil is the exponent of its highest hopes and ideas. In the spheres of government, of national and religious feeling, of all the finer influences of nature and human relationship, it was through him that the most searching, the most idealising, and the most enduring revelation was made. It was in him too that the national literature, after a century and a half of effort, attained its final perfection. But for our knowledge of the actual life of the time, of its manners and humours, of its gaiety on the surface, and of some of its deeper currents of serious feeling, we must go to another representative of the age. And it is in a poet born five years after Virgil, among the Sabellian people of the South of Italy, born like him of obscure parentage, but who, notwithstanding, enjoyed similar advantages of education, who though in early youth separated from him by difference of political sympathy as well as divided by difference of place, became in the first years of his manhood united to him by affection and devotion to kindred studies, that the complement of the genius of the gentle poet from the Cisalpine province is to be found. As Virgil is the most idealising exponent of what was of permanent and I.] HORACE AS REPRESENTATIVE OF HIS AGE. 3 catholic significance in the time, Horace is the most com- plete exponent of its actual life and movement. He is at once the lyrical poet, with heart and imagination re- sponsive to the deeper meaning and lighter amusements of life, and the satirist, the moralist, and the literary critic of the age. The phases of public life and feeling during twenty eventful years, the reflexions suggested by the vicissitudes of national and individual fortune, the pleasures of youth in their refined and piquant aspects, the happiness and the pathetic regrets of the friendships and the social inter- course of maturer years, the idyllic delight of days passed among beautiful scenes endeared by the sense of pos- session and long familiarity, are so idealised in his lyrical poetry, as to preserve their life and meaning for all after times. The social follies and personal eccentricities, the pedantry and pretention, the avarice and meanness as well as the luxurious indulgence of the age are made to pass before us and to teach their lessons in his satire. The true wisdom of life for the individual under these new social and political conditions, the knowledge how to adapt oneself to the world, and the higher knowledge how to be independent of it, are taught in his Moral Epistles. The criticism which the age needed, and which, so far as criticism could, pointed the way to a more mas- culine type of poetry than that actually realised by the poets who came after him, was expounded in the poetical Epistles of his later years. On the whole, we find in his writings the completest picture and the justest criticism of his time, expressed with equal mastery in the language of idealising poetry and of common sense. In no Greek or Roman poet do we find so complete a representation of any time, as we find in Horace of those years of the Augustan age which most deserve to live in the memory of the world. This is the first, and perhaps the chief ground of the prominent place assigned to him in the study of Roman literature. But he has another claim which makes him B 2 4 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. still less likely to be neglected. Among all ancient poets he suits the greatest variety of modern tastes. To a large number of those who receive a classical education he is the earliest, to some the only friend they make within its range. But whatever attraction the gaiety of his spirit and the music of his verse have for the young, it is only after mature experience of life that his full charm is felt, his full meaning understood. He has an attraction not merely of early association for educated men whose lives are cast in other spheres than that of literature : while to those who seek in the study of great poets to gain some temporary admission within the circle of some of the better thoughts, the finer fancies, the happier and more pathetic experiences of our race, he is able to afford this access. To each successive age or century, he seems to express its own familiar wisdom and experience. To Montaigne, to Addison and Johnson, as to our own times, he speaks with the voice of a contemporary. So true beyond his largest expectations was his prophecy : Usque ego postera Crescam laude recens. He is one of the few ancient writers who unite all the cultivated nations of modern times in a common admira- tion. They each seem to claim him as especially their own. But the strongest hold which he has on every generation and every variety of cultivated reader, is that no other writer, ancient or modern, seems equally to speak to each individual as a familiar friend. Among the few happy expressions which meet us occasionally amid the strained phraseology of his imitator Persius, is that in which he characterises this peculiar gift : Admissus circum praecordia ludit. He enters into the mind and heart of every reader through the medium of a style of which, if he is not the inventor, he was at least one of the earliest masters ; one which combines the grace of finished art with the familiar tones of natural conversation. But more than by the medium of I.] ADMISSUS CIRCUM PRAECORDIA LUDIT. 5 his style he excites interest and conciliates affection by the frank trust in himself and in his reader, and the self- respect with which he admits the world into his confidence. He was not indeed the first to establish this relation be- tween an author and his readers. For it was the sense of this relation, of the intimate knowledge of all the secrets of his life, imparted through his works, which was one of the chief attractions to Horace in Lucilius, and which may have attracted Lucilius himself to the Parian poet Archilochus. But no one before Horace had established this relation with such good humour, good taste, and perfect urbanity. There is, consequently, scarcely any figure in literature who seems to be so truly and familiarly known. He lives in his own writings as Dr. Johnson lives for us in the pages of Boswell. Perhaps the impression produced by the correspondence of Cicero may be deemed more trust- worthy than that produced by the apparently artless, yet carefully meditated self-delineation in Horace's familiar writings. But we have many phases of Cicero's mobile nature rather than any distinct image of the man. Hence, though there is no man in antiquity about whom so many particulars are known, there is no one about whose per- sonal character there has been, and still is, so much con- troversy. The self-delineation of Horace, on the other hand, is a work at once of ' Wahrheit ' and of ' Dichtung/ natural and frank and yet a study of art and reflexion. He has not left out the faults or exaggerated the virtues of the original, but he has given to the whole picture of his life, though sketched at different times, unity and con- sistency and the stamp of reality. The personality of Horace may not have been more interesting than that of some of his predecessors among Roman poets, but he applied a keener criticism to himself, and had a more intimate knowledge of himself. His interest in national affairs, in literature, in art and nature, is intermittent; his interest in human life and character never flags ; and he was especially interested in watching and retracing the current of that life which was best known to him. The 6 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. mode of life deliberately adopted by him in Rome and in the country, though as far as possible from being unsocial and ascetic, threw him from time to time largely on his own mind for companionship. He studied himself, as he studied his books, with the enthusiasm of self-culture. In the ma- turity of his powers, he looks back on his past experience as a process of education ; while he is ever striving to realise to his own mind how he stands in the present, and in what spirit he is prepared to meet the chances and the certainties of the future. We are thus able to accompany him better perhaps than any other writer of antiquity, not only in the record of his life, but in marking the trace left by each event and circumstance on the development of his character and intellect. As a set-off to the fullness and frankness of his own self-portraiture, we have to place the scanty evidence we have of the impression which he made on his contem- poraries. There is no mention of him in Tibullus and Propertius, and only one slight notice of him in Ovid ; and that expressive not of any personal interest, but only of appreciation of the musical charm of his verse. The last two of these writers speak often of other contemporary poets with whom they lived in intimacy. Horace belonged to an older set of men of letters, which included Virgil and Varius, Pollio, Fundanius, Octavius, Aristius Fuscus, etc., with all or most of whom, in the earlier years of his literary career, he lived on terms of friendly intimacy ; and in his later years he wished to guide and encourage younger men, in whom he recognised promise of literary distinction. But he seems to have felt that preference which Goethe and Scott, and other men of genius in modern times, have felt for the society of men of action and men of the world over that of men of letters. Though he lived in intimacy and made common cause with the writers of distinction, such as Virgil and Varius, and critics such as Quintilius, he disliked and was probably disliked by the grammarians and literary cliques, who swarmed amid the decay of political life, just as Pope disliked and was disliked by the critics and minor I.] BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES. 7 poets of his time. But it was by critics and grammarians that the personal memory of great writers was kept alive ; and one reason why there was no such traditional admira- tion or affection attaching to the memory of Horace, as there was to the memory of Virgil after his death, was probably that in his lifetime there was no love lost between him and the writers by whom the impression made by a great writer on the world in which he lived was trans- mitted to after times. Thus the only contemporary evi- dence we have of the regard in which he was held is that of Maecenas and that of Augustus preserved by Suetonius, who quotes the beginning of an epigram in which Mae- cenas imitated the playful terms of affection applied by Catullus to Calvus Ni te visceribus meis, Horati, Plus iam diligo and the statesman's dying commendation of his 'vatis amici ' to the Emperor ' Horati Flacci ut mei esto memor.' The tone of the Emperor's letters quoted by the biographer implies an appreciation of the social charm of the poet, and respect for his independence of character. The short life of Horace written by, or abridged from, Suetonius, is based almost entirely on the poet's own writings, and on these scanty memorials of the Emperor and Maecenas ; though it adds one or two facts probably preserved by contemporary grammarians. The statements of Suetonius amount to this : That he was born on the 8th of December in the year 65 B. c., and died on the 27th of November in the year 8 B. C., a few weeks after the death of Maecenas ; that he was a native of Venusia, the son of a freedman, who was also 'auctionum coactor' i.e. the collector of money paid at public auctions and combined other avocations with this ; that he served under Brutus with the rank of military tribune ; that, availing himself of the amnesty granted to the defeated party, he procured the post of clerk in the office of the Quaestor ; that he became intimate with Maecenas and Augustus, and secured a high place in the friendship of both. The biographer adds that 8 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. the Emperor endeavoured to obtain his services as secretary, and showed no resentment when this favour was denied him. By his command, Horace composed the Carmen Seculare, the two Odes (iv. 4, iv. 14) celebrating the victories of his step-sons over the Rhaetians and Vindelici, and the Epistle (ii. i) which begins Cum tot sustineas et tanta negotia solus. From the same account we learn that he died somewhat suddenly, having only time to declare the Emperor his heir by word of mouth, and that he was buried on the Esquiline, close to the tomb of Maecenas. Suetonius tells us further that he was small in stature and fat, and that this circumstance exposed him to some unseemly jocularity on the part of the Emperor ; also that he lived much in his country retreats, in the Sabine district and in the neighbourhood of Tibur, where his house was still shown in the time of Suetonius, near the grove of Tiburnus. This bare outline of facts we are able to fill up from the autobiographical record the ' Dichtung und Wahrheit ' contained in the lyrical poetry and the familiar writings of the poet. We are able, too, to follow his own guidance in noting the influence exercised by the facts and circum- stances of his life on his heart, character, and imagination. In more than one passage of his Odes and familiar writings (Odes iii. 21. i, Epod. 13. 6, Ep. i. 20. 27) he mentions or indicates 65 B.C., the year of the consul- ship of L. Manlius Torquatus and L. Aurelius Cotta, as the year of his birth. Born in the same decennium as the other leaders in action and literature who played their part in the Augustan age, he was in the maturity of his powers in the happiest and brightest epoch of the new era. At the same time his character was formed to independence before the freedom of thought and action, enjoyed under the Republic, was lost. In the final crisis of the Republic he was old enough to be not only a spectator but an actor. Had he been born a few years earlier he might have been too far committed to the Republican cause ever to become I.] THE SABELLIAN RACE. 9 reconciled to the new government. Had the date of his birth been somewhat later, he would probably have been as little interested in the national fortunes, as little braced to manliness in thought and feeling, as Tibullus and Propertius. His birth-place was the old colony of Venusia on the borders of Apulia and Lucania, or, more probably, the farm in its neighbourhood which his father had bought with the proceeds of his business. The district in which he was born was peopled by men of the old Sabellian stock ; and although, in consequence of his father's servile origin, we cannot be sure of the race to which he belonged by birth, yet the strong grain of Italian character and the Italian shrewdness of observation, apparent in his familiar writings, suggest his affinity with that branch of the race which retained longest its original stamp ; just as Virgil's more romantic imagination, and his greater susceptibility of spiritual feeling, suggest his affinity with the more impressible Celtic race of the Cisalpine district. In one of his earliest poems (Epod. 2) Horace speaks, with sympa- thetic pride, of the homely virtues of industry and chastity as being the inheritance of the Sabellian stock ; and in a later poem (Od. iii. 6), the stern discipline of a Sabellian mother is spoken of as the training of the breed of peasant soldiers who overthrew Pyrrhus and Antiochus, and stained the seas with Carthaginian blood. The ' Marsian and Apulian ' (Od. iii. 5) are mentioned together as represent- atives of the Italian soldiery. One of the best types of the Italian yeoman is introduced to us in the person of Ofellus, (Sat. ii. a), living a thrifty and genial life on his small farm, and, after the confiscations which followed the battle of Philippi, working as a hired labourer upon it and applying the lessons of a philosophy not of the schools to his changed circumstances. It is in his mouth that Horace puts the most serious discourse in all his Satires, assigning to him the same office as Lucilius assigned to Laelius in his satire. A type of business-like sagacity is indicated in Servius Oppidius of Canusium (Sat. ii. 3. 168), whose history would 10 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. be known to Horace from the vicinity of that town to Venusia. In Sat. i. 9. 29, he professes to recall the prophecy of a Sabellian crone, that the fate which awaited him in after years was to be talked to death by a bore. Such notices as these scattered through his writings imply that Horace had lived as a child among the peasantry of his native district, that he appreciated their homely virtues and robust character, and that he bore through all his life a happy recollection of the years passed among them. From these early associations he was prepared to enjoy the conversation and ways of his country neighbours in the Sabine highlands as a welcome change from the society of statesmen and men of letters in the metropolis. His childhood and boyhood passed among the Apulian yeomen must have aided in developing those intellectual gifts and moral tendencies which fitted him to be the genial satirist of his age. Another, and quite different gift, he seems first to have become conscious of in the early years passed near Venusia. He has, like the other great Italian poets, a genuine love of Nature. This susceptibility manifests itself in him in a way peculiar to himself and is discernible in the earliest impressions made by outward objects on his imagination. In Horace, the love of nature is shown in the vividness of impression produced by particular scenes l , and by the hold which these scenes gained on his affections. The earliest trace of this definiteness of perception is seen in the familiar passage of the fourth Ode of the third book, in which, with more probably of fancy than of actual memory, he tells the story of the adventure which marked him out as ' a poetic child,' Non sine dis animosus infans. In such graphic touches as 'celsae nidum Acherontiae,' 'arvum pingue humilis Forenti,' we note the individual distinctness of the impressions made on his mind. The 1 Besides many vivid descriptive touches in the Odes, cf. such phrases as ' saxis late candentibus Anxur/ ' rugosus frigore pagus,' from the Satires and Epistles. I.] VENUSIA. I J affection for particular places which he shows in later life, in his mention of Tibur, Lucretilis, the stream Digentia, and the fountain of Bandusia, seems to have been first awakened by the great natural objects by which his child- hood was surrounded ; such as the ' impetuous ' and ' loud- sounding ' Aufidus, whose name he more than once associates with his hope of immortality, the Monte Voltore and the 'Venusian woods' which clothed its sides, and the range of Apulian hills whose familiar outlines he recognises in his journey to Brundisium. The name of the fountain, whose sound charmed his ear in his poetical meridian, and which he has made as famous as the names of the fountains haunted by the Muses on Helicon and. Parnassus, was probably transferred by him from a fountain in the neighbourhood of his early home to that which charmed his ear and fancy in later life. The most important moral influence of his early years was that exercised on his character by the worth, sagacity, and pious devotion of his father. We hear of no other members of his family; and the fact that his father was able to make him the exclusive object of his care, to accompany him to Rome, and to leave him means sufficient to support him in the station in which he was educated, suggests the inference that he was an only son and that he lost his mother in his early years. The attachment between himself and his father is of the kind often found subsisting between father and son when they are the sole surviving members of their race. After Horace had enjoyed the intimacy of the best men of his day, he looks back to his father's influence as one of the happiest circumstances of his life, and attributes to his precepts and example what- ever claim he had to moral worth and social attraction. To the same influence he ascribes the intellectual habit of observing and judging character. To his care also he owed the advantage of the highest education which Rome could give, and the provision of the means which enabled him to complete his studies at Athens. The original position of his father appears to have been that of a public slave of 12 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. the town of Venusia ; and it is supposed that he owed the ancient patrician name of Horatius to the fact that Venusia was included in the Horatian tribe. Horace was himself ' ingenuus ' i.e. born after his father had obtained his emancipation. His father had first held the post of ' coactor,' or collector of money at public auctions. From the scanty emoluments of this post, combined with other business, he saved enough to become the owner of the small farm in the neighbourhood of Venusia where the poet probably was born. Though careful and thrifty like the best type of the Italian yeoman, he was free from the narrowness of self-made men, and while preparing his son for a career more suitable to the promise of his genius than likely to advance him in the race for wealth, he inculcated upon him the wisdom of being content with the provision he had himself made for him. To his training Horace attributes his exemption from the meanness and avarice of which he is so caustic an observer, as well as his im- munity from the more ruinous vices of a corrupt society. Not satisfied with sending him to the school at Venusia where the sons of the provincial magnates were educated, he gave up his own occupation, took him to Rome, acted there as his attendant, enabled him to appear like the sons of men of old hereditary estate, and procured for him the best instruction which Rome could provide. He became the companion, guide, and friend of his son ; and imparted to him the lessons on human life drawn from his own ex- perience. There is scarcely any individual portrait in all ancient literature which leaves on the mind so real an im- pression of worth, affection, and good sense, as this picture of the poet's father. It reminds us of the peasant fathers of two men of genius in modern times, Burns and Carlyle ; of the serious sense of duty in the one and his reverence for the 'traditus ab antiquis mos ; ' of the other's habit of shrewd and caustic observation on the lives and characters of his neighbours. The admiration which these men of genius had for the homely worth and sagacity of their fathers is exactly like that which Horace expresses for his I.] HIS FATHER. 13 peasant father. There are no passages in his writings, among those in which Horace speaks of and from himself, which afford surer evidence of the soundness of his heart and the true metal out of which his character was tem- pered, than those in which he recalls with candour and pride the debt which he owed his father. The vein of genius which made him one of the great poets of the world, is one of the incommunicable gifts QtGiv ipiKvSta SS/pa offffa K(v aural Suatv, fKwv 5' ov/c av TIS Z\OITO but the grain of character which saved him from becoming the slave of. society or of the pleasures to which the mobility and geniality of his temperament exposed him, was clearly his by inheritance. At Rome he received the ordinary literary education under the severe discipline of Orbilius, one of the line of famous grammarians and schoolmasters, dating from the time of Lucilius, to whose writings and teaching much of the definiteness and clearness of Latin style is to be attri- buted. A line from Domitius Marsus, preserved in a frag- ment of Suetonius, Si quos Orbilius ferula scuticaque cecidit justifies the epithet 'plagosus' applied by Horace to his old schoolmaster. In him, according to the account of Suetonius and Macrobius (ii. 6. 3), Horace had a living example of the caustic and censorious freedom of speech which he admired in Lucilius. Orbilius taught with ' more reputation than remuneration,' and wrote a book ' on the wrongs which schoolmasters suffered at the hands of parents.' If Horace received any literary impulse from him, it was probably towards satire rather than artistic poetry. The school-book which he mentions in connexion with the teaching he received at Rome is the ' poems of Livius Andronicus,' probably his Latin translation of the Odyssey, the retention of which as a text-book in education in the Ciceronian age is a proof of Roman conservatism in educational as in other matters. But Horace received also, before he left Rome, some direct initiation into Greek 14 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. literature and some knowledge of the Iliad. The object of the higher school-education during the last half-century of the Republic was to impart an intelligent mastery of Latin and Greek ; to enable the pupil to become in after-life ' doctus sermones utriusque linguae.' Horace was familiar with, though he did not greatly value, most of the old Latin poets, and through all his life was a diligent student of the whole range of Greek poetry from Homer to Menander. The crown of a liberal education in that age was to pass some years at Athens, which attracted the youth of Rome by the spell of its memories and the fame of its living teachers, and afforded them the combined advantages which a visit to the old seats of art and letters, and resi- dence at a great University, afford to a modern Englishman. But these advantages were not accessible to every one; and it must have been quite an exceptional thing for a man of Horace's birth and means to share in the life led there by the younger members of the Roman aristocracy. The enthusiasm for intellectual culture, and the ambition to live with people of distinction, were through all his life powerful motives with Horace ; and he was influenced by both motives in completing his education at Athens. The intellectual gains which he attributed to his stay there were an advance in literary accomplishment, Adiecere bonae paulo plus artis Athenae, and his first introduction to the questions of ethical philosophy, which occupied much of his attention in his later years. It was probably at this time that he became an admirer of Archilochus and the old lyrical poets with whom his own earliest lyrical poems indicate long familiarity. He tells us that his earliest literary ambition was by the composition of Greek verses to be numbered among Greek poets, till warned from so preposterous a purpose by what he poetically calls a vision of Romulus, but what prosaically may be regarded as the suggestion of his own common sense and national feeling. Yet this early attempt to catch the melodies of the old Greek lyrical poets in their I.] HIS EDUCATION: ROME AND ATHENS. 15 own language may have prepared him for that mastery over musical effect and poetical expression which he after- wards attained ; just as their exercises in Latin or Italian verse trained the most classic of our English poets to their consummate mastery of metre and diction. One negative advantage he gained from the completion of his studies at Athens instead of under Greek teachers at Rome, that he escaped the influence of Alexandrinism, under which all the other contemporary poets were educated. But Athens was to him a school of life and social pleasure as well as of literary and philosophic culture. He writes of the time he spent there in the genial spirit in which men recall in after years their college life when it lives in their memory as a time in which they enjoyed their youth with congenial companions, as well as felt the first stirring of intellectual life. It is probable that the tie which bound him to some of the men of his own age and standing, whom he addresses in the language of old intimacy, was first formed in the ' pleasant time ' of his Athenian residence. The arrival of Brutus in Athens in the autumn after the assassination of Julius Caesar was the occasion of great enthusiasm among the Athenian people, who, living more in the memory of their past than in the interests of the present 1 , saw in the act of the conspirators a parallel to the deeds of their own Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The devotion of Brutus to philosophy had been recently proclaimed in those works of Cicero which gave a new impulse to the study in Rome ; and his appearance in the lecture-rooms of the philosophers attracted to his cause, by personal sympathy, the young Romans who were finishing their education at Athens. Horace followed the same impulse which moved his associates. Of the share which he took in the civil war he writes with reserve ; but we have his own assertion that he took part in the battle of 1 Cf. Tacitus, Annals, ii. 53 : ' Hinc ventum Athenas, foederique sociae et vetustae urbis datum ut uno lictore uteretur. Excepere Graeci quaesitissimis honoribus vetera suorum facta dictaque praeferentes, quo plus dignalionis adulatio haberet.' 16 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. Philippi, and held the post of military tribune at the time. His appointment to that post in an army the officers of which were largely drawn from the oldest and noblest families excited considerable envy in ancient, and has given rise to some astonishment in modern times. It seems improbable that Brutus should have appointed a youth of obscure birth and of no military experience immediately to so high a rank. But the presence of Catullus and Cinna with Memmius in his provincial govern- ment, and, somewhat later, of Julius Florus, Titius and other young poets with Tiberius, suggests the inference that his love of literature may have induced Brutus to attach him to his staff, and that the ardour which he showed in the cause, or the proof which he gave of capacity, may have led to his subsequent promotion. In the succinct statement of his claims to distinction which Horace makes in the last Epistle of the first book, he states emphatically the approval of the first men of his time in war and peace, Me primis urbis belli placuisse domique. In what is probably the earliest of all his writings, the 7th Satire of Book i., he gives a graphic account of a scene enacted in presence of the staff when Brutus held his praetorial court at Clazomenae. The sole interest of the piece is the impression it produces of being drawn from actual experience, while the scene was still fresh in the memory of the writer and of those for whose entertainment it was written. The Epistle to Bullatius (i. n) shows his familiarity not only with the more famous cities of Asia and the Greek isles, but with such deserted towns as Lebedos. Expressions in the Odes, such as the ' fesso maris ac viarum militiaeque ' (ii. 6), a parallel to the ' odio maris atque viarum' of the Epistle referred to, and, O saepe mecum tempus in ultimum Deducte (ii. 7), show that he had his share in the alarms and hardships of the campaign which preceded the final conflict with the arms of the Triumvirs. But lines in the Ode last quoted 51.] HORACE IN THE ARMY OF BRUTUS. 1J speak also of convivial pleasures often enjoyed with the comrade who had shared his dangers ; and these remi- niscences may be either of the pleasant times when they were students together at Athens, or of the relaxations from military duties which the luxurious cities of Asia afforded. Of his actual part in the battle, he tells us only that he shared in the general rout and that he left his shield ingloriously behind him. As one of the officers in command of a legion, he probably bore his part in the first action in which the wing under Brutus was successful ; and though he escaped from the final battle unharmed, ' owing to the protection of Mercury,' as he tells us, veiling, as he occasionally does, the actual incidents of his life under mythological allusions, there is no more reason to attribute cowardice to him than to any other survivor of a defeat. To take seriously his ironical adaptation of words long before used of themselves by poets of a most combative and martial spirit, Archilochus and Alcaeus, would be to attribute to a man, who, with all his irony, maintained in his life and writings a habitual self-respect, sentiments which were a habitual source of ridicule in the slaves of Roman comedy. The mode in which he makes his con- fession is in accordance with his habitual candour and ironical self-depreciation. But perhaps his description of himself some ten years later as ' imbellis et firmus parum ' (Epod. i) implies that the experience of defeat had chilled the ardour with which, ' in his hot youth, in the Consulship of Plancus,' he had fought for the Republic. It cannot be thought discreditable to him that he did not adhere to the cause after its leaders had shown their despair of it by committing suicide. If there is any discredit in such action, it is one which he shares with men of high character and position, like Valerius Messalla, whose birth would have made it more incumbent on him to adhere to the Senatorian cause, if it had not been irretrievably lost. Yet, without pressing his own admission against him, it may be granted that in this crisis of his life Horace showed, as he showed in all his later course and in his criticism C 1 8 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. of the world of action and letters, a subordination of en- thusiasm to a sober estimate of things as they were. There is nothing of the spirit of a renegade in his subsequent conversion and acceptance of the new government. Along with the best among the survivors of the defeated cause, he felt that the reconciliation of parties was the first need of the age ; and what was at first a cold acquiescence in re-established order, became sympathetic advocacy, after a common danger and common triumph had united the con- quered and the conquerors. The immediate feelings with which he regarded the overthrow of the Republican cause find expression in some of the earliest of his lyrical composi- tions. In the sixteenth Epode, written probably during the short war of Perusia, he calls on the better part of his countrymen to follow the example of the Phocaeans and to find a new home among the happy islands of the Western Ocean. In the fourteenth Ode of the first book, an allegory written in imitation of Alcaeus, he appears to remonstrate in tones of passionate earnestness with the remnants of the republican party. Both of these lyrical compositions may have exposed him to the charge of having too soon and too absolutely despaired of the Republic. Yet they are written in a spirit the very opposite of the gay and careless tone in which a few years later he expresses his indifference to the public topics of the day, and they betray no unworthy haste in welcoming the star of the new Empire. The permanent effect of the defeat of his cause was to cure him of all illusions. It checked any personal ambition for public distinction. It brought home to him the lesson which he ever afterwards applied, not to expect too much from life, neither to trust the smiles nor to fear the frowns of fortune. He thus learned his philosophy ' vita magistra,' from the teaching of life, and his experience of the vicissi- tudes of fortune, common in an age of revolution, imparts a reality to maxims or reflexions, which otherwise might appear conventional. His opinions in the years imme- diately following the battle of Philippi, recorded in the first book of the Satires, imply his adherence to the speculative I.] THE PERIODS OF HORACE'S LITERARY LIFE. 19 doctrines of Epicurus, inculcating political quietism. With the later revival of his sympathy with the national fortunes, we note a greater sympathy with the attitude of Stoicism, the teachers of which school are introduced merely as objects of ridicule in his early writings. His life as a poet and man of letters, after the years of education and adventure were over, divides itself into three periods of about ten years each, and is reflected in the writings of these different periods. Of his habits, state of mind, ordinary avocations, in the years between 41 B.C. and 29 B.C., which were passed chiefly at Rome, we learn all that we can know from the two books of Satires, pub- lished about the years 35 B.C. and 29 B.C., and from the Epodes, published a little before the latter date. These different works show different aspects of his experience, life, and character. The Satires present him to us as the disinterested spectator of life, the Epodes as one sharing in its passions, animosities, and pleasures. The one work is the expression of his critical and observant faculty, the other of his more ardent feelings, and of that vein of poetry which had not yet found its truest and happiest outlet. The second period, 29 B.C. to 19 B.C., when he was between thirty-six and forty-six years of age, was the meridian of his genius ; the time when he seems to have been happiest as a man, and was most truly inspired as a poet. The record of this period is contained in the larger number of the Odes of the three books published together during this decennium, and in the first book of the Epistles. During the last ten years of his life, his literary activity was much more intermittent, and of his personal position and relations at this time we learn only from the Odes of the fourth book, and from the second book of the Epistles : for the Ars Poetica, even if it belongs to this period, a point about which doubts have recently been raised, is unlike all his other works in this respect, that it tells us scarcely anything about himself. C 2 20 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. II. Horace's Literary Life. [First Period : from 41 B. c. to 29 B. C.] Horace returned to Rome probably in the year after the battle of Philippi, and found himself, in consequence of the confiscation of the territory attached to Venusia, stripped of his home and estate. He speaks in one of his Odes of a narrow escape from shipwreck in the Sicilian sea ; and he often indicates a lively sense of the dangers and terrors of the sea. It is probable that this danger was incurred on his homeward voyage. The comparison which he draws between himself and the soldier of Lucullus vehemens lupus, et sibi et hosti Iratus pariter, ieiunis dentibus acer is a record of the angry and reckless mood in which he first entered on literature. The evidence of the Epodes leads to the conclusion that between his bright days at Athens and on the staff of Brutus, and the position which he soon afterwards enjoyed as a favoured member of the best circle in Rome, he passed through a short interval of struggle and discomfort, and was thrown into the society of men and women towards whom his feelings were uncongenial. He must have lost many of his old comrades by the fortune of war, and he had not yet made new friends among the partisans of Caesar. He not only had the critical faculty of a satirist, but was at this period of his life capable of feeling violent personal animosity; and he retained the resentment of a partisan against some of the prominent re- presentatives of the victorious cause. His earliest writings were in the style of Archilochus, which afforded vent to his private animosities and opened up a field to him in which he might assert his originality, and in the more personal and aggressive vein of Lucilius, in adopting which he aspired to revive a form of the national literature which no one had successfully cultivated since the older satirist. Several of the Epodes and the second Satire of the first book show by the greater coarseness of their tone and their more II.] VIRGIL, VARIUS, AND MAECENAS. 2 1 aggressive personalities, that Horace, on his first return to Rome, was neither so happy in his immediate social rela- tions, nor so fastidious in his pleasures, as he became in the time when the Odes and the Epistles were composed. The happiest circumstance of his life in the early years after Philippi was the friendship which he formed with Virgil and Varius. The appreciation of their qualities expressed in the lines animae quales neque candidiores Terra tulit neque quis me sit devinctior alter, and the appreciation which he received from them, must have done much to restore his natural kindliness and to place his relation to the world on a pleasanter footing. These older poets had made for themselves friends among the chiefs of the Caesarian party. They were thus able to exercise a determining influence not on the fortunes only, but on the whole life and art of Horace, by introducing him to Maecenas. The date of this introduction was probably in 39 B.C., but it was not till nearly a year after- wards that the relations between the poet and the states- man became intimate. From this time, till the death of the great Minister some thirty years later, his affection for Maecenas became the dominant feeling in the life of Horace. The relation between them was as nearly that of equal friendship as such a relation could be in a society based on aristocratic traditions, such as that of Rome was at all times. Although Horace does not conceal a natural sense of grati- fied vanity, especially in the earlier stages of their friendship, and though he owed to it the prosperity of his life, yet through all their intercourse he was resolute in maintaining his independence. It is from Horace chiefly that we learn to know and value the character of Maecenas, and to under- stand the kind of influence that he exercised. He bears strong testimony to the absence of all jealousy and intrigue from the circle of which Maecenas was the centre. When he himself became the most favoured guest in the mansion on the Esquiline, he owed this distinction more to his per- sonal qualities than to his genius. Horace cultivated more 22 LIFE OF HORACE. [CH. I. carefully and valued more highly the qualities which fit men for life, than those which secure distinction in literature. The urbanity and tone of the world which appear natural to him and which in him were combined with perfect frank- ness and sincerity, the tact and reticence which he inculcates and which he seems to have carried into his conduct, must have recommended him to one whose especial function it was to understand and to manage men, and who, if his sympathetic nature required a confidant, wanted one on whose discretion and honour he could rely. His inter- course with Maecenas tended to develope these qualities in Horace. There is a great difference in tone between the ignoble bitterness of the invectives against Canidia, or the coarse personality of the second Satire, and the geniality of those compositions which were written after Horace be- came the intimate friend of Maecenas. Coincidently with this change in tone and temper we find that he attaches himself in literature more to his own countryman the ' comis et urbanus ' Lucilius, than to the angry Greek for whom 'rage forged the weapon of the iambus,' and that it is the urbanity and the frank communicativeness, not the aggressive personality of his master that he reproduces. The fastidiousness which characterized Horace in his literary and social judgments was also a quality which he shared with his patron. Not only the kindlier spirit of his writings, and the tone at once of the world and of distinction, which are a great ground of Horace's modern popularity, but also the more serious aims which he set before himself in his art may be ascribed to the influence of Maecenas. From the testimony, not of poets only, but of historians, we learn that under an appearance of indolence and an entire abnegation of personal ambition, Maecenas concealed great capacity and public spirit, and the most loyal devotion to Augustus. This devotion was not a mere personal sentiment, but was associated with his desire to promote a large, humane, and enlightened policy. It was while Augustus acted in accordance with his advice and that of Agrippa that his rule was most II.] MAECENAS. ' 23 prosperous, and most beneficent. He encouraged the poets associated with him to great and serious undertakings, and to the use of their genius to enlist the national sentiment in favour of the great reformation in manners and character, which he had at heart. It was under this influence that Horace at a later period used his lyrical art to commend to the imagination of his countrymen the ideal of the new Empire l . The two Epodes apparently written immediately before and immediately after the battle of Actium, show that Horace's sympathy with the national cause was at first identified with his personal anxiety for Maecenas. But it is not only in the employment of his lyrical art for the celebration of national glory and the advancement of state policy that we recognise the more serious aims imparted to Horace by this relation. It was owing to his attach- ment to Maecenas and to the circle of eminent men with whom that relation brought him into contact, that he took the leading part in that consciously directed effort to 1 The best commentary on many of the utterances of Horace on public policy, as in Od. iii. 2, iii. 24, is to be found in the long speech in which Dion (lii. 14-40) represents Maecenas as advising Augustus on the principles in accordance with which he should govern. The necessity for severity of punishment insisted on in iii. 24. 25-36, ' O quisquis volet impias,' &c., gains new significance by being compared with such phrases as /xerap/wfywow aiirijv (i. e. rty irar/x'&O KOI KaraKofffitjffov itpo<; TO aoxppovtaTtpov and KO.V -y nal d>s vu\^uar) TI, /ecu f^f"YX^'H' ro} Ka i Ko\aa&-ffToi. The ' Nescit equo rudis Haerere ingennus puer,' (iii. 24. 54), and the precepts of manliness for the training of the sons of Senators and Knights in iii. 2, ' Angustam amice,' are illustrated by lii. 26, tva fcas Tf tTi traTSes (Iffif, ts T& SiSai\cu/0pv, 5O[ifvos ijiuuv ru\tw TTJS car)s KO.I iraffas ras e\iriSas l^cuf kv r^uv. This interpretation not only substitutes the force of scornful irony for the weakness of insincere compliment and the spirit of the whole poem is very far from that of compliment and flattery but affords the only rational explanation of the words cui super Carthaginem Virtus sepulcrum condidit. CH. V.] CLEOPATRA. EPOD. 9. 125 In the grandeur of the pentameter there is surely a re- miniscence of Marius as the conqueror of Jugurtha. The poem is the most powerful example of fierce sarcasm among all the imitations of Archilochus ; and both the occasion and the person against whom it is directed impart dignity and seriousness to the employment of the weapon, as they do to its employment by Catullus against the father-in-law and son-in-law who were ruining the Com- monwealth. The thirty-seventh Ode of Book i, while it is a song of triumph over the downfall of Cleopatra, is a partial retractation of the imputation of cowardice and dishonour. Neither poem could have been written by Horace, had he not felt himself thoroughly identified with the national cause as represented by Caesar. A few of the poems, though written in Archilochian metre, have little if anything of the Archilochian spirit. They express moods and feelings which find their natural outlet in other forms of lyrical poetry. Thus, the first Epode, already referred to in its historical connexion, is a pure expression of Horace's affection and gratitude to Maecenas and of contentment with his own lot, such as we find in several of the Odes, Satires, and Epistles. The third Epode is of the slightest significance, except as it shows the relation of easy familiarity already established between the statesman and the poet, and intimates that when they chose ' discincti ludere,' their ideas of relaxation were not always very intellectual or very refined ; perhaps not less so than those of Goethe and the Duke of Weimar, when they spent hours in cracking whips against one an- other in the market-place. The thirteenth is written rather in the vein of Alcaeus or Anacreon, than of Archilochus. It is a convivial Ode, in which the influence of wine is in- voked to rouse the drooping spirits of himself and his comrades under the depressing influence of fortune and external nature. It may have been suggested by the dis- astrous results of Philippi. The inclement weather outside is symbolical of the inclemency of fortune. The only com- fort is to be found in good wine 126 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. V. Tu vina Torquato move consule pressa meo. Cetera mitte loqui : deus haec fortasse benigna Reducet in sedem vice. That the first hint of the poem is due to a Greek original may be inferred from the opening imagery, which recalls passages in the fragments both of Alcaeus and Anacreon, and from the concluding illustration in which Chiron mingles words of manly cheerfulness with the warning of his doom addressed to Achilles. In the older Greek poets wine and song were glorified as the restorers of life and spirit in trouble and danger Deformis aegrimoniae dulcibus alloquiis. In the Latin poets wine is glorified rather as a bond of companionship, and as affording relief from the monotony of existence ; and the enjoyment of it is more often asso- ciated with bright weather and the grace and freshness of trees and running water than with rain and tempest. The most poetical, and at the same time the most per- plexing in its meaning of all the Epodes, is the second, in which the praises of a country life are put into the mouth of a notorious city usurer, a real, not a fictitious personage, whose whole soul is absorbed in laying out his money at interest on the Kalends of each month. Is the main pur- pose of the poem to ridicule this person and the incon- sistency between his professions and his practice, and is his character dramatically sustained by slight touches, inten- tionally introduced into the body of the poem ? Or does Horace intend to ridicule the insincere enthusiasm for the beauty of nature, which may have become fashionable then, as it perhaps is now * ? Is the poem really a satire in the 1 This is the view of M. Gaston Boissier : ' De toutes les raisons qu'on a donnees pour expliquer cette epode, il n'y en a qu'une qui me semble naturelle et vraisemblable. II etait impatiente de voir tant de gens admirer a froid la campagne ; il voulait rire aux depens de. ceux qui n'ayant aucune opinion personnelle, croient devoir prendre tous les gouts de la mode, en les exagerant. Nous connaissons, nous aussi, ces proneurs ennuyeux de la belle nature, qui vont visiter les glaciers et les montagnes uniquement parce qu'il est de bon ton de les avoir vus, et nous comprenons la mauvaise humeur que devait ressentir de ces enthousiasmes de commande un esprit juste et droit qui ne faisait cas que de la verite.' Nouvelles Promenades Archeologiques, pp. 17, 18. CH.V.] PRAISE OF A COUNTRY LIFE. EPOD. 2. 127 disguise of an idyll, or is it a genuine idyll, gathering into one picture the ideal charm of a country life, as it pre- sented itself to the Italian imagination, and as' it may have been partially realised by the more fortunate yeomen in the Sabine or Apulian highlands, and by members of the cultivated classes who like Tibullus lived on and cultivated their own estates ? Some lines in the poem suit best the ideal life of the Italian yeoman, as the Sabina qualis aut perusta solibus Pernicis uxor Apuli, Sacrum vetustis exstruat lignis focum Lassi sub adventum viri. Others, suggestive of the more indolent pleasures of con- templation, and the final touch, Positosque vernas, ditis examen domus, Circa renidentes Lares, apply better to the refined and comparatively wealthy owners of large estates. The first impression which the poem must produce on every reader, till he is met by the surprise of the last four lines, Haec ubi locutus fenerator Alfius, &c., is that it is a sincere expression of the Italian love of nature and still more of the Italian delight in the labours of the field and their results, and also in the sports of the country Aut trudit acres hinc et hinc multa cane Apros in obstantes plagas. This first impression is confirmed by the resemblance of the poem in tone and substance to the first Elegy of Tibul- lus, a poem written about the same time, and by its agree- ment in spirit with the ideal of such a life worked out in the fullest detail in the Georgics. It has been even sug- gested that Horace intended to parody the master-pieces of his friends. Certainly, if he did, never was art so well concealed. Why should he lavish so much serious poetical power, so many felicitous phrases, on a parody ? such, for instance, as Vel cum decorum mitibus pomis caput Auctumnus agris extulit. Horace would have left it to Bavius and Maevius to parody 128 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. V. Virgil's art, and even if he had wished to parody Tibullus, the pleasure would have been denied to him, as the Elegy was not written till the year 22 B.C., after the Epodes had been published. It is much more likely that Tibullus took hints from Horace *, as he did from the Georgics, than that Horace parodied either. All three deal with a subject which it was as natural for an Italian poet to treat as to sing of war or love. The enthusiasm of Horace, less heartfelt than that of Tibullus or Virgil, is rather of sympathy than of strong personal feeling. He often expresses other feelings also, as those of love and sorrow, through sympathy, rather than directly. The pleasure which he himself derives from his Sabine farm is not the pleasure here described, and this Epode may have been written before or soon after he entered on the possession of it. There is no feeling of personal longing, like that expressed even in the Satires. The art is purely objective. He writes, like Virgil, in sym- pathy with the labours associated with so much of the happiness and worth of the Italian race ; he appreciates the spirit of thrift and industry, developed in such a life, and the material well-being, which are their result ; and he realises the charm to eye and ear which the environment of such a life affords to the man of intellectual culture. The idyllic picture of virtuous and wholesome living is enhanced by contrast with the disorderly passions and luxurious banquets of the town Quis non malarum, quas amor curas habet, Haec inter obliviscitur ? Though neither his own love of the country nor his true lyrical vein is yet fully developed 2 , yet the poem appears to be an early and genuine expression of a poet's sympathy with a life which had great charms for the Italian imagination, and which, if Horace did not sympathise with it from his re- 1 The line in Tib. ii. i. 23, Turbaque vernarum saturi bona signa coloni, written some years later, seems a clear reminiscence of the Positosque vernas ditis examen domus. 1 The profusion of detail is a sign of his earlier manner. CH. V.] DISSIMULATOR OP IS PROPRIAE. 129 collection of the farm on the borders of Lucania and Apulia, he must have learned to appreciate from his intimate inter- course with the author of the Georgics. It is not likely that he found any suggestion of a similar feeling for the charm of a country life in his prototype, who denounces instead of glorifying the land in which his lot was cast. The only old Greek poet who realises the delight of such a life is Aristophanes, who describes its attractions in contrast to the hardships and discomforts of life in town during the Peloponnesian war. A passage (Pax, 569) in which this contrast is made is clearly imitated in the opening lines of the Epode. What, then, is the meaning of the last four lines, in which all these fine sentiments are ascribed to the usurer Alfius ? It is not enough to say, although it is true, that the charm of a country life is enhanced by contrast with the pleasures of making money by usury. But it is characteristic of Horace, when he is most in earnest, to check himself and bring himself back to the ordinary mood in which he meets society. To use a phrase of Mr. George Meredith's, he offers resistance ' to the invasion of the poetic ' by means of ' the commonplace.' It was seen in the Satires and Epistles that he resists ' the invasion ' of an over-earnest mood by satire directed against the paradoxes and the pro- fessors of Stoicism. Two of his noblest national Odes, where his feeling is most tragic or most elevated, end in a stanza of ironical self-depreciation. So he adds a satiric tag to this Epode, to prevent his being taken too seriously. The systematic enthusiasm with which he is carried away to celebrate the happiness of country life, partially checked in the course of the poem, is disclaimed with ' town-bred irony.' The poet, like some modern poets, may have prided himself at that stage of his career more on being a man of the world than on being a man of genius. Whether his art gains or loses most by this extreme self- consciousness, may be a matter of opinion. The Epodes are, on the whole, the least interesting and satisfactory work of Horace. They are, indeed, important K 130 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. V. as revelations of the man and of a particular stage of con- temporary society, which we do not get elsewhere. But they reveal chiefly the less genial side of his nature, his less happy experiences, and his antipathetic rather than his sympathetic relations to society. The impression we form from them must be corrected by that which we form from the Satires written at the same time. The difference be- tween these impressions suggests a caution in judging of the character of a writer from single works or from the writings of a single period. It is from the totality of the impression produced by the works of his whole literary activity, that his nature and character should be judged. By this criterion there is no difficulty in deciding that there is more of the true Horace in the Satires than in the Epodes. The Satires deal absolutely with things as they are, the Epodes aim at a special artistic and imitated effect. The effect at which he aims in the Epodes is ' sal niger,' ill- natured sarcasm ; but Horace's way of looking at life was humorous and genial, rather than ill-natured and sarcastic. The 'carmen maledicum,' as it gratifies the disinterested love of detraction common to all societies, enjoyed great tem- porary popularity in Greece and Rome ; but to maintain its interest for after-times it seems to require not only some unusually pungent force of sarcasm, some force of finished expression, but some celebrity in the object to enable after- times to judge whether the satirist has hit his mark. The first condition of the effectiveness of all such literature is its sincerity. This is what imparts such pungency to the sarcasm of Catullus. His lampoons are perhaps the most powerful expression of concentrated scorn in any language. The objects of his invective such as Clodia, Piso, Mem- mius, Mamurra, Caesar were sufficiently eminent to redeem the attacks from that taint of ignobleness which sticks to the quarrels of obscurer people. In some of the objects of Horace's attack, there is nothing to clear it from this taint. The feeling by which he is moved seems sometimes that of the imitative artist rather than the man. In power of sarcastic expression, he is inferior to Catullus ; in power of CH. V.] CATULLUS, HORACE AND MARTIAL. 131 personal caricature, as in wit, he shows himself in the Epodes inferior to Martial : though the union of humour and grim horror in the representation of Canidia and her associates, male and female, is beyond the imagination of Martial to conceive. The poem in which the power of scornful sarcasm is most worthily employed in union with the vivid presentation of events, as if they were passing before the eyes of an interested and excited spectator, is the ninth, ' Quando repostum Caecubum.' The Epodes have neither the musical charm and variety of the Odes nor their studied felicities of language. The iambic metre does not lend itself to the sonorous effects of the Alcaic stanza, the graceful vivacity of the Sapphic, nor the grave moderation characteristic of some varieties of the Asclepiadean. Horace cannot rival the charm of joyous speed imparted to the pure iambic by Catullus in ' Phaselus ille,' or the fiery force as of launched javelins l in ' Quis hoc potest videre.' But the metre of the earlier Epodes suits their terse epigrammatic style, in which each separate couplet is intended to leave its separate sting. Horace made himself master of this, as of all the other metres employed by him, and left a permanent impression of its power to utter a succession of stinging sentences, or to bring before the imagination a succession of peaceful sights and sounds from external nature. It was for this last purpose that it was reproduced by the great master of metrical effect in the first century of the Empire : Martial, at least, must have seen in the second Epode not a satire but an idyll. 1 Cf. the phrase ' truces vibrare iambos.' Catull. xxxvi. 5. K 2 CHAPTER VI. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. The Odes. I. IT is for his Odes that Horace claims immortality, and it is to them that he chiefly owes it. Scarcely any work in any literature has been so widely and so familiarly known. Almost from the time of their author's death, they became what they have been since the revival of letters, one of the chief instruments by which literary taste and a delicate sense of language have been educated. The music of their verse, the grace, lucidity, and terseness of their diction, the truth and, at the same time, the limitation of their thought, impress them on the memory; while their applicability to the ordinary experience of life has brought them more into the currency of quotation, in speech and writing, than the words of any other writer. Changes in literary taste and speculative thought do not seem to affect the estimation in which they are held. They gain and retain the ear of each generation from the perfection of their form and the importance of their meaning. No ancient writer has so much excited and so much baffled the ambition of translators ; and scarcely any still con- tinues to find so many critics and interpreters. Yet among his professed admirers, the most opposite opinions appear to prevail as to the ground on which his distinction as a lyrical poet chiefly rests. He seems to speak to each reader in accordance with his prevailing mood. To one large class his message to his generation, commended by the perfection of form and melody in which VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE ODES. 133 it is conveyed, seems to be nothing more than to enjoy the present day and to be undisturbed about the future. To others he appears at his best as the interpreter of the great- ness of the Roman Empire. Others again turn with most sympathy to the graver utterances and wiser lessons of his philosophy of life. One great authority on at least one part of his message finds his true nature, not in the ' gaiety and wit,' the ' easy mirth,' which inspired ' his social hours,' but in the humblest note of those sad strains Drawn forth by pressure of his gilded chains, As a chance sunbeam from his memory fell Upon the Sabine farm he loved so well, Or when the prattle of Bandusia's spring Haunted his ear, he only listening l . To one ingenious critic it appears that, while some of the Odes may be written in the vein of Anacreon, others in that of Alcaeus, others in that of Pindar, yet regarded as a whole, they are conceived rather in the spirit of ' the Si- monidean dirge,' ' Ceae neniae,' and that their immediate motive was, first, to utter a lament over the tragedy of the civil wars, and, secondly, to point the moral of the tragic career of Licinius Murena. This variety of impressions produced on different minds is a proof of the versatility of the poet and of the strong personal hold which he lays upon his readers. He has a very distinct individuality as a man and a writer ; and it is one of the great charms of the Odes, as it was seen to be of the Satires and Epistles, that this individuality is vividly present in them. But he had also the emotional suscepti- bility of a true lyrical poet, and was thus able to throw himself with sympathetic feeling into the public and per- sonal life of his age, to express with elevation what his fellow-countrymen felt in a great national crisis, and to make the thought, the culture, the ethical tendency, as well as the mirth and gaiety of a great epoch in civilisation, live for ever in the imagination of the world. From the fact that Horace in various places, as in the 1 Wordsworth, Liberty (1829). 134 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. Ode to Agrippa, the concluding stanzas of the Ode to Pollio, and of the third Ode of Book iii, speaks of his Muse as best fitted for the lighter themes of love and wine, the conclusion is sometimes drawn that, in his own opinion, to sing of these was his true function as a lyrical poet. But in the Ode to Agrippa he is merely expressing the same disinclination to describe, in elaborate poems, the military events of the day, which he had expressed in the dialogue with Trebatius in his Satires ; and in the other places he checks himself, as he does habitually in the expression of his deeper feelings and higher enthusiasm, with the ironical urbanity of one who is, above all things, ' dissimulator opis propriae.' In other passages he claims to be the ' High Priest of the Muses,' the inspirer of loyalty and patriotism, and the teacher of public duty. He claims not only immortality for his own verse, but its power to crown with immortality the civic virtues of his contemporaries. In boasting that he has raised a monument more enduring than bronze, and in associating the eternity of his completed work with the eternity of Rome, he asserts a greater claim than that which in one of his earlier Odes he makes for the lighter songs of his idle hours si quid vacui sub umbra Lusimus tecum, quod et hunc in annum Vivat et plures. Thus if we are to judge Horace by his own estimate of his art, it is in its graver rather than its lighter tones that we should find the secret of its greatness. In the Ode just quoted, and in a later one written after an escape from sudden death, in which he represents sym- bolically the enduring power of poetry, and seems to anti- cipate his own permanent rank among the great lyrical poets of the world, he indicates, as he does in both the first and second books of the Epistles, his wish to be regarded as the Alcaeus of Rome. And of Alcaeus he speaks as the poet who sang of ' battles and banished tyrants ' and also inter arma Sive iactatam religarat udo Litore navim, 1.] HORACE AND THE GREEK LYRIC POETS. 135 Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illi Semper haerentem puerum canebat Et Lycum nigris oculis nigroque Crine decorum. Had he regarded himself as specially the poet of plea- sure, it is with the Teian Anacreon that he would have claimed kinship ; or had he felt himself to be the poet of passionate love he would, like Catullus, have hinted at the relation of his own Muse to the Muse of Sappho. By claiming Alcaeus as his prototype he seems to imply that he regarded his lyre as equally tuned to the lighter pleasures and to the sterner and more dignified interests of life. At a later stage of his lyrical career, when called upon to celebrate the victories of Drusus and Tiberius, while he introduces himself as the poet who had sung and still was moved to sing in the vein of Alcaeus singing of Lycus, in the next Ode, while disclaiming all rivalry with Pindar, he yet indicates that it is in his spirit that he desires to accom- plish his task. As his attitude to Greek systems of philo- sophy was that of an eclectic with apparently a preference for Aristippus, so he is somewhat of an eclectic in his atti- tude to the lyric poets of Greece. He seems to have wished not only to embody the spirit of Alcaeus and Pindar in his own lyrical expression, but to temper it with the spirit of Anacreon, with the sadder mood of Simonides, with some faint glow of the ' calores ' of Sappho, and with much of the moral gravity which he attributes to Stesi- chorus. With the mobile temperament of true lyrical genius, and with the sympathy of a many-sided culture, he could enter into and reproduce the predominant moods of these various writers in accordance with the special occa- sion which moved him to write, and with the deepening and refining influence of time on his own nature. If then we ask which was the predominant vein in him, it would seem natural to look for his gayer feeling in his earlier, and his graver tones in his later work. And this expectation is on the whole realised. But there is some- thing exceptional in the part played by Horace, as at once 136 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. the idealising lyrical poet of his age, the realistic author of the Satires, and the critic of the later Epistles. The double function of lyrical idealist and satiric realist may have been combined in Archilochus, among the ancients : and there are brilliant examples of the union of lyrical genius with the serious and humorous criticism of life and literature in modern times. But it is difficult to realise that the artistic idealist of the Odes is the same man who wrote the ' Journey to Brundisium ' and the ' Banquet of Nasidienus.' Did Horace discover the true vein of his genius only after the age of passion and illusion had gone ? This at least is certain ; it was only after he had reached middle life that the richest vein of his lyrical genius revealed itself, and that he gained sufficient mastery over his art to express by its means the larger results of his own experience and observation. The Odes of the second and third books, which contain the maturest expression of his mind, belong probably without any exception to the years immediately following the battle of Actium. Several of those in- cluded in the first book (e.g. 24, 29, 31 and 37) fall in the same period. But a certain number of them belong to the years before that event, when the poet was still engaged in the composition of the Satires and Epodes ; and some of them probably go back to the years immediately following his return to Rome after Philippi. Some (e. g. 4, 7, 28) are in form, though not in spirit, written after the model of Ar- chilochus ; and others, from the similarity of their substance, may be assumed to have been the product of the time during which he was engaged in the composition of the Epodes. In the Odes of the first book there are clearer traces than in the later books of the imitative processes by which Horace formed his art. Thus Odes 9, 14, 18, and 37 all begin with lines translated or closely imitated from Alcaeus. The sixteenth appears to be immediately suggested by the palinode of Stesichorus. In some he seems to be merely reproducing the memories of Greek art and poetry, without associating them with anything in the public or private life of the day. The treatment of his subjects is more I.] THE FIRST BOOK OF ODES. 137 artificial and conventional ; the tone is lighter and more careless ; the substance slighter than in his later Odes. No deeper philosophy of life or higher teaching is found in them than that summed up in the maxim 'carpe diem.' About half of them are more or less connected with the pleasures of love and wine. Only five are inspired by serious interest in national affairs. In the note struck by the words Quid Tiridaten terreat, unice Securus, he professes his own exceptional indifference to the public questions of the day; and although such Odes as 2, 12, 14, 35, 37, shew that in a serious crisis of the national fortunes he felt profoundly 'the grief and the alarm ' which weighed on the Roman world in the troubled years between the death of Julius Caesar and the capture of Alexandria, yet the dominant note of the book is that indicated in the short Ode with which it concludes ' Persicos odi ' which is intended to relieve the severer strain of the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventh. If the spirit of the Odes is to be judged by the prevailing tone of those contained in the first book, composed for the most part apparently between the years 38 or 37 and 30 B.C., we should think of Horace, as he shows himself before the curtain falls on the first act of his lyrical representation, as the Anacreontic singer of the lighter joys of life sub arta Vite bibentem. Yet even in this book his gaiety is not so light-hearted as it appears. Often it seems to be a mood to which he gives way as a relief from painful memories or anxious forebodings. There is a ground tone of sadness under the graceful gaiety of his Epicurean maxims. He feels not only the inclemency of the times, and the vicissitudes in his own fortunes, but also the { riddle of the painful earth.' But he early applied to himself and others the lesson expressed at a later time in the lines Laetus in praesens animus, quod ultra est, Oderit curare et amara lento Temperet risu. 138 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. His gaiety is not the gaiety of the man of pleasure, follow- ing his natural bent without reflexion, as is that of Ovid and Catullus, but rather that of a man who fought against the melancholy suggestions of the times, of his own fortunes and his own temperament, and was able to rise buoyantly above them. The dominant tone of the Odes in the second book is reflective and didactic ; and the vein of melancholy latent in a few of the Odes of the first book comes out fully in several of those of the second. The Ode by which the book is introduced is the only one which deals with public affairs, and that not with their present, but with their past phase. The civil wars are looked upon as closed, and their tale is regarded as not indeed without elements of glory, but essentially sad and tragical, and still suggestive of forebodings for the future. The book is con- siderably shorter than either the first or the third book, and in the metres employed he adheres with only one exceptional experiment to the Sapphic, the Alcaic, and one variety of the Asclepiad ; the Sapphic being used to ex- press his lighter and happier, the Alcaic his more thought- ful and pensive mood. As in all three books, his gayer interchange with his graver or sadder tones. But in this book the latter predominate. His philosophy is no longer confined to the maxims of enjoyment, but extends to the wise conduct of life, and to the limitation of those desires which disturb its peace. He begins to speak in the tones of a censor, as in 18 ' Non ebur neque aureum.' He is more serious and sympathetic in the expression of his personal feeling, as in 3 (' Aequam memento '), 6 (' Septimi Cades'), 9 (' Non semper imbres'), 13 (' Ille et nefasto '), 14 (' Eheu fugaces '), 17 (' Cur me querelis '), 20 (' Non usitata '). To all of these, as well as to 1 8, the thought of death and what comes after gives their pervading character. The theme is suggested not only by the thought which enters into all his meditations on life, but by danger apparently from fail- ing health or accident threatening his own life, and by anxieties for one whose life was as dear to him as his own. 1.] THE SECOND AND THIRD BOOKS. 139 The love poems, by which the prevailing tone of pensive melancholy is relieved, are absolutely free from any trace of personal passion. They are humorous and ironical, and composed in the spirit of one Cuius octavum trepidavit aetas Claudere lustrum, and who finds amusement in contemplating the affairs of his younger associates. The general character of the book is marked by greater independence in his art, greater maturity of thought, and a deepening of seriousness in his personal relations and in the feeling with which he contemplates life. Non usitata nee tenui ferar Penna, is the self-assertion of a poet who wished himself to be regarded as something more than the ' idle singer of an empty day.' There is greater maturity of thought and feeling in the Odes of the third book ; and still more prominence is given in them to the graver interests of life. He assumes in its opening stanza the office of the priest of the Muses, the prophetic teacher of the new generation. The world has entered on its new life. There are no longer regrets for the past, except in so far as the corruption of the age calls for a remedy. In this book he is, like Virgil, the national and religious poet of Imperial Rome. There is accord- ingly a severer tone in his moral teaching (' Intactis opu- lentior/ iii. 24), and a graver and more imaginative utter- ance of his philosophy of life (' Tyrrhena regum progenies,' iii. 29) ; yet in all his art, as in his life, he aims at tempering the grave interests of life with its gaiety and charm. In those which express this charm, whether in human and social relations, or in nature (as 7, 13, and 23), there is a purer and more disinterested feeling. He shows not only greater maturity of art, but is conscious of a more powerful inspiration (' Quo me, Bacche, rapis/ iii. 25). He is more proudly conscious of the greatness of his task, and of the success with which he has accomplished it. In his last 140 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. poem he associates the eternity of his fame (as Virgil does in the ninth Aeneid) with the great symbol of the eternity of Rome dum Capitolium Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex. The fourth book and the Carmen Seculare were tasks which he was called upon to perform on a great public occasion and in celebration of great victories. The serious and national tone is naturally that which predominates in them. The Odes inspired by public feeling are relieved by others, either the direct expression of personal feeling, or dealing with the old subjects of love and wine ; but these are evidently subsidiary to those referring to public events. The composition of his Odes may therefore be considered as having extended over nearly the whole of his literary career. But it was in the eight or ten years following the battle of Actium, when the national mind was most stirred, and the conditions of his own life were most favourable to lyrical inspiration, that his art was most mature. It is un- certain whether any of the Odes were in any way pub- lished at the time of their composition, and if so, what was the mode of their publication. In his Satires he declares his aversion to the practice of public recitation, but he was willing to gratify a select audience nobilium scriptorum auditor et ultor. It is natural to suppose that the Odes addressed to in- dividuals should have been sent to them, and should thus have obtained some currency before they were published collectively. It is possible also that there may have been some partial publication of some collection of his Odes before the completion of the first three books. But the Epilogue, when compared with the Prologue, shows that these three books were finally published as a collective whole, and were so regarded by the poet. They were so arranged also as to give a different character to each of the three books, and to make them representative of the earlier, middle, and mature period of his lyrical activity. Yet this purpose is modified by his strong determination to avoid !.] DATE OF CARM. I-III. 141 harping too long on the same string. Thus some of his slightest pieces, expressive of his most careless moods, are interspersed among the graver utterances of the third book. So, too, whilst the great mass of the Odes in the first book belong to his earliest period, one at least (i. 24), if we can trust the date given by Jerome for the death of Ouintilius, must have been composed seven years after the battle of Actium. But there are several about which we can speak with considerable confidence as reflecting the public sentiment during particular phases of the national fortunes, or as repre- sentative of the poet's art at different stages of its maturity, and of his personal feelings at different stages of his career. There is one of these (i. 3) the date of which has excited much controversy ; as on the view taken of it depends the view taken of the date of the publication of the three books. Two views are held about this date : one that the poems were not given to the world in their present shape till about the middle of the year 19 B.C. ; the other that they appeared some time in 23 B.C. The first opinion rests mainly on the opinion formed as to the occasion of the composition of the Ode, ' Sic te diva potens Cypri.' That Ode is addressed to the ship which was to bear Virgil on his voyage to Athens. We know that Virgil sailed to Athens in the spring of the year 19, and, on his return in September of the same year, died on landing at Brundisium. We know of no other voyage to Greece made or con- templated by him. But we know very little of the events of his life from the time that he retired to Naples about 37 B.C. We hear vaguely that he visited and lived for some time in Sicily; and passages in the third and fourth books of the Aeneid seem to reproduce the impressions of an eye- witness of the scenes there described. There is at least no improbability that Virgil made an earlier voyage to Greece, the impressions of which may perhaps be traced in the account of the voyage of Aeneas among the islands of the Aegean and past the shores of Epirus. If the Ode refers to his last voyage, it must have been composed immediately before the publication of the three books, which must then 142 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH.VI. have taken place in the interval between the departure of Virgil and his death in the following September. The position assigned to it among Odes all referring to the earlier period of Horace's art, would in that case be very remarkable. It is urged that Horace wished to introduce his work to the world with Odes indicative of his relations to Maecenas, Augustus, and the greatest poet of the age. If it was intended to do special honour to Virgil by this juxtaposition, that purpose might have been served by placing there the twenty-fourth Ode, which is a truer tribute to his worth. If the poem were really written after the completion of the Georgics and Aeneid, we should have expected not only an expression of personal affection, but some reference to Virgil's pre-eminence as a poet. Dif- ferent opinions may be formed as to the relative merits of the poem. It certainly shows imaginative power and con- centrated energy of expression. But the thought is con- ventional and unreal. It is essentially the old theological thought of the sinfulness of human enterprise, to which Hesiod first gave expression, and which Virgil has himself reproduced in the fourth Eclogue Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis, Quae temptare Thetim ratibus, &c. It is true that even in Horace's maturest art the thought is often obvious and commonplace. But then it is in ac- cordance with fact, and is a comment on real experience. A somewhat similar thought is expressed in iii. 24 si neque fervidis Pars inclusa caloribus Mundi nee Boreae finitimum latus Durataeque solo nives Mercatorem abignnt, horrida callidi Vincunt aequora navitae. There is solidity and reality in the thought that the stimulus to all the enterprise of the time is the passion for luxury. That an event so ordinary as a voyage from Brundisium to Greece should suggest the thought that the wickedness of man will not allow Jove to lay aside his angry thunderbolts, is so little in keeping with the moderation of i.] DATE OF CARM. /-///. 143 Horace in the maturest period of his art, that it has been explained as irony. Yet it is still more improbable that in this Ode, bidding god-speed to the friend of whom he speaks as ' animae dimidium meae/ he is rallying him on his timidity. The lines in ii. 9. 18-24 et potius nova Cantemus Augusti tropaea, have been thought to refer to the results obtained from the Parthians in the year 20 B.C. But a comparison of the stanza Medumque flumen gentibus additum Victis minores volvere vertices, Intraque praescriptum Gelonos Exiguis equitare campis, with Virgil's description of Caesar's great triumph on his return from the East in 28 B.C. (Aen. viii. 725), Hie Lelegas Carasque sagittiferosque Gelonos Finxerat ; Euphrates ibat iam mollior undis, renders it much more probable that these lines refer to the events in the East following the capture of Alexandria, which produced a great impression at Rome ; and that the poem was written in the year 27 B.C., immediately after Caesar received the title of Augustus. While therefore the evidence afforded in these two Odes does not require the date of publication to be deferred to the year 19 B.C., the evidence of the first book of the Epistles points to the con- clusion that that book was given to the world not later than 19 B.C., and that it appeared at some considerable interval of time after the appearance of the Odes. In the first Epistle Horace speaks of himself as having laid aside c versus et cetera ludicra.' He excuses himself to Maecenas, who wished him to resume his old task, with the plea, Non eadem est aetas, non mens. The reference to Alcaeus in Ep. i. 19 Hunc ego non alio dictum prius ore Latinus Vulgavi fidicen and the following lines, prove that when that Epistle was written the Odes were generally known and criticised. 144 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. The evidence of the Epistles is thus conclusive against assigning so late a date as 19 B.C. for the publication of the three books of the Odes. The other date generally assigned to the publication is the year 23 B.C., before the death of Marcellus, and the detection of Murena's con- spiracy, which event took place in 22 B.C. It is urged with much force that it would have been inconsistent with the tact and good feeling of Horace to have sent forth the stanza Crescit occnlto velut arbor aevo Fama Marcelli, in which a stress is laid on the connexion of the house of Marcellus with the Imperial family, after the death of the young heir of the Empire had given to that connexion so painful a significance. It might perhaps be urged on the other hand, that it would have been even more marked to have omitted the stanza from an Ode written many years before the event and familiarly known : the stanza would still remain as a record not only of the old con- nexion formed by the union of Octavia with the father of the young Marcellus, but of the closer connexion created by his marriage with Julia. Still it would be remarkable that the lyrical poet of the Empire should have remained silent on an event which made so profound and lasting an im- pression on the Roman people l , and which was lamented not only in the great epic poem of the age, but in the work of a poet almost entirely absorbed in his own passion, if it had occurred before the completion and publication of the three books of the Odes. The Ode iii. 19, in which it is not easy to find any other theme than that of a festive meeting held in honour of Murena, presents a similar difficulty. If the spirit of that Ode is entirely genial and friendly, it seems hardly possible that Horace would have published it after he knew of the punishment which had overtaken 1 Cf. Tac. Annals, ii. 41 : ' Sed suberat occnlta formido reputantibus hand prosperam in Druso patre eius favorem vulgi, avunculum eiusdem Marcellum flagrantibus plebis studiis intra iuventam ereptnm, breves et infaustos populi Romani amores.' I.] MURENA. 145 one so nearly connected with his friend and patron Mae- cenas. The answer given to this by Mr. Verrall is that the spirit is one not of friendly congratulation, but of mocking irony; and he finds the motive not only of that poem, but of the severest utterances and the most elaborate symbolism in the book (Od. iii. 4 and 24), in the painful feeling excited by the career of Murena. The nineteenth Ode is one of those in which Horace expresses himself not directly but dramatically, and this he does with an abruptness and ap- parent want of continuity to which there is scarcely any parallel. This at least appears, that neither this Ode nor ii. 10, directly addressed to the same person, implies that Horace had any strong personal regard for Murena. He might have still retained both Odes, even after Murena's disgrace and fall, as a record of warnings that had been delivered to him in the time of his prosperity, possibly at the instance of Maecenas himself, and as pointing the moral of a proud heart going before destruction. This we may regard as possible without assigning to the tragedy of Murena anything like the prominence which is given to it by Mr. Verrall. On such a supposition we might assign the publication of the Odes to the year 22, rather than 23. This would admit of that special reference , to the riotous disturbance in the year 22, which Mr. Verrall, with his usual acuteness, finds in the lines (iii. 24. 25) O quisquis volet impias Caedes et rabiem tollere civicam, Si quaeret PATER VRBIVM Subscribi statuis, indomitam audeat Refrenare licentiam. And this date seems to agree with the evidence of Ep. i. 13, in which Horace sends his Odes (carmina, not sermones or satiras] by the hands of Vinius to Augustus. He writes to Vinius, whom he supposes still on his journey, a letter recapitulating the instructions which he had given him at starting. He supposes that he has not yet reached his destination at the time the letter is written, and he urges him to press on per clivos, flumina, lamas. L 146 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH.VI. This looks as if the Odes were sent to Augustus while absent from Italy; between the latter part of the year 22 and the latter part of 19 B.C. These considerations are insufficient to fix the date definitely; but they seem to limit it to the year 23 or 22 B.C., with a bias of probability in favour of the latter date. The date of the Carmen Seculare is fixed for the year 17: the fourth book of the Odes after the year 15. There is a general but not absolute adherence to chronological order in the Odes written in connexion with public events. This chronological order is not necessarily that in which the poems were composed. Thus the second poem of Book i. may have been written after the twelfth, possibly after the thirty-seventh, and yet may be intended to give expression to the feelings of an earlier time. II. The first general impression we form of the Odes of Horace is that they are in form and expression the poetry of one who is emphatically an artist and a poet of culture, rather than of strong native inspiration. He does not. like some of the great lyrical poets of modern times, give back to his people their own joys and sorrows in their own language. He speaks through a Greek medium to a class of cultivated men and women, to whom Greek life and Greek art were thoroughly familiar. It was in the Augustan age that the genius of Italy was finally perfected by that union with the genius of Greece, still surviving in her art and literature, which had been becoming more and more close ever since the days of Ennius. And no one, not even Cicero in a previous age, nor Virgil in his own, felt more deeply the spirit of Greek culture than Horace. It had drawn him to Athens in his earliest youth ; it had for a time almost induced him to forget his nationality, and, instead of making a new place for himself among the Roman poets, to ' attempt to add one more recruit to the mighty host of Greek bards ' ' magnas Graecorum implere II.] GREEK ELEMENT IN THE ODES. 147 catervas.' In one of the purest utterances of his personal feeling (ii. 6), his heart is touched by Greek associations, and his longing for Tibur and Tarentum seems to gather strength from the memories of their foundation by Greek settlers. But fortunately his national feeling and his com- mon sense were stronger forces in him than his sympathetic culture. His ambition is to make the old art of Lesbos and Ionia live again in Italian measures, associated with the greatness of Rome, the varied beauty of Italy, and the interests of the hour, as Virgil had made the grace of the Sicilian pastoral live again in association with the beauty of his native district, and the vicissitudes of his personal fortunes. As the poet of culture, Horace sets before him- self purer models than even Virgil had in his earlier works. He aspires to breathe the fresh air of the morning of Greek creation, and by the inspiration thus derived to glorify the realism of Roman public life and Roman pleasure, and his own relation to the world and to nature. What distinguishes him and Lucretius from all other Roman poets, is that they sought none but the 'integros fontes.' The absolute sincerity of the one, the faultless critical taste of the other, made them equally averse to re-echoing the Alexandrian echoes of a greater time. Yet the culture of the Roman world was more deeply steeped in Alexandrianism in the time of Horace than in that of Lucretius ; and though Horace, for the form of his art, for something of his thought and much of his diction, goes back to Homer and the Greek lyric and tragic poets, yet in his use of Greek mythology as a kind of storehouse of romantic adventure, and in his numerous geographical allusions, we see that he is yielding to tastes formed and fostered by Alexandrian learning. But if we compare Horace in these respects with so thorough an Alexandrian as Propertius, we find that it is the personages and the tales of mythology familiar from Homer and Pindar and the Greek tragedians, not the obscurer beings and more artificial fancies of later creation, that live for us again in the Odes, and that his geographical allusions are not introduced as so much dead learning, but L 2 148 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH.VI. give new life to his subject by names which stirred the imagination in his own day with the thought of distant lands, or wild and wandering tribes on the confines of the Empire, or seas, suggestive of the enterprise of the present time and the memories of a more adventurous past. This is the first impression we get from the Odes. We seem to be living in a kind of renaissance of Greek art and fancy. Perhaps it is a note of his wish to recall into life a Greek ideal, associated with poetry, that he begins his enumeration of the various ambitions of men with the lines ' Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum,' &c. There was in the age of Augustus a revival corresponding to the romantic revival, and one corresponding to the aesthetic revival of modern times. Virgil and Livy are the purest exponents of the first : Horace in his Odes of the second. But the time was also one of a great living movement, of a great revolution in human affairs, accompanied at first by a great disturbance in men's minds, afterwards by a settled determination of thought and feeling into new lines. It was a time by its sufferings and vicissitudes cal- culated to stimulate reflexion on the problems, the duties and interests of life. It was a time of great wealth and luxury, m which the refinement of pleasure afforded a piquant attraction to the senses, while the extravagance of luxury afforded an appropriate theme for satire to the moralist. If Horace lived in imagination in the poetry of the past, he had lived his own life also ; in the world of pleasure, and in retirement from the world, in active social inter- course with the men most eminent in literature and society, and in the most confidential intimacy with the man who was then the chief depositary of the secrets of state, and whose position called upon him to study and understand all the forces by which the new empire was consolidated. He felt, more than most poets, the two impulses spoken of by a poet of our own day, one driving him ' to the world without,' and ' one to solitude ' ; and in his solitude he shaped into artistic form and melody the thoughts and 11.] THE IDEAL OF ROME. 149 observations which came to him in the actual stir and hurry of life. If in his art and the mere ornament of his art no one is more of a Greek, no one is more essentially Roman in his sympathy with the great characteristics of his race and the dominant feeling of his time. Like Virgil he has an ideal Rome, glorified in his imagination ; and of that Rome Augustus gradually becomes the representative. This ideal makes him more vividly conscious of the de- generacy and corruption of the actual Rome, and moves him to assume the function of a censor and reformer, as Lucretius is moved by his vivid consciousness of the differ- ence between the ideal of life possible to man, and its actual condition. The great Roman qualities recognised in all the great representative Roman writers in Ennius, Lucretius, and Virgil, as in Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus the imperial feeling, the sense of the majesty of government, the moral fervour and gravity, have found a powerful voice in the light singer of pleasure and amusement. Even in expression he combines in a remarkable degree Roman strength and concentration with Greek grace and subtlety. He has also the special Italian susceptibility to pleasure, to social enjoyment, and to the enjoyment of nature. He has further the strong self-consciousness which gives such an interest to the ' confessions ' of Catullus and Ovid. But the consciousness of Horace is more reflective. He not only receives vivid impressions from the world without and from the movement of his own spirit, but he medi- tates upon them ; on the lessons they have to teach, and on the best mode in which they can be artistically repre- sented. He does not, like Lucretius and Virgil, concen- trate his thought for years on one great theme, so as to embody in one continuous work of art a great philosophy of nature and human life, or a great representative poem expressive of what Rome and Italy mean for all time ; but, with the more mobile temperament of a lyrical poet, he keeps heart, mind, and imagination alive to all that can stir them ; and thus in a series of short lyrical pieces, varying in length from two to twenty stanzas, and arranged 150 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. with the intention of constantly varying their theme, and the mood in which they are to be received, he too has raised a ' monumentum acre perennius,' truly representative of the Augustan age, in its anxieties and alarms, its aspirations and exultations, its new faith and loyalty, its revived re- ligion ; in the lesson which its experience teaches, as well as in what was most vivid and piquant in social life, and what there was of purer and more refined enjoyment in the experience of its happiest and most gifted spirits. It is an unprofitable question to ask whether Horace's true function was to be, what he sometimes is, the serious, national, religious and philosophical representative of his age ; or, as he often is, the ironical and yet not unsym- pathetic singer of its lighter moods ; or the simple poet speaking from his own heart of what gave himself the purest pleasure. But to appreciate him through the whole range of his powers and susceptibilities, we may ask how he fulfils each of these functions. While the arrangement of his poems which he himself adopted must be borne in mind as indicating the artistic impression which he wished to produce, it is necessary to find some other principle of arrangement, so as to estimate fairly his varied gifts as a lyrical poet. Recognising the obvious fact that through all his poetic career he aims both at inspiring and teaching, and also at amusing his generation, that he uses his poetry both as an organ of impersonal feeling and thought, and as the outlet of his own personal experience and his own in- nermost feelings, we may try to estimate him first in his most serious and most impersonal vein, next in his mirth and gaiety, as the poet who reproduced to his own genera- tion the epam/cd and o^/xTrori/cd of Alcaeus, and lastly, as the poet who charms us by the revelation of himself. It is in- deed a peculiarity of his art that he always makes us feel the presence of his own personality; but in some poems he is merely the sympathetic onlooker, or his own experience is appealed to as the witness of some impersonal truth ; in others the expression of himself is the whole motive of the poem. 111.] NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS ODES. 151 III. In the first division we consider his national, religious, philosophical and ethical poems. Some careless utterances, such as the Mitte civiles super urbe curas, &c. might to some readers suggest a doubt whether he was really deeply interested in the national fortunes, and whether all his expressions of public feeling are not more or less official. But the answer is that the various moods which he expresses are intended to heighten or to relieve one another. He acts on the principle he so well expresses in the words neque semper arcum Tendit Apollo. There is a time to feel the strain of public anxiety, and a time to forget that and all other cares in social enjoyment. So, too, private griefs are to be forgotten in sympathy with national triumphs (ii. 9). He has the justest sense of the true proportions of things, and distinguishes sharply be- tween the passing excitement raised by some rumour of distant trouble, and the real crises involving serious danger to the State. But in these, the great crises of the national fortunes, he feels and expresses the spirit which might animate a patriotic statesman, and during all the changing phases of the revolution which he witnessed, he seems to express, in his Odes, the deeper mood of the nation, from the anxiety verging on despair of the years between 40 and 30 B.C., to the deep security that followed it. He shares the patriotic sorrow and anxiety which all except the devotees of a lost cause must have felt during the final struggle between Caesar and the remnants of the Pompeian faction. He recognises that the one need of the State is reconcilement, and acknowledges that the only ruler who can reconcile the Roman world is the man whose first duty was, as the avenger of Julius Caesar, to crush the remnants of the party for which Horace himself had fought (i. 2) *. 1 ' Caesaris ultor ' seems to be the key-note of the poem. 152 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. After the defeat of Sextus and the crushing of Lepidus he finds in Caesar the only saviour of the State from disaster and anarchy, the man who has to do for Rome at that time what the united efforts of many national heroes, royal and republican, patrician and plebeian, had done through all the generations from the founding of Rome till the fall of the Republic (i. 12). At the great crisis of the national fortunes, the feeling of anxiety and self-reproach expressed in the pause before the outbreak of the great conflict be- tween the powers of the West and the East Eheu cicatricum et sceleris pudet Fratrumque (i. 35) gives way to a stern sense of triumph tempered by a re- luctant admiration for the woman who had threatened to bring the Capitol to ruins (i. 37). When a new page seems to be turned over in the history of Rome, and the world is beginning to breathe again in peace, he cannot leave the past without writing a dirge over the civil strife of the thirty years from the consulship of Metellus (ii. i), in which the sorrow for the national losses Quis non Latino sanguine pinguior Campus does not restrain his tribute of admiration for the chiefs of the defeated cause Non indecoro pulvere sordidos. In the tones in which he records the national dishonour auditumque Medis Hesperiae sonitum ruinae we seem to find an anticipation of the solemn and dignified pathos of Tacitus. It is in the remarkable series of Odes at the beginning of Book iii, all written in the Alcaic metre, and, unlike the great mass of poems in the other books, given to the world with no personal address prefixed to them, that he most distinctly comes forward as the poet of Rome and of the restored national life under the conditions of the new Empire. In them, more than any of the others, national 111.] NATIONAL ODES OF BOOK III. 153 is united to religious and ethical feeling. Their movement is grave and powerful. They are no expression of indi- vidual feeling, but the voice of the better genius of Rome, addressed to the generation which was entering on the duties of life in an altered world. Though no allusion marks the exact date of their composition 1 , they are evi- dently written in the time of strongest national enthusiasm, between the years 27 and 23 B.C., when the hopes of the new Empire were highest and its aims most ideal, and while Horace himself was in the meridian of his lyrical inspiration. They are written and arranged with a distinct unity of purpose. The first two might be ranked also among the philosophical and ethical Odes, but they differ from such enunciations of his philosophy as that of iii. 29, or from the ethical Odes addressed to individuals, as incul- cating, not the attitude towards life or the principles of conduct which best secure individual happiness, but the spirit of contentment and renunciation 2 , and the training for public duty, which befit the subjects of the new Empire, in contrast to the struggle for personal aggrandisement and the pursuit of pleasure, characteristic of the last days of the Republic. They suggest also the qualities demanded for the governor of the new Empire the heroic virtue which is independent of the popular caprice, which rises to Heaven by a way forbidden to common men, and raises the world along with it and the virtue of trustworthiness which fitted a man to share in the counsels of the Empire Est et fideli tuta silentio Merces 3 . These two Odes are introductory to the more sustained elevation of the third and fourth, in which the central feeling of the age, that which gave solidity and perman- ence to the new Empire, receives its most elaborate lyrical 1 Unless ' Caelo tonantem ' (iii. 5) is to be taken as referring to the dedication of the temple of Jupiter Tonans in 22 B. c. 2 Cf. the spirit inculcated by Lucretius parere quietum Quam regere imperio res (v. 1127). 8 Cf. Propertius iii. 9, 34 Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. vr. expression. They are inspired by the same sentiment and the same conviction as the national epic of Virgil. In the often-quoted lines with which the third Ode opens lustum et tenacem propositi virum we recognise no mere Stoical commonplace, but a tribute to the civic virtue and the strength of character which fitted Augustus to be the ruler of the world, and raised him to the level of the heroes of old, who, themselves of divine origin, had by their services to the world obtained a place in ' the quiet ranks of the gods/ and especially, of the great national hero and demigod Romulus. Then by the voice of the goddess Juno, the implacable enemy of Troy, he declares the great conquering and governing mission of Rome, in the spirit of Virgil's Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento, and appeals to the Capitol as the symbol of the stability and the universality of her Empire. But he adds a warn- ing, of which the true meaning is probably that suggested by Pliiss. In the words ne nimium pii Rebusque fidentes avitae Tecta velint reparare Troiae, we cannot regard the stern and impressive warning as mere rhetoric ; nor can we suppose that Augustus or any one else seriously contemplated the transference of the seat of the Empire from Rome to the site of ancient Troy, and that Horace was moved to make this patriotic protest against the design. But under the denunciation of any attempt to repair the dwelling of ancestral Troy, he may, without too direct a shock to old associations and sympa- thies, have wished to declare the impossibility of any return to the old forms of the Republic. The third Ode inaugurates the new Empire, and assigns to it, as Virgil has throughout the Aeneid, a divine sanction. The fourth Ode completes, also with the aid of religious symbolism, the thought of the sanction on which the new Empire rests. The poem developes the idea of the divine favour and protection bestowed on genius, whether mani- 111.] POLITICAL ANXIETIES. 155 Tested in the art and inspiration of the poet, or in the art of governing men. As Jove with the aid of Pallas and Apollo, Juno and Vulcan (types of intelligence and light, of weight and dignity of character, and of skill exercised with patience and energy) crushed the rebellion of the Giants, so Augustus by wise counsels and the inspiration of genius triumphed over the anarchy and destructive forces, which, in the years that elapsed between the battle of Philippi and the capture of Alexandria, threatened the overthrow of civilisation. In the fifth and sixth Odes the tone is no longer one of exultation, but of warning and reproof. Though Rome may have before it a future greater than its past, and though the man has appeared in whom her greatness is to be fulfilled, there still remain elements of evil which mar the fulfilment of the national mission. The object of these Odes is to rouse the public conscience to a re- cognition of these elements of evil, and so to remedy them. The first sign of degeneracy is tame acquiescence in the dishonour clinging to the Roman arms since the defeat of Crassus. The contrast is drawn between the spirit of the present and the spirit of the heroic age of the Republic. History is appealed to, to impress the old ideal of loyalty to duty on the imagination of the present generation. In the last of the series Delicta maiorum immeritus lues the deeper source of national decline is traced to the neglect of religion and the corruption of family life. Again the memory of the stronger and nobler past is evoked in the lines Non his iuventus orta parentibus, &c. And as in the former Ode the ideal appealed to is that of devotion to duty, the highest virtue of Rome in her best days, in this it is the ideal of purity and simplicity of life, which Roman writers represent as the special virtue of the Sabellian stock Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, Hanc Remus et frater, &c. (Georg. ii. 532), 156 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. In the twenty-fourth Ode the call is made in still sterner tones for a reformer to restrain and punish the two great evils, luxury and avarice, which Roman moralists regard as the two great causes of national decay. Here for once at least Horace looks on vice with the severity of Tacitus and Juvenal. It should be ranked rather with his ethical than his national Odes, but its motive is interest in the public weal, not in the character or fate of an individual. The twenty-fifth Ode is one of those in which the poet glorifies his own inspiration ; but the motive of the poem is the enthusiasm inspired by the revelation of the apo- theosis of the Emperor. By the vividness with which he pictures the supernatural influence under which the Ode is composed, he seems to meet the ' incredulus odi ' of the enlightened and sceptical class to which he himself be- longed, regarding this new phase of supernaturalism. The Odes of the fourth book, on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus which secured the communications of Italy with the lands north of the Alps, are Odes of triumph, appealing to the martial pride of the Romans, which since the restoration of the standards by the Parthians had again found a legitimate outlet. It is a tribute also to the great- ness of the Emperor. The earlier books are full of vague alarms caused by the threatening attitude of the tribes and nations on the frontier; but now that three lustres had passed since the fall of Alexandria, all the peoples of the furthest East and West, all without the pale of Roman civilisation, had learned to fear and respect the power of Augustus. Two Odes of the same book, the fifth and fifteenth, sum up the glories of his reign, and record the fulfilment of what were only aspirations in the earlier books. The fifth, written as a pendant to the victory of Drusus, records in grave and quiet tones the sense of security which has succeeded to the long strain of anxiety, and the loyal enthusiasm of the people for the ruler to whom they owe the renewed fertility of their fields, the safe pursuit of commerce, the revival of honesty in trade, and of purity in the family. The idyllic picture presented HI.] THE FOURTH BOOK. 157 in this Ode is to be looked at along with the contrast in iii. 24. These two Odes give the fullest expression to the moods of national despondency and of national content- ment. They each tend to glorify the Emperor and to impress on the world the need of his absolute rule, and its efficacy. The fifteenth Ode, the pendant to the victory of Tiberius over the Rhaeti, might come as the inscription on some monument recording the sum of the whole glories of the reign of Augustus, in war and peace. The last tones we hear in the completed lyrical message of Horace testify to the lays and hymns sung in honour of Augustus as the descendant of Anchises and Venus. During the twenty years over which the national lyrics of Horace extend, there is a great change in the aspect of the world, and a corresponding change in the public feeling of which Horace is the exponent. In the earlier Odes, Caesar is the hope of the Roman world in its hour of danger and distress. In the Odes of the third book he is the true representative of an ideal Rome, who is called upon, with the aid of Heaven, by the inspiration of his genius and his devotion to duty, to transform the actual Roman world, torn in pieces by civil wars, corrupted by private vices, false to the standard of national honour and manliness, to this new ideal, in which the great qualities of the past should be revived. The feeling expressed in these Odes is genuine and spontaneous. In the Odes of the fourth book the ideal is supposed to be realised ; but there is less perhaps of the ring of genuine sincerity in the cele- bration of its triumph. The tone of the poet is more distinctly imperial than national. It is not Rome that is glorified, but the Emperor and the members of the im- perial family. Even past history is pressed into this service, and it is as a glory of the Claudian family that the battle of the Metaurus is celebrated (iv. 4). The adulation which was the bane of the next century begins to be heard in such lines as Quo nihil mains meliusve terris Fata donavere bonique Divi (iv. 2). 158 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. The condition described by Tacitus 'ubi populum annona, cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit, insurgere paullatim, munia senatus magistratuum legum in se trahere ' has been al- ready reached ; and we understand how naturally that led to the later stage of acquiescence described in the words ' omnes exuta aequalitate jussa principis aspectare, nulla in praesens formidine,' till the suppression of all independence for a generation produces its natural result in the servile adulation of the next reign. Horace and Virgil cannot be cleared of all taint of this adulation. In Horace the ' dul- cedo otii ' and the desire to make all things pleasant im- pair his discernment. The publication of the Ars Amandi a few years later, and the career of the two Julias, afford an impressive commentary on the lines Nullis polluitur casta domus stupris, &c. of Ode 5. The sterner picture in iii. 24 is nearer the truth than the vague optimism of the lines ordinem Rectum evaganti frena licentiae Iniecit emovitque culpas Et veteres revocavit artes (iv. 15). The revival there spoken of could only have been a dream produced by the ' dulcedine otii,' which may have charmed the fancy or lulled the conscience of the world, but did not brace it to efforts to realise the ideal. At the best, the fancy shows that the purer aspirations of the Roman people were not as yet altogether extinct. Horace is in his Odes the poet also of the religious re- vival which accompanied and was dependent on the revival of national feeling. And this religious revival, which was fostered by the policy and perhaps the personal belief of the Emperor, was partly ceremonial, partly aesthetic. More than at any earlier period the Gods of Rome and Italy be- came identified with the old Gods of Olympus, and all the associations of art and poetry were applied to reawaken, in the minds of the cultivated classes, the dormant faith in a divine presence in the world. It was in Virgil, brought up in the simpler beliefs and the household pieties of the Cis- IIL] RELIGION OF THE ODES. 159 alpine province, that this revival found its sincerest and most reverential exponent. Horace, by education and by the critical temper of his mind, shared the free-thinking opinions of the cultivated classes in the last age of the Republic. In one of his earliest writings he uses the words of Lucretius to express his own disbelief in any supernatural action in the world. In the thirty-fourth Ode of the first book he gives what can hardly be taken as a serious ac- count of his conversion from this ' insaniens sapientia,' and expresses a vague belief in a God, identified with the ab- straction Fortuna which in more than one place he treats as a capricious power and invests with personal attributes. If there had been any real change in the personal convic- tions of Horace during the twenty years that elapsed be- tween the journey to Brundisium and the composition of the Carmen Seculare, we should have found traces of it in the writings in which he expresses his innermost convictions on human life and conduct the first book of the Epistles. The actual belief in the living presence of the Jove of the Capitol or the Gods of Olympus, in the efficacy of prayer to the Lares, or in the protection afforded to flocks and fields by the Italian Faunus, could not reassert itself in the mind of one educated in the school which had produced the De Rerttm Natura of Lucretius, or even the De Natura Deorum of Cicero. But even Lucretius, in spite of his stern iconoclasm, could be moved to poetical sympathy with the religious fancies and symbolism which had been perpetuated from the ages of faith, in art, poetry, and ex- ternal ceremonial. He could recognise a hidden omnipre- sent power pervading the universe, and could appeal to this power as a present help to his country in danger, and as the inspirer of his verse. Horace's grasp of speculative truth was neither so earnest nor so consistent ; he wrote his Odes in an age of strong reaction from the destructive and dis- organising forces of the preceding age ; and, in this new age, he professed to revive the office of a Greek lyrical poet, one of whose functions was to compose hymns in honour of the Gods, and to tell the tale of their human 160 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. adventures. It was natural that he should recognise in the religious forms and beliefs of the past a salutary power to heal some of the evils of the present, and also a material by which his lyrical art could move the deeper sympathies and charm the fancy of his contemporaries. Nor need we suppose the feeling, out of which his world of supernatural beings and agencies is recreated, altogether insincere. Though the actual course of his life may be regulated in accordance with the negative conclusions of the under- standing, the imagination of a poet like Horace and Lu- cretius is moved to the recognition of some transcendent power and agency, hidden in the world, and yet sometimes apparent on the surface, which it associates with some concern for the course of nature and human affairs, and even of individual destiny. It is natural for the poet or artist to embody the suggestion of this mysterious feeling, which gives its transcendent quality to his poetry or art, in the forms of traditional belief, into which he breathes new life. If there is much that is artificial and conventional in the part played by the Gods of Olympus and by the fables of mythology in the Odes of Horace and this is the ele- ment in his lyrical poetry which is regarded as most facti- tious there is something of a true feeling after the divine and the ideal in these supernatural fancies. It is in the Odes expressive of national and imperial sentiment, that we seem to find most of real meaning in the religious language of Horace. The analogy between Jove in Heaven and Augustus on earth is often hinted at ; and the ground of this analogy is indicated by the emphatic stress laid on the triumph of Jove over the Giants Clari Giganteo triumpho (iii. i). It is the supremacy of order in the world of nature and human affairs which the imagination of Horace sees per- sonified in that Jove Qui terrain inertem, qui mare temperat Ventosum, et urbes regnaque tristia Divosque mortalesque turbas Imperio regit unus aequo (iii. 4). III.] THE EMPEROR DEIFIED. 161 Augustus is regarded as the minister and vicegerent on earth of this supreme power Te minor laetutn reget aequus orbem and it is on this ground that a divine function is attributed to him. The deification of the Emperor, originating in the superstitious idolatry of the Eastern provinces, thus receives its sanction in the lyrical as in the epic poetry of the age. The old Gods of Olympus are brought back, as in the Aeneid, blending with the lively personal attributes which the poetic fancy of Greece bestowed on them, the statelier characteristics of Roman life Hinc avidus stetit Vulcanus, hinc matrona Juno, &c. (iii. 4). But it is in the Carmen Seculare that the Gods of Rome and Italy appear in their strictly national character. Diana is there the Goddess of the Aventine and Mount Algidus, not, as in an earlier hymn, of Erymanthus and Cragus. Apollo is nearer to the Janus of old Italian worship than to the God of Delos and Patara. The Carmen Seculare is intended to be regarded not as a work of Greek art, but as a national hymn. The only reference to ancient story in it is one suggested not by the Iliad or Greek lyrical poetry, but by the new national poem, the Aeneid. The poem, in its antique prosaic phraseology and the literal- ness of its tone, presents a striking contrast to an Ode, written in connexion with the same subject, in which Horace in the character of a Greek lyrical poet addresses the same powers and recalls the artistic and poetical asso- ciations of the tales of Niobe, Tityos and Achilles. The one, in harmony with the formal utilitarian religion of Rome, clothes itself in language of studied plainness and even quaintness, and moves in verse which has little to satisfy the ear beyond formal correctness and regularity; while the other is bright with the vivid personality of the Gods of Greece, and moves with their nimble and graceful tread. This Ode 'Dive, quern proles Niobaea' (iv. 6) and the earlier Ode to Mercury (i. 10), might be looked upon as mere imitative pieces unconnected with anything M HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH.VI. real in the age, did we not remember the aesthetic revival which in that age, as in recent times, accompanied the re- ligious revival. The Odes of Horace in which Gods and Goddesses of Olympus reappear, surrounded with the as- sociations of Greek art and poetry, are expressions of the same movement as led to the adornment of Rome in the Augustan age with Greek temples and statues, and induced Augustus himself, in a work of art still preserved to us, to be represented as blending the attributes of a Roman im- perator with those of a Greek demigod 2 . But it is not only with the symbols of Roman belief or with this neo-Hellenic revival that Horace shews his poet- ical sympathy. Like Virgil and Tibullus he finds a charm in the observances and the beliefs of rustic Paganism. There is one at least of the Odes of Horace which may be called an expression of natural piety, that addressed to the peasant maid or housewife Phidyle (iii. 23), in which the pomp and state of the national ceremonial is contrasted with the humble prayer and simple offerings which ensure protection to vines, crops, and herds in the deadly autumn season. He feels the poetical beauty of the old rural festivals, bringing rest to man and beast, and giving scope to that gay social life in the open air which is so attractive to the tempera- ment of the nations of Southern Europe Ludit herboso pecus omne campo, Cum tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres ; Festus in pratis vacat otioso Cum bove pagus (iii. 18). He peoples in fancy the romantic scenery of the valley among the Sabine hills with the presence of beings who lived an immortal life in the older poetry of Greece. He consecrates a pine overhanging his farm-house to Diana as the Goddess of the mountains and the groves (iii. 22). He sees Pan quitting the Arcadian Lycaeus and speeding in the form of the Italian Faunus to the lovely heights of Lucretilis (i. 17); he surprises Bacchus attended by Nymphs and Satyrs among its rocky solitudes, or follows him in 1 Cf. ' Virgil,' p. 19. 111.] NATURAL PIETY. 163 rapt enthusiasm along the river banks and through silent woods. It was a great part of the charm which he found in his country life, to feel that it was in scenes like those in which he passed his daily life that the poets whom he loved had found the haunts of Pan, Dionysus, and Artemis, and to see in imagination those divinities coming back to earth to delight in the lonely and beautiful places of Italy, as they had of old in Arcadia and Caria. And it is not only on his fancy that the religious sentiment acts. It acts also on his affections. It deepens his sense of happiness and contentment with his own lot, and of the beauty and dignity of his own calling. In many passages which we cannot treat as merely conventional, he expresses a belief that he is a special object of divine protection, and this favour he attributes to the purifying influence of the love which he bears to the Muses Di me tuentur, Dis pietas mea Et Musa cordi est. Thus, though the Satires, Epistles, and Epodes present Horace to us as a man for whom any other world than that of ordinary experience had no existence, the Odes reveal him as a man moved by the idea of the majesty of Rome to the recognition of an infinite order and majesty supreme in the world, and one whose heart in realising its deepest happiness was not unmoved by natural piety. Through his patriotic sentiment and his love of Nature and poetry, the ironical singer of the lighter joys of life is capable of feeling something of the solemn enthusiasm and reverential piety of Virgil. But if in certain moods he may seem to share in the re- ligious feelings and beliefs of Virgil, in other moods he is nearer to the attitude of Lucretius. He, too, may claim a rank among philosophical poets, and the attitude towards human life which he maintains depends in a great degree on his philosophical conceptions. The Epistles present him to us rather as a man in search of a philosophical creed than, like Lucretius, the consistent and polemical upholder of a definite one. And it was natural that in his M 2 164 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. lyrical poetry he should let himself be swayed by conflicting sympathies, and see in opposite theories of life and actual ways of living some side of truth which moved his imagi- nation or stirred his lighter fancy. There is a serious and impassioned side to his philosophy, in which we recognise the countryman of Lucretius, the inheritor of the masculine traditions of Rome. There is another side to it in which we seem to recognise the disciple of Aristippus, and the sym- pathetic student of Anacreon, Mimnermus and Menander. He was in contact with the life of his age at too many points to reduce it to a formula. As a poet he aims at vividly realising various situations in life ; as a moralist he feels that the condition of happiness and consistency of character is to understand rightly each situation, and to meet it as it should be met. His philosophy is based on observation of life, more than on any speculative conception. But as Lucretius under the conception of ' Nature ' declares his belief in the omnipotence of law in the world, and Virgil in personifying the Fates implies his belief in the firm de- crees of Providence, the thought ever present to the mind of Horace is the uncertainty in human affairs, which he personifies under the name of Fortune, and the limit im- posed on all effort and all enjoyment by the inevitable certainty of death, which he personifies as Necessitas. The aspect of irony in human affairs which Lucretius speaks of as the ' vis abdita q'uaedam Y and Tacitus as the ' ludibria rerum humanarum,' presents itself to the imagination of Horace as a personal power Fortuna saevo laeta negotio. In his conception of man's relation to this power there is an ethical grandeur in which he seems to rise to the level of Lucretius. Two lessons he learns from this aspect of life ; the necessity of each man's absolute dependence on himself, and the necessity of limiting his desires. To be master of oneself, and to find happiness in simple pleasures, 1 v. 1233 : Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam Opterit, et pulchros fascis saevasque secures Froculcare ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur. I III.] HORACE AND LUCRETIUS. 165 are the lessons which Horace draws from his philosophy. So far as there is any difference between Lucretius and Horace in the way in which these lessons are apprehended, they seem to come to the former like a new revelation, to the latter like old familiar truths. There is thus more of reverential awe in the tones of Lucretius, more of a stately calm in those of Horace. The sapphic stanza of Horace Non enim gazae neque consularis Summovet lictor miseros tumultus Mentis et curas laqueata circum Tecta volantes (ii. 16) can express the familiar thought of the impotence of pomp and state to secure peace of mind, with as much grandeur and elevation, if with less passionate vehemence, than the hexameters of Lucretius Re veraque metus hominum curaeque sequaces Nee metuunt sonitus armorum nee fera tela (ii. 48). In another place where Horace treads in the footsteps of Lucretius Linqnenda tellus et domus et placens Uxor, which may be compared with lam iam non domus accipiet te laeta neque uxor Optima (iii. 892) there is a profounder pathos in the older poet, a calmer resignation in the younger. There is an austerer consola- tion also in Lucretius. He puts aside the fear of death by the power of thought, by the sense of reconcilement with the universal law of Nature. Horace, in one mood, draws from the thought of death the lesson to intensify the enjoyment of the present, almost in the spirit of those whose maxim, ' brevis hie est fructus homullis,' Lucretius treats with such austere scorn. But he approaches Lucre- tius in such passages as the Quod adest memento Componere aequus, in which the same true and serious meaning may be read as in the lines 1 66 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. Sed quia semper aves quod abest, praesentia temnis Imperfecta tibi elapsa est ingrataque vita (iii. 955). Horace had a more real sympathy with the social and pleasure-loving side of Epicureanism than Lucretius. The sense of man's limitation tends, in Horace, to lower the higher energies of life Quid brevi fortes iaculamur aevo Multa? while Lucretius holds that life with all its limitations and imperfections still affords sufficient scope ' dignam dis degere vitam.' Yet if we recognise in the philosophy of Lucretius a loftier power of contemplation, and a more austere courage resulting from it, the philosophy of Horace can invest the practical duties and the wise regulation of life with poetic charm and dignity. By being less con- sistent in his philosophy, Horace is truer to the conditions of human life. He has no rigid rule of logic to apply to the varying circumstances. A vein of natural Stoicism, inherited from the old Sabellian stock, and a sympathetic appreciation of the great practical qualities manifested in the best Roman statesmen and soldiers of all times, temper the Epicureanism natural to his social temper, his poetical tastes, and the pleasure which he found in nature, in human society, in art and poetry. His true ideal is not the Stoic, renouncing all the amenities, nor the Epicurean, renouncing the practical duties of life ; not the contemplative thinker, nor the man who achieves success in the world of action, nor the man of pleasure, but the man who can temperately enjoy all the blessings of life and yet be independent of them, who performs public duties with capacity and integrity and yet is free from personal ambition, who is ready if called upon to sacrifice his life for his country and his friends. One of the latest utterances of his philosophy is in the Ode to Lollius, where, after paying a tribute to the supposed rectitude and capacity of the person addressed, he sketches an ideal in which the best qualities of the Epicurean and the Stoic are united to those of the patriot and the man of honour III.] THE HIGHEST GOOD. 167 Non possidentem multa vocaveris Recte beatum : rectius occupat Nomen beati, qui Deorum Muneribus sapienter uti Duramque callet pauperiem pati Peiusque leto flagitium timet, Non ille pro caris amicis Aut patria timidus perire (iv. 9), He has that sense of the dignity of human life which is so marked a characteristic of Lucretius and Virgil, of Cicero and Tacitus, but he has a less profound sense of its pathos than either Lucretius or Virgil. With them the pathos of human life is felt in the severance of the ties of family affection ; in Horace it is felt in the thought of the eternal banishment of each living individual from the scene of his transitory enjoyment Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium Versatur nrna serins ocius Sors exitura et nos in aeternum Exilium impositura cymbae (ii. 3). Thus Horace represented in his poetry the graver interests of his time the national sentiment in its most intense and exalted movement, the religious revival both in its national and its artistic significance, the serious thoughts on the conduct of life which the condition of society, the career of individuals, and his own experience and reflexion impressed upon him. Among Roman poets he holds a middle position between Virgil and Lucretius on the one hand, and the elegiac poets and Martial, whose poetry simply aims at giving pleasure, on the other. Horace ranks both among the ' sacri vates,' who interpret the deeper meaning of life, and among the poets who take the transient lights and shadows of their time as the theme of their art. If not the most representative poet of his country, for that title belongs to the author of the Georgics and the Aeneid, he is the most many-sided. It is not necessary to find with Mr. Verrall that his Melpomene is the Muse of Tragedy, to recognise that his great value among the poets of the world consists in the completeness and variety of his representation : and in this completeness 1 68 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [Cn. VI. and variety is included his capacity of interpreting the tragic element in national history and in the career of individuals, and his sense of whatever in the men of his own age or in the records and supernatural beliefs of the past added dignity and elevation to life, as well as the wit and gaiety with which he has idealised the ' fugitiva gaudia ' of a refined society, loving pleasure both from natural temperament and as an escape from anxious cares and painful memories. There is a third function of his lyrical art, in which it becomes his own individual voice, express- ing his sympathy with and appreciation of his friends, and giving utterance to what was deepest in his own personal feelings. IV. To a large class of his admirers Horace is best known as the Anacreontic singer of the pleasures of love and wine ; and it is in the lighter poems dealing with these themes that they would find the truest expression of himself and the purest specimens of his art. The irony with which he sometimes seems to disclaim all higher purpose, and the enduring grace with which he can invest some transient phase of passion or sentiment, or of social gaiety, seem to afford some countenance to this view both of the man and of his art. But it is safer to look for the expression of his most real self in his familiar writings, and in the Odes to recognise him as the sympathetic artist, yielding to various and sometimes opposite moods, as they were fitted to call forth the graver or gayer tones of his lyre. Love and wine were favourite themes of his prototypes, the older Greek lyrical poets, as they have been of some of the greatest lyrical poets of modern times ; and Horace, though neither an ardent lover nor an intemperate reveller, had in the memories of his youth and in the sympathetic observation of his maturer years the materials which his fancy could idealise in connexion with both of these subjects. In his love poems he does not give utterance to the force of his personal passion, as Catullus does in the Lesbia IV.] ANACREONTIC ODES. poems, as tradition tells us that Sappho and Alcaeus did, and as Propertius and Tibullus did among his younger contemporaries. It is not in the Odes, but in one or two of the Epodes, that we find traces of personal passion in Horace Cum tu magnorum numen laesnra Decorum In verba iurabas mea, Artius atque hedera procera adstringitur ilex Lentis adhaerens brachiis. The passionate sincerity of these words, uttered 'calida iuventa,' may be contrasted with the light-hearted irony with which he treats a similar experience in one of the most charming of his lighter Odes Ulla si iuris tibi peierati Poena, Barine, nocuisset unquam. The confessions of Horace seem to imply that he was too fickle or too self-possessed a lover ever to have been scathed by any ' grande passion ' of which he would care to per- petuate the torment and the rapture as Catullus has done ; nor did he ever allow this single feeling to gain such ascendency over him, and so to make the other interests of life indifferent to him, as was the case with Catullus, Propertius, and the other elegiac poets. His poems ad- dressed to his many real or imaginary heroines are artistic studies in which he idealises and invests with the associa- tions of Greek poetry, sometimes his own, but more frequently the lighter and more transient relations of the younger men of his day with the class in Rome who corresponded to the Glycerium or the Thais of Greek comedy. He sees them in the triumph of their dangerous fascination in such poems as Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa (i. 5). Lydia, die, per omnes (i. 8). Ulla si iuris tibi peierati (ii. 8). He appreciates the humorous side which a sentimental affair with one of a lower degree presents to the associates of the lover, as in Ne sit ancillae tibi amor pudori (ii. 4). 170 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. vi. He tells sympathetically a tale of true love in the ' Quid fles Asterie ' (iii. 7), or dramatically varies the often-told story of ' amantium irae amoris integratio ' in the ' Donee gratus eram tibi ' (iii. 9). He reminds us of the influence of advancing years on the warmth of his feelings Lenit albescens animos capillus ; and though he sometimes speaks of himself as burning with jealousy, he makes us think of him rather, to use his own words, as vacui, sive quid urimur Non praeter solitum leves, singing the praises of Lalage in his Sabine wood, entertain- ing the accomplished Tyndaris in the beautiful valley crowned by Lucretilis, bidding a fatherly farewell to Galatea before she sails across the Adriatic Sis licet felix ubicumque mavis, Et memor nostri, Galatea, vivas (iii. 27) or inviting Phyllis, the latest of all his loves, to come to his country house and entertain him with her music. It is not likely that these poems are mere literary studies deal- ing with purely imaginary situations and personages, nor that on the other hand they are a literal reproduction of actual circumstances. They are rather idyllic pictures suggested by or combined out of the ordinary experience of the time. So far as these heroines of Horace's Odes appear in his representation, they might be supposed to be refined and accomplished ladies leading a somewhat inde- pendent but quite decorous life. They appear to be well read in Greek poetry, and accomplished musicians. In addressing them he uses the stories of the Greek mythology as a literature of romance, as Ovid did later in the Heroides. Thus in the Galatea Ode he tells very charmingly the adventure of Europa Nuper in pratis studiosa florum and in the ' Quid fles Asterie,' it is said of the agent who passes between Chloe and Gyges, peccare docentes Fallax historias movet. 1V.] HIS LIGHTER POEMS. 171 In all of these poems he aims at introducing an ideal of Greek refinement and romance into the realism of Roman pleasure. But we have no pictures of Roman family life like that in the Epithalamium of Catullus Torquatus volo parvnlus nor do we find any noble picture of a Roman matron, like the Cornelia of Propertius. In general we find the lighter, brighter and more decorous phases of the love affairs and the life of pleasure of the time. Yet he reminds us also of the coarser and more reckless aspect of these affairs in the introduction of the ' Damalis multi meri ' at the revels of young men, and he does not shrink, in two or three of his least agreeable Odes, from shewing us the other side of the picture the hideousness of what remains of this life of pleasure after the charm of youth has passed. If we believed the motive of such Odes as i. 25? i y - J 3> to be bitter and vindictive, such a belief would seriously diminish the estimate we form both of the heart and of the taste of Horace. But we may look upon them rather as completing the artistic representation of this phase of life, shewing the life of pleasure in its decay as in its idyllic grace. And as all his representation seems intended also to point a moral, so the poems i. 25, iii. 15, iv. 13, impress the lesson which he applies to himself in the Epistles, that if there is a time when he can say 'non lusisse pudet,' the time also comes when it is imperative ' incidere ludum.' Of all the poets of love, ancient or modern, Horace is perhaps the least serious. He is less serious even than Ovid, who at least in the Heroides shews occasionally a juster appreciation of the tenderness and constancy of a woman's heart. The tone of Horace is more that of persi- flage than of either ardent passion or tender sentiment. He paints the piquant attraction of coyness or inconstancy, of waywardness or cruelty, in his Chloe or Pyrrha, his Glycera or Barine, but he regards the influence of woman, at the best, as ministering to the refined amusement 172 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. of a man's lighter hours. He may sigh for the lot of those Quos irrupta tenet copula, nee malis Divnlsus querimoniis Suprema citius solvet amor die, but he had soon for himself learned to lay aside the Spes animi credula mutui. We seldom if ever come upon that feeling of the union of heart with heart which is the secret of the charm of the ' Acmen Septimius suos amores ' of Catullus. His song is nearer his own ironical description of it nos proelia virginum Sectis in iuvenes unguibus acrium Cantamus vacui. Phrases here and there, such as Nee tinctus viola pallor amantium, or Dum flagrantia detorqnet ad oscula Cervicem aut facili saevitia negat, shew that he could note the signs of more powerful passion, but it did not come within the carefully meditated scope of his lyrical art to attempt any rivalry with Sappho or Catullus in a sphere in which they were unapproachable. His remonstrances with his brother poets, Tibullus and Valgius, imply a feeling that there is something unmanly in the complaints of lovers over the loss of the object of their affection through either inconstancy or death. It is especially in the treatment of this sentiment that the peculiar irony of Horace is shewn, and his frequent declara- tion that love is the one appropriate theme of his Muse might seem intended to disguise the prominence he else- where gives to the didactic office which his Muse fulfils or to her function in awaking national sentiment. He is apparently more sincere in his praises of wine, though on this subject also we have to remember that he is following the example of the oldest lyric poets Musa dedit fidibus Divos pnerosque Deonim, Et pugilem victorem et equum certamine primum Et iuvenum curas et libera vina referre (A. P. 83-5). IV.] PRAISE OF WINE. 173 The opening words of three of the poems in Book i Vides, ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte Nullam, Vare, sacra vile prius sevens arborem Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero remind us that in his praises of wine he was the artistic imitator of Alcaeus. But he writes also as a man to whom in his youth the pleasures of comradeship had been en- hanced by wine Cum quo morantem saepe diem mero Fregi coronatus nitentes Malobathro Syrio capillos (ii. 7) and who in his maturer years had no greater enjoyment than that of ' honest talk and wholesome wine ' with an old friend, or with some of the intellectual leaders of the time. In his earlier poems on the subject such as Epode 13, Odes i. 7, 9, 18, written probably in the time between the battle of Philippi and his subsequent prosperity he celebrates wine as the alleviator of care and hardship Quis post vina gravem militiam ant pauperiem crepat? He brings out its soothing and cheering influence in con- trast with the inclemency of Nature and of fortune, of which wild storms and the severity of wintry weather are the emblems. In later Odes written in his more pros- perous days, he associates the pleasures of wine with other features of outward Nature, with the hospitable shade of the vast pine and the pale poplar, and with the brook fretting and hurrying along its winding channel in which the hot Falernian may be cooled (ii. 3). It is associated also with those peculiarly Roman tastes, the love of flowers worn as wreaths, and of perfumes. But he especially values the power of wine as breaking down the barriers to frank and friendly companionship, and as the promoter of good conversation Tu lene tormentum ingenio admoves Plerumque duro ; tu sapientium Curas et arcanum iocoso Consilium retegis Lyaeo (iii. 21). 174 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH.VI. On rare occasions of special festivity he may go beyond these more tranquil pleasures ; and can say in his own name recepto Dulce mihi furere est amico (ii. 7), or describe with Bacchanalian licence the revel to celebrate the bestowal of the augurate on Murena, or the return of Plotius Numida from Spain. But it is chiefly as enhanc- ing the refined enjoyment of social life that he praises wine. He impresses on his friends the need that the Graces should be present at the feast, and make it a scene of harmony in- stead of brawling and discord. He reminds us also of a more subtle danger of intemperate revels of the self-asser- tion, vanity, and boastfulness, the breaches of honour and reticence which are their accompaniment quae subsequitur caecus amor sui Et tollens vacuum plus nimio gloria verticem Arcanique fides prodiga perlucidior vitro. In his convivial songs, as in his love poems, Horace shews us everywhere the cool head judging the value of and as- signing limits to the indulgence claimed by the genial tem- perament. He permits the freer indulgence of youth, though he would have that too regulated by good taste and cordial feeling, and while he appreciates the enhancement which wine could give to the more intellectual pleasure of the conversation of Maecenas or Messalla, he feels that it is only on rare occasions that this enhancement should be sought, and that the secret of such enjoyment consists in the simplicity of the daily life Premant Galena falce quibus dedit Fortuna vitem me pascunt olivae, Me cichorea levesque malvae (i. 31). V. In most of the Odes of Horace his own personality and his personal relations to many contemporaries are distinctly present. In his various writings, Satires, Epistles, and Odes, V.] POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS. 175 he seems to speak as an individual either opening his own mind to another individual, or winding into his confidence and extracting from him his secret by the force of personal sympathy. Many of his Odes, and especially those con- taining his maxims for the conduct of life, are of the same character as his Epistles ; some of them addressed to men of social eminence, with whom his relations are more distant, others to men united to him by varying degrees of intimacy and affection. Some of these must have had more meaning for his contemporaries than they have for us. Some may have contained hints or warnings, or references to circumstances which with our limited knowledge of contemporary history cannot be fully ascertained. Horace shared the confidence of Maecenas. It was the special business of Maecenas to understand the characters of the leading members of society, and his position required him to exercise a constant vigilance over them, and to restrain ambitious designs in the quietest way. Thus, in what seem mere Odes of compliment to Sestius, Munatius Plancus, Dellius, and others, it may be observed how an Epicurean acquiescence with the existing state of things is insinuated, and how they and others of their class are called upon to enjoy the wealth and high position which were still left to them. There is thus probably some political motive be- hind the exhortations to rich men to enjoy their riches. What is known of Licinius Murena leaves little doubt that the ' Rectius vives, Licini,' (ii. 10) was meant not only to inculcate the maxims of moderation, but to convey a warn- ing ; and the parallel pointed out by Mr. Verrall between the language and illustration of that Ode and Seneca's quotation from the 'Prometheus' of Maecenas would justify the opinion that the subject was one which Horace and Maecenas had discussed together. So in the Ode to Sal- lustius Crispus on the right use of wealth, we have to re- member that it is addressed to one of the richest men of the day, and Mr. Verrall' s remark perhaps applies to it, that it was a necessity of the Empire that these men should contribute to the needs of the State. Odes ad- 176 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. dressed to other members of the wealthy aristocracy, or favourites of the Court, such as Torquatus, Lollius, Cen- sorinus, and men of more real distinction, such as Agrippa, Pollio, and Messalla, indicate the relation in which Horace stood to the great world. It was a source of pride to him that the rich man courted his society pauperemque dives Me petit and that eminent men appreciated the compliment of having their names associated with his lyrical poetry. But if his Muse became something of a courtier, we have only to compare the way in which she plays that part in Statius and Martial with her attitude in the Odes of Horace, to feel how well he combined tact and urbanity with dignity and independence. If the deference which Horace pays to social distinction is to be condemned, he shares the reproach with one esteemed among the simplest and manliest of men of letters, Sir Walter Scott. Both lived at a time and in a state in which great stress was laid on such distinctions of rank. They might have rebelled against them, or kept themselves apart from the world in which they were encountered ; they accepted them for what they were worth, neither envying them nor sacrificing their own natural life to them, but paying to them the outward deference which the usages of society made customary, and appreciating and profiting by whatever distinction of manner and dignity of character accompany such conditions. Horace uses his lyrical art to dignify and to warn the members of the aristocracy of the new Empire. He does not address them in the tones of an inferior towards a superior ; but rather as Lucretius addresses Memmius, with the superi- ority of a wiser man, tempered by the urbanity of one who avoids making his superiority too apparent. Much of the personal influence exercised by Horace over modern readers is the influence of social manner ; and it is in these personal addresses that the influence of his manner is perpetuated. There was no quality more cultivated by the Romans than urbanity, and the type of that quality in their literature is V.] URBANITY. 177 Horace himself. In his intercourse with the world, he studied to conform to its ways and to lay aside ' inhumanae senium Camenae.' On comparing him with Martial and Juvenal, we seem to apprehend some survival of the great and simple manner from the age of Scipio and Laelius to the men of finest culture, literary and social, of a later time. But he understood too the wide difference between the courtesy imposed by this social relation, and his cordial bearing towards the friends of his choice ; and it is in the Odes addressed to these that we feel most his social attrac- tion. There is not, indeed, in the poems dedicated to friend- ship, the spontaneous expression of feeling in perfect forms of apparently unstudied art, such as there is in the poems of Catullus to Verannius and Licinius Calvus. Few poets have combined the warmth of heart and keen delight in friendship with the power of direct and simple expression given to Catullus. Horace wrote his Odes in middle life, when, though friendship is as firm, it is not so ardent as in early youth. He exercises more restraint in the expression of his feelings. His single friendship for Maecenas, like that of Cicero for Atticus, tended perhaps to make his other friendships less absorbing. He, however, like Cicero, was a man of largely diffused kindliness. In the poems addressed by him to Virgil, to Aelius Lamia, to Aristius Fuscus, to Septimius, to Pompeius, some shade of ex- pression distinguishes the various modes of affection by which he was moved a feeling of reverence for Virgil as one cherished in the inmost sanctuary of his heart ; love for Lamia as one whose lighter and deeper joys he shared, as he shares in the Epistles his deeper sorrows ; a confi- dence in the sympathy of Aristius Fuscus with the deeper intuitions of his meditative moods, as well as with his more playful fancies ; towards Septimius a tender clinging in his own hour of anxiety and failing health ibi tu calentem Debita sparges lacrima favillam Vatis amici N 178 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. to Pompeius the cordiality towards an old comrade with whom he had shared the pleasures as well as the hardships of the campaign under Brutus. Many of the friends to whom the Odes are dedicated appear again in the Satires and Epistles, and we seem from the terms of friendly raillery or discriminating appreciation applied to them to be able to reanimate that friendly circle of lively and cultivated men. With several of them Aristius Fuscus, Valgius, Tibullus, Iccius he was united by the bond of literary sympathy ; and, as we learn from the Epistles, to some of them he was, as Cicero was to many of his correspondents, active in kindly offices. The clue to some of the lighter Odes addressed to his personal friends e.g. ' Aeli vetusto nobilis ab Lamo ' (iii. 17) has been lost. Some slight occasion calls them forth ; some slight verbal allusion would speak to the men of his circle of what is unintelligible to us. Yet such in- stances are rare ; and, generally speaking, we learn from these Odes how frank and intimate the relations of Horace were to the men of culture in his time, and how largely these friendships contributed to the wisdom and happiness which he realised in life. Yet, after all, it is not in the expression of his friendship, not even of his friendship for Maecenas, that Horace seems to speak most immediately from his heart. If we ask what was the secret of his deepest happiness, the answer which his Odes supply is that it was in his love of his Sabine farm and other favourite spots in Italy, and in the consciousness of inspiration and the practice of his art associated with them. It is in these themes that we find the purest ex- pression of his personal feeling. The Satires and Epistles enable us to understand the actual happiness which he found in his Sabine retreat on the banks of the Digentia. In the Odes this valley becomes familiar to us, glorified by peaceful images of love and poetry, by the bright fancies of Greek mythology and the festive observances of the religion of Italy. He contrasts the peaceful life in this ' reducta valle,' not only with the smoke and wealth and 8V.] NATURE. 179 bustling business, but with the violent pleasures and excite- ments of Rome : nee Semeleius Cum Marte confundet Thyoneus Proelia. It is in his lonely wanderings among its heights and woods that he is conscious of a more powerful inspiration ; and it is there that he has a sense of peace and divine protection, arising from a consciousness of a heart free from guile or guilt. The idealising magic of his poetry, evoked by the pure affections of his heart, has added the names of Mount Lucretilis and the spring Bandusia to the names of Helicon and Parnassus, of Castalia and Aganippe, as consecrated to the genius of poetry. The rude mirth, on the festival of Faunus, of peasants who worked his fields, still lives in the Faune nympharum fugientum amator (iii. 18). The source of his deepest contentment with his lot, of his moral strength, and of his least artificial poetry, is to be sought in the Purae rivus aquae silvaque iugerum Paucorum (iii. 16), the soothing and restorative power of which imparts some- thing of an idyllic grace to the common sense of the Satires and Epistles, as well as to the purer inspiration of the Odes. Besides the streams, mountains, and woods of the district of Mandela, the woods and waters around Tibur are asso- ciated for ever with the poetry of Horace. In one of the earliest of his Odes, written probably before he had received the gift of his Sabine farm, while still fresh from his travels in Greece and Asia Minor, he declares his preference for Tibur, with its varied beauty of grove and orchard, streams and waterfall, over the famous and beautiful cities and scenes of those favoured lands. In an Ode (ii. 6) in which he speaks most from his heart, written when weary and in weak health, and under some apprehension of the near ap- proach of death, he expresses the wish that he might find N 2 l8o HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. at Tibur a place for his ' age to wear away in.' And again, in the last book of his Odes, it is around the groves and streams of Tibur that he describes himself as like the Matine bee, gathering honey industriously from the pleasant banks of thyme ; and it is to the influence of the streams and thick foliage around Tibur that he ascribes the moulding of his lyrical faculty Sed quae Tibur aquae fertile praefluunt Et spissae nemorum comae Fingent Aeolio carmine nobilem (iv. 3). In Horace, the feeling inspired by Nature is not the con- templative enthusiasm of Lucretius, nor the sympathy with her manifold life which moved the poet of the Georgics, but rather the love for particular places that which Cicero had for his 'ocelli Italiae' as places of refuge from the distractions and pleasures of the city, as fosterers of meditation, and as giving a living impulse to his genius. Cicero finds in his country places the statesman's, Horace the poet's otium. The love of Nature in Horace is idyllic, not contemplative. He has in the highest degree the power of presenting distinct pictures of her various features to the imagination, and of marking the most characteristic signs of the various seasons. We seem, as we follow his guidance, to look on Soracte standing forth in his white robe, and the woods weighed down by snow, and the frozen streams ; to feel the breezes of early spring rustling through the leaves, and filling the sails of the ships released from the inaction of winter ; to see the silent river bank, in the heat of summer, unstirred by any wandering wind, and to mark the deeper hue of the ripening grape under the influence of autumn, Purpureo varius colore. But it was in the living impulse given to his genius that he drew the chief nourishment from Nature. For it was in the consciousness and the active exercise of his genius that Horace, like Lucretius and Virgil, found his chief enjoy- ment. It was in living his highest life, keeping alive his purest susceptibilities of feeling, and shaping into artistic V.] ART. 181 form the thoughts and images which Nature and meditation brought to him, that he was most truly himself. It is the consciousness of his inspiration, and the consciousness that he has done justice to his gift, that give him his sense of distinction and of superiority to the more vulgar forms of ambition. One of his earliest expressions of personal feeling is in his prayer to Apollo at the dedication of his temple nee turpem senectam Degere nee cithara carentem (i. 31). One of his latest is his tribute of gratitude to the Muse for this gift of inspiration, and for the pleasure which through it he gave to the world Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est (iv. 3). His absolute confidence in the immortality of his song deepens with the sense of his growth in power and with the greater seriousness of his art. In one of his earlier Odes (i. 32), in which he regards himself as a singer of the lighter pleasures of life ' lusimus ' he expresses the hope that his work might survive for some few years. At the end of the second book, under the figure of his change into a swan, he predicts his survival after death, and the wide diffusion of his fame and influence Me Colchus et qui dissimulat metum Marsae cohortis Dacus et ultimi Noscent Geloni, me peritus Discet Hiber Rhodanique potor. But it is not till the 'monumentum acre perennius' is completed by the great Odes of the third book, that he confidently proclaims the permanence of his work in words that are at this day fully realised usque ego postera Crescam laude recens. In his latest book he claims a place among the immortals with Pindar and Simonides, Alcaeus and Stesichorus, Sappho and Anacreon. So, too, he claims not only immortality for the poet, but the power of conferring immortality Caelo Musa beat (iv. 8). 1 82 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. And this sense of living in the memory of future genera- tions was to the Romans a reality. If the immediate motive to Horace to conquer his natural indolence and devote the best energies of the best years of his manhood to the perfecting of his art, was the 'sweet love of the Muses ' which he shared with Lucretius and Virgil, his own words leave no doubt that the hope of living, as he has lived, in the life of future ages and among the future inheritors of civilisation who were then beyond its pale, was an elevating and sustaining influence in his life. VI. Though neither by his practice nor his criticism does he proclaim himself one of those who value form above sub- stance, yet it is to his careful art, as much as to the ' ingeni benigna vena,' that he owes his immortality. Each single Ode is, in itself, a work of art, producing a unity of im- pression, and, by its position, contributing to the complete and complex impression of the whole collection as an imaginative and artistic embodiment of the spirit of the age, and of the finer moments in the poet's life. In some Odes he expresses his own feelings and thoughts directly ; in others in the form of a personal address, invitation, warning, or remonstrance ; in others he describes some situation dramatically, allowing it to suggest its own story and its own lesson. In general, metre, diction, thought, imagery are so used as to convey and perpetuate various moods, happy or melancholy, light or elevated, through which a mind, in a high degree sensitive, but essentially sane and just, has passed, under various conditions of national and personal experience. He eliminates all that is alien from the real meaning of the situation, so as to leave only what has a universal and permanent significance. It would be too much to say that all the poems are equally perfect in form, for some of the Odes in Book i. (e. g. 7 and 28) suggest the inference that that improvement in concen- tration of effect and definiteness of purpose which the Odes VI.] HIS STYLE. 183 shew in comparison with the Epodes, was not accomplished without much of the ' limae labor.' Whatever defects in form there may be among the later Odes seem to arise from excessive concentration. The transitions from one thought to another, or from one act in the drama to another, are too rapid and abrupt to be clearly intelligible. Instances of this kind of obscurity may be seen in the concluding stanzas of iii. 2, and in the account (iii. 19) of the revel held in celebration of the bestowal of the augurate on Murena. That poem may have the meaning which Mr. Verrall attributes to it, but it does not explain itself with the clearness of the drama where Asterie and Gyges, Chloe and Enipeus, play their part, in the light stanzas beginning ' Quid fles, Asterie.' Sometimes a seeming confusion in the thought or in the expression of it mars the harmonious development of the ideas, as in the sixth and seventh stanzas of i. 35 Te Spes et albo rara Fides colit Velata panno, etc. But, generally speaking, the mastery of form was attained by him before the mastery over his materials, and that maturity of mind which ultimately made the graver pre- dominate over the lighter products of his art. In the first book, it is in the poems of the simplest texture, in which a single thought or situation is presented, that we feel most the perfection of form, as in 5, 9, 14, 17, 31, 32. As he advances in his art, he still shews his consummate skill in expressing his mood of mind, or presenting some single phase of human life or nature to the imagination in a few stanzas, in which reflexion scarcely mingles with the pure or sparkling current of his feeling or fancy, as in ii. 6, 8, iii. 7, 9, 13, 1 8, iv. 3. But, at the same time, he has learned to combine thoughts, symbolism, and narrative into more complex harmonies, as in the first six Odes of Book iii. and the fourth and fourteenth of Book iv; to work some appropriate tale from Greek mythology into lines of kindly warning addressed to one of the heroines of his fancy ; to express his philosophy of life in Odes 184 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [Cm VI. of sustained dignity, as ii. 16, Hi. 16, 29; or to utter the whole burden of the sins of the age in lines of continuous rebuke, each of which singly is incisive like the note of a Censor, as in Hi. 24. In both the longer and the shorter poems, the fact or situation which gives rise to the poem is presented in the opening lines ; then the feeling rises as it approaches the central fact or thought ; and then for the most part dies away in lines that, while calming the emotion, deepen the impression of the whole ; as, for instance, the majesty of the speech and bearing of Regulus gains a deeper impressiveness from the contrast suggested by the quiet ending Tendens Venafranos in agros Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum (iii. 5) 1 . The special excellence of the lyrical art of Horace is his mastery over his various metres, and his adaptation of them to express his various moods. The single word of recognition which his lyrical genius receives from any contemporary is the epithet ' numerosus,' applied to him by Ovid. His own claim to recognition is on the ground that he has made the music of the old lyrical metres of Greece live in the language of Italy. His first attempt to do this was in reproducing the recurring chime of the Parian iambics, which fitted the incisiveness and terseness of the Latin language, and proved itself an adequate vehicle for the biting satire of Italy and the sententiousness of the Roman mind. In the Epodes he makes experiments in other combinations of recurring lines, their characteristic being that the sense is generally completed in the couplet. In the first nine Odes of Book i, which are so arranged as to give specimens of all the most important metres, four are in couplets, four in stanzas of four lines of different struc- ture, and one is composed in a verse of uniform structure, so arranged as generally to fall into strophes of four lines. Of the first class of metres, in which the couplet is used, 1 This characteristic of the art of Horace is well brought out by Mr. Wick- ham in his notes on the Odes. VI.] FORMS OF VERSE. 185 only one the third Asclepiad was finally adopted by him as one of his regular metres, and it is so employed that two couplets are grouped together into one stanza; so that generally it may be said that the metres of the Odes are arranged in stanzas of four lines of limited variety of structure, in conformity with strict metrical laws. In the structure of each line and stanza and in the tendency to complete the sense within the stanza, we recognise the distinction between the weighty and regular movement of the Latin language and the rapidity and free range of the Greek. By the recognition of this distinction Horace adapts the Aeolian melody to the Latin tongue. Of the various metres which he adopted, five were found best suited to his purpose the Sapphic, the Alcaic, and three varieties of the Asclepiad. In the Sapphic, in which the trochee and the dactyl are the predominating feet, he brings out a light, graceful, and rapid movement, expressive either of gay or serious anima- tion of feeling. Thus, in the ' Ne sit ancillae ' and the ' Ulla si iuris tibi peierati,' the metre is the vehicle of his spright- liest raillery. In the ' Integer vitae ' and the ' Septimi Gades,' it presents a transcript of the poet's mind in cheer- ful animation, or in the alternation between quiet hope- fulness and pensive resignation. It moves with a stately and animated tread in the ' Otium divos ' and in various poems such as i. 2 and 12, which have the character of national hymns; while in iii. n and 27, it accompanies lively narrative used in connexion with a lively personal address. As an instrument of buoyant feeling, expressing itself by means of vivid and rapidly changing imagery, no Latin metre equals the Glyconics of Catullus ; but that metre is not capable of the varied and more stately and concentrated effects of the Sapphics of Horace. In the Alcaic, which he places last among the early specimens of the metres chiefly employed, as he places the Sapphic first, the power and impetus first imparted to it by its inventor are tempered by a weight and dignity of movement more accordant with the genius of the language, 1 86 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [Cn. VI. and the sustained elevation of feeling, the continuous volume of thought, action, and imagery, which it is gener- ally used to convey. Perhaps Horace did not at first find out the true power and function of this metre. In the first book, the Sapphic is the metre employed in the earlier poems of national feeling, and it is only near the end of the book that he employs the Alcaic for sustained, power- ful, and impassioned feeling. In the ' Vides ut alta,' the ' Velox amoenum saepe Lucretilem/ the ' Musis amicus,' the ' Quid dedicatum poscit Apollinem,' and others, he employs it on themes which did not call for the swelling and culminating effects which it produces in iii. 3, 4, 5, 6, iv. 4, 14, or the complex variations of iii. 29, or the dirge- like solemnity of ' Eheu fugaces,' and such stanzas as ' Quis non Latino sanguine pinguior ' and ' Omnes e'odem cogi- mur.' It is in the Odes of the second book that he first associates it with the grave or solemn movement of his spirit ; yet to the end, whether from the desire to shew the versatility of his instrument, or to avoid the impression of monotony of effect, he from time to time, as in ' O nate mecum consule Manlio ' and ' Vixi puellis nuper idoneus,' reverts to the practice of its inventor, who, ' amid the re- spites from battle or the perils of shipwreck, sang of Bacchus and the Muses, of Venus and the boy who never leaves her side, and of the beauty of the dark eyes and dark locks of Lycus.' In short Odes characterised by Greek grace and subtlety of feeling and observation rather than Roman dignity and elevation, or Italian sprightliness and animation, there is no metre which he employs with more charm than the combination of two Asclepiads with one Pherecratean and one Glyconic, generally called the fifth Asclepiad. The mood expressed in it may be sombre or bright, but it is one that comes and passes more lightly than that expressed either in the Alcaic stanza or in other combinations of the Asclepiad. The Pherecratean,, following on the two longer lines, breaks the monotony of mood, while the light and rapid Glyconic at the end of the stanza seems to allow the $VlJ FORMS OF VERSE. 187 mood to pass away, leaving no feeling of satiety, but either a happy memory, or a blending of buoyant hopefulness with some feeling of regret or alarm over which the mind does not care to brood. Among the happiest applications of this metre are the ' Quis multa gracilis,' the ' O navis referent in mare te novi,' the ' O fons Bandusiae,' and the ' Quid fles, Asterie,' all among the most perfect in form of the shorter pieces of Horace. In the first, the mood expressed is that of a light regret lightly passing and losing itself in the artistic pleasure of looking on a graceful and piquant picture. In the second the re- gret is deeper, and the thought accompanying it is graver, but it is one on which the poet will not let his fancy dwell, and the buoyancy of the metre suggests the hope that the ship which the poet is watching with alarm and anxiety, will avoid the ' dangerous seas among the shining Cyclades.' In ' O fons Bandusiae,' he has arrested and perpetuated the joy of a happy hour spent among the Sabine hills, looking on and listening to the clear waters of Bandusia, springing from the ilex-crowned rock, and hurrying to join the larger stream of the Digentia ; while the picture is completed by the graceful life of the young kid cui frons turgida cornibus Primis et Venerem et proelia destinat. In 'Quid fles, Asterie,' the metre tells a love story, full of life and graceful movement, in the fewest possible words. The mood is that of passing trouble and anxiety, but with the light of hope and ultimate happiness break- ing through and banishing the clouds. It is also, as in the ' Quis multa gracilis,' the mood of a disinterested spectator, in whom the drama passing before his imagin- ation rather stimulates a sympathetic curiosity than arouses any deeper emotion. To the ' Vitas hinnuleo me similis, Chloe,' a sense of the young life of spring is imparted, in accord with the young life of the person addressed ; but the tone of the Ode shews that in the transient interest with which Chloe inspires him, the poet is e non praeter solitum levis,' and that while his fancy is 1 88 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. charmed his heart is untouched. There is a similar buoy- ancy of feeling in the hymn to Diana (i. 21) as the goddess of streams, groves, and mountains, and the concluding stanza ' Hie bellum lacrimosum ' suggests the passing away of the cloud of foreboding which may have given occasion to the hymn, if, as is probable, it was sung on some public occasion. It is perhaps a matter of regret that he should once have associated this, the most graceful and charming of his metres, with the least pleasing of all the subjects of his art, in 'Audivere, Lyce.' But as, in the most conventional of his Odes, there is always some touch of nature which keeps them alive, so, in the least pleasing of his poems, in those of which the general effect is repulsive, there are images of grace and beauty. And so in the lines quid habes illius, illius, Qnae spirabat amores, Quae me surpuerat mihi, Felix post Cinaram, notaque et artium Grataram facies? there lives a feeling of regret for the spell once exercised over him, in contrast to the indifference with which he now can contemplate the ' dilapsam in cineres facem.' Rapid transition is the note of the poem, the change from vehement passion to vehement scorn. The graceful beauty of the past forces on the mind the thought of the hideousness of the present, but he does not care to dwell on the thought. The object of this invective passes from his mind, as she passes from the sphere of her fascination. But he proves the metre an apt instrument for the vein of Archilochian mockery in his temper, as for his finer fancies. He has used more frequently other combinations of the Asclepiad with the Glyconic the three Asclepiads followed by the one Glyconic, and the couplet consisting of the Glyconic followed by the Asclepiad. The effect of the first is to express gravity, moderation, and sobriety of feeling, whether of happiness or sorrow. In iii. 16, VI.] FORMS OF VERSE. 189 Inclusam Danaen turris aenea,' the feeling expressed is that of calm and temperate contentment ; of the hap- piness procured by simple pleasures and few wants, con- trasted with the pomp and vanity of great wealth. In iv. 5 the metre seems to be the very echo of the feeling which he desires to express, a mood not of enthusiasm or elevation, but calm and sober happiness secured by the rule of Augustus Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat, Nutrit rura Ceres almaque Faustitas, Pacatum volitant per mare navitae, Culpari metuit Fides. In ' Scriberis Vario ' there is the sobriety of tone of one disclaiming all lofty ambition. Regret and longing, made calm by resignation and the appreciation of the quiet and chastened graces of character, have found no utterance in any language more in harmony with the mood expressed than in ' Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus.' In poems connected with love 'Albi ne doleas plus nimio ' or ' Extremum Tanain ' there is the tone of one complaining over faithlessness or hardheartedness, not of passionate or indignant remonstrance. In ' lam veris comites' (iv. 12) there is present a sense of idyllic quiet, combined with the elegiac feeling awakened by the thought of death; while in i. 15 'Pastor cum traheret ' there is a grave inexorable denunciation of doom, uttered with no violence or anger, but with a calm certitude. The couplet formed by the Glyconic and the Ascle- piadean dimeter has a somewhat different effect from the couplets used in the Epodes. The metre is less epigrammatic, but it has an incisive, definite, sententious and even abrupt character, resembling the Epode. It presents a series of thoughts, images, and feelings, suc- ceeding one another with rapid transition, rather than the continuous swelling and subsiding of some simple mood. This seems to be the character of i. 3 ' Sic te diva potens Cypri.' The thought or sight of the ship which is to bear Virgil on his voyage suggests the old ' reverential HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. fear ' of the sea. The images the ' monstra natantia,' the 'mare turgidum,' the 'infames scopulos Acroceraunia ' and the thoughts of the impiety of man's enterprise, of the old fraud of Prometheus and of its consequences, follow one another in rapid and abrupt transition, till they conclude with the Nil mortalibus ardui est : Caelum ipsum petimns stultitia, neque Per nostrum patinmr scelus Iracunda lovem ponere fulmina. In iii. 24 ' Intactis opulentior ' a succession of thoughts is presented with the incisiveness of Archilochian satire, and the gravity and sternness of censorial rebuke. In iii. 19 'Quantum distet ab Inacho' the metre expresses abrupt transition of scene and thought, combined with excited feeling. In iii. 25 c Quo me Bacche ' the mind passes rapidly from the scene before the eye to the inward thought and feeling, from the vision of the God, swaying the Bacchantes, uprooting the tall ashes, to the sense of inspiration expressed in Nil parvuin aut humili modo, Nil mortale loquar. The metre is employed also in two Odes in which the poet exercises his most subtle and delicate gift in ' Donee gratus eram tibi ' and ' Quern tu Melpomene semel.' The terseness of the Latin language, and the power of the metre to concentrate in a few short stanzas a whole drama of the abrupt and capricious moods of lovers, and of ' a woman's last word,' are exemplified in the first. The second is perhaps the most perfect specimen of Horace's most delicate manner, and another example of how much can be done in the fewest words. The note of the metre is that thought and feeling do not seem to pass into one another by logical transition, as in the Alcaic, Sapphic, and the other combinations of the Asclepiadean, but to stand apart, suggesting a vivid contrast, the link of con- nexion between them being supplied by the mind. This adds to the vivid impression which each individual thought or picture makes. VI.] FORMS OF VERSE. 191 The simple Asclepiadean dimeter, with its unimpassioned rhythm, is employed, with admirable tact, to claim for his own art a place among the various aims and pursuits to which men devote their lives, and to declare" the reality of the success which he has achieved. A few other metres are employed once or twice in the collection, and give variety to it. But he did not find them equally suited either to his subjects or to the genius of the Latin language. It is to be observed that he does not use the metres which Catullus had naturalised in Latium the hendecasyllable, the pure iambic or the scazon. Perhaps he did not care to tread on ground already appropriated : Libera per vacuum posui vestigia primus, Non aliena meo press! pede (Ep. i. 19. 21). But, apart from this desire not to appear among the servile ranks of imitators, he must have felt that, though these metres had been proved to be suited to the genius of the Latin language as a direct medium for the utterance of simple or impassioned feelings, they were not the true expression of the more varied and more reflective move- ments of his own mind. He adopted the Sapphic stanza, although that had been employed by Catullus with a power more approaching to that of its passionate inventor; but in adopting it he entirely altered its character. He made it more regular in movement and calmer in tone than it is either in Catullus or in the extant specimens of Sappho. He twice uses the Asclepiad trimeter em- ployed by Catullus for tender remonstrance but as an instrument of sententious rather than emotional expression. The metres which he first employed he made absolutely his own. As Munro has said of them, the secret of their music was lost with its inventor. Seneca has made a mechanical reproduction of his Asclepiads and Sapphics in the choral odes of his tragedies ; and in the Silvae of Statius there is one specimen of a Sapphic ode, no better or worse than some of the innumerable exercises in Sapphic verse, written for two centuries in our English schools. The only true master of metre who flourished HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. under the Empire, Martial, while he adopts with success the metres of Catullus and Ovid, has limited his ambition to the use of one of the metres employed by Horace in his Epodes, that of the ' Beatus ille qui procul negotiis.' The great success of Horace is in eliciting new musical effects from the Latin language, in accordance with the grave, powerful, and commanding tones which made it the organ of Roman law and empire, with the terseness and incisiveness which have made it the language of inscrip- tions, epitaphs, and epigrams, and with the softer and live- lier tones responding to the Italian sensuousness, vivacity, and emotional susceptibility, which already appear, though without poetic grace, in the cantica of Plautus, and have survived as the dominant characteristics of the modern Italian tongue. It is essentially a ' carmen Latinum ' to which his lyre is attuned. The music, though caught from the old Aeolian melodies, is generally Roman or Italian. But if the first note of his lyrical art is the musical power which Ovid recognises in applying to him the epithet ' nu- merosus,' the second, and one inseparable from his music, is the power characterised by the ' arbiter elegantiarum ' of the reign of Nero as the ' curiosa felicitas ' of his language a felicity shewn as much in the arrangement and com- bination, as in the choice of his words. This gift, like his power over metre, is partly the result of his Greek studies, partly of his Roman nurture and Italian birth. He was thoroughly steeped in the language of Homer and of the old lyric poets and apparently also of the tragic poets. In adapting Greek phraseology to Latin, he studies the genius of his own language more closely than the older Roman poets. He avoids such novel word-formations as ' silvicultrix,' ' silvifragus,' etc., which Catullus and Lucre- tius perpetrated after the example of the older poets, and of which th'ere are traces in Virgil, and, later, in the Meta- morphoses of Ovid. Except where the thing of which he speaks is Greek, as for instance ' melos,' ' barbiton,' etc., he uses Latin words to render the phrases which he imitates, and Latin phrases to render the compound words to which VI.] CURIOS A FELICITAS. 193 the more plastic nature of the Greek language gave birth 1 . He shews how his genius has assimilated the Greek in- fluence in his avoidance of that exaggerative tendency which their rhetorical training developed in Roman poets, and from which not even Virgil is exempt. He can convey much feeling and meaning by use of the simplest and com- monest words, such as ' brevis,' ' vacuus,' ' integer/ ' impro- bus,' 'vagus.' This Greek moderation of expression is conspicuous in his frequent employment of the figures of speech known to grammarians as litotes and oxymoron, e.g. ' non hoc pollicitus tuae,' ' splendide mendax,' ' grata protervitas,' and the like. It is conspicuous also in the emphasis which he gives by such juxtaposition of dis- cordant qualities as in ' tenues grandia,' ' dulcia barbare,' ' credulus aurea,' ' perfidus hospitium.' He avails himself of Greek constructions to compress the greatest amount of meaning and feeling into the fewest possible words. This new power over language was not gained without some sacrifice of the purity of the Latin idiom. And this sacri- fice is especially apparent in the prose style of the historian Tacitus, who, as an imitator of Horace and Virgil, availed himself of the same aid to terseness and condensation. But, while the language of many of the Odes, especially those of which the subject has an affinity to Greek thought and feeling, reproduces the subtle moderation and grace of Greek diction, no writer can be more truly Roman in his phraseology and constructions. In his purely Roman Odes he employs the plainest and most prosaic phrases, terms associated with Roman life, and adds dignity to his subject by their employment. Such phrases as these Motum ex Metello consule civicum (ii. i) neque consularis Summovet lictor miseros tumultns Mentis (ii. 16) Descendit in campum petitor (iii. i) Nee sumit aut ponit secures (iii. a) ut capitis minor (iii. 5) 1 E. g. the periphrasis for xa\Kto6wf>ri ' tunica tectum adaraantina ' (i. 6. 13). O 194 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH. VI. and many others, appealed powerfully to the Roman imagi- nation in their plain and direct realism. Occasionally, but very rarely, this Roman realism betrays him into some coarser or more grotesque phrase, more suited to the mood in which the Satires are written than to the delicate art of the Odes. The realistic and concrete force of Latin is seen also in the use of the participle of verbs instead of some abstract substantive, as in Desiderantem quod satis est, Quod si dolentem nee Phrygius lapis, Multa petentibus desunt multa. In the plain directness of such maxims or generalisations as Bene est cui deus obtulit Parca, quod satis est, manu, or Quod adest memento Componere aequus, it is not the Greek artist but the Roman moralist to whom we are listening. The Roman ' vates,' moved by the sense of doom, seems to speak in such powerful expressions of national grief as auditumque Medis Hesperiae sonitum ruinae, or inspired by the vision of triumph in stet Capitolium Fulgens triumphatisque possit Roma ferox dare iura Medis. Horace is able, in the fewest words, to present out- ward scenes and processes of Nature to the inward eye, as in rura quae Liris quieta Mordet aqua taciturnus amnis, or positas ut glaciet nives Puro numine luppiter. A similar power of condensation of language is seen in the graphic touches by which a scene from life is called up at a single stroke Nunc et latentis proditor intimo Gratus puellae risus ab angulo, 5 VI.] IMAGINATION. 195 or some record of human experience crystallises in a phrase ' Arcanique fides prodiga,' ' Spes animi credula mutui.' The more imaginative and figurative use of language is seen in many of the epithets he applies to the sea, such as ' aequor imperiosius,' ' mare tumultuosum,' ' dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae,' or in such phrases as 'ventos aequore deproeliantes.' The same descriptive power, combined with the imaginative gift of seeing analogies between natural and moral phenomena, is more fully shewn in the few longer similes which he employs. There is poetic enthu- siasm as well as vigour in the comparison of himself, hurried along through silent woods, to the Bacchante Hebram prospiciens et nive candidam Thracen ac pede barbaro Lustratam Rhodopen (iii. 25). In the Odes in celebration of the victories of Drusus and Tiberius, there is Pindaric vigour, if not novelty, in the comparison of Drusus, descending suddenly on the Rhaeti, to the eaglet swooping down (iv. 4), and of the havoc made by Tiberius on the barbarous hosts to that made by the impetuous Aufidus, Cum saevit horrendamque cultis Diluviem meditatur agris (iv. 14). So too, in the common comparison of the course of life to the course of a river cetera fluminis Ritu feruntur nunc medio alveo Cum pace delabentis Etruscum In mare, nunc lapides adesos Stirpesque raptas et pecus et domos Volventis una non sine montium Clamore vicinaeque silvae, Cum fera diluvies quietos Irritat amnes (iii. 29) we feel, as we feel in reading Lucretius and Virgil, that the poet had often watched such a spectacle, and reflected on its significance. Horace belongs to that class of lyrical poets in whom impulse and enthusiasm are subordinate to, and controlled O 2 ig6 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. [CH.VI. by reflexion. Wherever we can compare him with Catullus, we feel his inferiority in spontaneity, in ardour of feeling, in direct presentation of his object. It would be unfair to compare their love-poetry, in which Catullus is at his best, and Horace hardly professes to be serious. But even in the expression of affection for friends, in which both are excellent, and, still more, of hatred or scorn of enemies, Catullus is the greater. It was seen in an earlier chapter how much colder the verses are in which Horace cele- brates the return of Numida from Spain than the out- burst of joy with which Catullus greets the return of Verannius Venistine domum ad tuos Penates Fratresque unanimos annmque matrem? Venisti, O mihi nnntii beati ! And the unpleasing bitterness of the twenty-fifth Ode of Book i. ' Parcius iunctas' is tame indeed compared with the scathing scorn of the stanzas to Furius and Aurelius Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis. Horace avoids fastidiously those diminutives of which Catullus, like the old Comic poets, makes such prodigal use as terms of endearment. It is by the use of the simplest and quietest words, or by the emphasis given by the position of a word, as in the ' care Maecenas eques,' in ' necte meo Lamiae coronam,' ' animae dimidium meae,' 'vatis amici,' that Horace signifies the presence of his personal feelings. Horace writes with a manly affection and esteem for his friends, and an artificial hatred and more real disdain for his enemies, but never with the passionate love and passionate scorn which live for ever in the burning and the biting lines of Catullus. In other poems which we can compare, as for instance the ' Dianae sumus in fide ' and the ' Dianam tenerae dicite virgines,' we feel the differ- ence between the vivid visions of a poet of the ' first inten- tion,' and an artist reshaping the fancies of earlier poets. The feeling of the new life of the world, and the new joy in the heart of man which comes with it, is more vividly pre- VL] HORACE AND CATULLUS. 197 sent in ' lam ver egelidos refert tepores ' than in * lam veris comites quae mare temperant.' Horace nowhere reaches such heights of creative imagination as Catullus reaches in the Attis, nor is he capable of the sustained union of vivid feeling with vivid imagery which we find in the Epithala- mium in honour of Manlius and Vinia. The deepest springs of personal joy and sorrow are not among the forces of his lyrical poetry, any more than the awe of the supernatural world or the spirit of adventure in action and in speculation. If it were necessary to award poetic supremacy to either, it would be right to bear in mind the short time allowed for the genius of Catullus to mature, and the mellowing wisdom which the last twenty years of his life brought to Horace. Had he died at the age when Catullus died, he would have been either altogether forgotten, or known only as the author of a few Satires, and these not his best. Where he is superior to Catullus is in the wider range and the greater dignity of his art. He is in sympathy with human life in many more of its relations. It is permissible to think that Catullus had a stronger and more vivid nature, and yet to hold that the work of Horace, even if limited to the Odes, is a more important contribution to Roman litera- ture, that it is more truly representative of the idea of Rome than any other work except the Aeneid, and that it bears the stamp of immortality artistic perfection more surely than any work except the Georgics. If his was not so purely a poetic nature as that of Catullus, he was a man much more complete. While as free from austerity, he was much more serious, much more capable of appreciating the true proportions of things, and his own claims on life. The work accomplished by him is thus much more com- plete, more equable, more solid. His apparent want of spontaneity, his occasional conventionality, the obviousness of his thought, are compensated by the art which lends a charm even to these limitations of his spirit. No one knew better the impossibility, without the natural gift, of pro- ducing poetry that could please and live Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est 198 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. but no one realised more truly how much industry and method and critical insight could do, to draw forth and shape into perfect form the rough ore of genius. His spiritual gift was able to render its fullest service to the world by becoming obedient to his intellectual power and critical judgment. THE ELEGIAC POETS. THE ELEGIAC POETS. CHAPTER I. ROMAN ELEGY. IT was seen in a former chapter that Horace, as the literary lawgiver of his age, encouraged the cultivation of the great forms of poetry, especially of the tragic drama, with the view apparently of imparting to it an artistic per- fection equal to that attained by epic, didactic, and lyrical poetry. The substance of poetry was to be sought in a true criticism of life. The great Greek writers were still to be followed as models of artistic execution ; and it was accepted as an article of critical faith that the older Greek writers were the best Si quia Graecorum sunt antiquissima quaeque Scripta vel optima, &c. (Hor. Ep. ii. i. 28). He, alone among his contemporaries, will have nothing to do with the Alexandrian poets. He came more and more to regard the function of the poet as, in the main, an ethical one, and to demand that above all things he should be of use to his generation. He evidently thought little of the art of those among his younger contemporaries who alone produced works which still live. He speaks disparagingly of the form and substance of elegiac poetry. To the metre he applies the epithet ' trifling,' exiguus. While to the hexameter he assigns the sphere of war and heroic deeds, to the iambic that of dramatic action and dialogue, to lyrical measures that of celebrating the praise of gods, heroes, or 202 ROMAN ELEGY. [Cn. 1. victors in the games, and the loves and gaiety of youth, he limits the function of the elegiac metre to the expression of sorrow, and to inscriptions on votive offerings Versibns impariter iunctis querimonia primum, Post etiam inclusa est voti sententia compos (A. P. 75). In accordance with this view of the primary function of the elegy, he applies the epithet ' miserabiles ' to the elegies of Tibullus ; and uses the terms ' flebiles modi ' and ' molles querellae ' of the verses of Valgius, a poet of the circle to which Tibullus belonged. The name of elegy is so much associated, in all literature, with the idea of a lament, that it is natural to accept this account of its origin, which probably fests on some Greek authority. The word lAeyo?, as is remarked by K. O. Miiller, is used by Euripides (Iph. Taur. 1091) of the lament of Alcyone for her husband Ceyx, and in Aristophanes (Av. 2 1 8) for the lament of the nightingale over Itys. The word eXeyeiov is applied by Thucydides (i. 132) to the inscription on the votive tripod raised by the Greeks in Delphi from the spoils of the Persian war. It is clear that the metre at an early stage of its development was recognised as suitable for two functions which it afterwards fulfilled, that of a lament and that of an epigram. But the earliest extant specimens of the metre in Greek, the appeals of Callinus to his countrymen and of Tyrtaeus to the Spartans, are con- ceived in a spirit the very opposite of that of the ' imbelles elegi ' of the Roman poets, and presumably of the Greek poets whom they followed. The political manifestoes of Solon, the gnomic maxims of Theognis, and the convivial ditties of Phocylides and others are equally remote from the purely personal, unreflective, sentimental utterances of the Latin elegy. The elegiac metre, a development of the epic hexameter by a weakening process, was used in the great era of Greek literature for a more simple and less impassioned expression of personal feeling and reflexion than that of lyrical poetry. But that it was regarded as allied to this latter form may be inferred from the musical accompaniment with which it was presented. CH. I.] EARLY GREEK ELEGIAC POETS. 203 Among the early elegiac poets the name of Mimnermus alone is associated with love. He seems to have treated the subject in a spirit somewhat resembling that occasionally found in Tibullus; and as the art of Tibullus is comparatively free from Alexandrian tendencies, it is not unlikely that he, like Horace, drew from older and purer sources of in- spiration than his contemporaries. Mimnermus flourished in the latter part of the 7th century B. C. Though there is the breath of battle and of patriotism in some of his frag- ments, yet the prevailing tone of them is the lament of the individual for the loss of youth and its pleasures. That the line ra ok /Stos, n 8< rtpirvov artp xpvfftiys is the key-note of his poetry, as it is of the Latin elegiac poetry, may be inferred from the manner in which he is spoken of by the Latin poets who had all his writings in their hands. Propertius and Horace adduce him as the prototype of those who made love the chief theme of their verse and the chief pursuit of their lives. Plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero is the language of Propertius, who is represented by Horace (Ep. ii. 2. 100) as thinking it a finer compliment to be com- pared to Mimnermus than to the Alexandrian Callimachus. Horace, who gratifies Propertius by this comparison, quotes Mimnermus as the authority by whom a life of gaiety and pleasure is justified Si, Mimnermus uti censet, sine amore iocisque Nil est iucnndum, vivas in amore iocisque (Ep. i. 6. 65). An Alexandrian poet, Hermesianax of Colophon, speaks of him as burning with love for Nanno, and finding a vent for his feelings 'in the breath of the soft penta- meter.' But it was first by the Alexandrian poets them- selves that the elegiac metre became identified with the poetry of pleasure. Love as a passion had found its most ardent expression in the lyric poetry of Sappho ; as a pastime it had been treated in graceful and lively tones by Anacreon. The part which it plays in the tragedy of 204 ROMAN ELEGY. [CH. I. human life had found its representative poet in Euripides ; and its part in the comedy had found a poet in Menander Fabula iucundi nulla est sine amore Menandri. But as it was in Ionia, after the martial and enterprising spirit of her cities had begun to decay, that the spirit of the erotic elegy was first displayed, so it was after the decay of Greek enterprise and creative genius, in an age of luxury and learned leisure, that the love of the poet for his mistress became the principal motive of the poetry which drew its material from actual life. Even the revival of the romance of the past, to which much of the literary activity of the Alexandrian poets was devoted, was largely influenced by the desire to idealise the pleasure that enlivened their own days. For the expression of that sentiment the elegiac metre by its gentle and languid movement commended itself as the fittest vehicle ; and the form and composition of the poems in which it was employed were elaborated with studious art. Before what is strictly called the Alexandrian age, Anti- machus of Colophon had composed certain books of elegies, to which he gave the name of his mistress, ' Lyde.' Ovid mentions her along with the heroine of the elegies of Philetas Nee tantum Clario Lyde dilecta poetae, Nee tantum Coo Bittis amata suo est (Trist. i. 6. i). The idea of Antimachus which naturally occurs to the readers of Latin poetry is that suggested by Catullus in comparing him with the author who gave his name to the ' Annals of Volusius ' At populus tumido gaudeat Antimacho. But the author who seems to have first limited the scope of the elegy to the love of the poet for his mistress was Philetas of Cos, of whose art and genius a more favourable opinion may be formed from the admiration frequently expressed by Propertius, and the allusions to him in Ovid ; and from the more convincing evidence of the CH. l.] ALEXANDRIAN ELEGIAC POETS. 205 contemporary poet, Theocritus, who regarded him as his master : OVTt TOV t It was not in the nature of Ovid to make any further attempt to work at so thankless a task. Ovid could only gain access to the select and limited class who cared for literature by works directly addressed to them. And from this necessity he found a medium more suited to his genius than the regular drama. His faculty was much more that of the story-teller than of the regular dramatist. In the exuberance of fancy which creates materials for narrative, in the power of presenting it with rapidity and brightness, and in the power of making natural scenes and the picturesque movement of life present to the eye l , no Roman poet of any age equalled him. 1 The vividness of Ovid's power of presenting images to his own mind is shown in the Tristia and Ex Ponto, where he so constantly speaks of the presence of friends and places to his imagination. Cf. Ex Ponto i. 8, 31 Nam modo vos animo dukes reminiscor amici, Nunc mihi cum cara coniuge nata subit ; Eque domo rursus pulchrae loca vertor ad urbis, Cunctaque mens oculis pervidet ilia suis : Nunc fora nunc aedes nunc marmore tecta theatra, Nunc subit aequata porticus omnis humo, &c. ; ibid. i. 9, 7 Ante meos oculos tanquam praesentis imago, Haeret et exstinctum vivere fingit amor. IV.] HIS FAILURE IN TRAGEDY. 345 He gives little indication of the power of conceiving and embodying the nobler types of character, actuated by heroic impulses, nor of reaching the deeper sources of tragic passion. His vivid and energetic faculty of expres- sion is more oratorical than purely dramatic, though it is an oratory often expressing itself in the tones of refined conversation. His imagination was discursive rather than concentrative. It ranged rapidly over the whole world of ancient fable and romance, over every region of the three continents known to story, every picturesque aspect of the natural world, but did not take up its dwelling at ' Thebes or Athens ' and regard them as the scene of some complete action of deep human significance. Though accompanied by accurate observation, and intuitive insight into the inner life and feelings of many varieties of men and women, yet in no poet of equal eminence is the imagination so little combined with rational reflexion on the laws of life. We cannot say that he had either belief or disbelief in any providential overruling of human affairs : the gods in whom he finds it expedient to believe are capricious agencies who by their jealous interference bring about the vicissitudes of human life, but afford no light or help in its perplexities. Neither religion nor human or divine will has any existence for his mind. Passion of every kind, desire, vanity and irritation, quickness of intelli- gence, the influence of custom, these are the moving powers of his world of natural and supernatural beings. Nothing higher or more serious comes within the range of his art. He has little power over the springs of pathos. Deeds of horror and cruelty he can describe pic- turesquely, but they do not seem to move him deeply. A great sorrow, a great affection, a great cause or a great crisis, awakens in him little corresponding emotion. The real importance of Ovid in literature, the inheritance which he left, and through which he powerfully influenced some of the greatest poets and painters of the modern world, was in the new and vivid life which he imparted to the fables of the Greek mythology. Those fables, many 346 OVID. [CH. v. of which must have been old in the days of Homer, had already gone through various phases of their perennial existence. To the great Greek lyric poets they existed as the bright morning, the memory of which added a divine glory and ideality to their still bright midday. To the great Athenian poets, living in that age of the world when more than in any other the old forces of religious belief and re- verence met with the awakening forces of art and philosophy, they supplied a large store of ideal situations, personages, actions and catastrophes by which they could express their interpretation of human life. Great artists in every kind of material had made the personages of this time present to the eye of later generations, and according to their own conceptions had made their power present to the spirit, or the interest of their story present to the curiosity of later times. To the imagination of the Alexandrian poets they supplied that element of a fuller and fresher life, a sense of movement and adventure and susceptibility to pleasure and pain, which was impossible in the routine of actual exist- ence. But, living in an age of learning, science, and criti- cism, rather than of action, creation, and speculation, they brought nothing new from the spiritual life of their own time to enrich this heritage while it passed through their hands. They lost the sense of the heroic proportions in which the imagination of an earlier time had set it forth. It tended to pass into learned antiquarianism, the colours obscured, the outlines of the figures ill defined, the passions and feelings reproduced from older works, not created from living sympathy. The Greek imagination was too languid, too sophisticated, too much overgrown with learning, and, though not with thought, yet with the accumulated results of thought, to renew the life of this old mythology. The medium, too, the artificial epic diction, was incapable of imparting freshness to the treatment. Both conception and language, too far removed from the original sources, had become like a river flowing through level flats, dried up by the heat of an African sun. To impart to that mythology a new life, and thus to transmit it to a time IV.] GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN LATIN. 347 which could enter into its enjoyment with all the sensuous vitality with which it first passed into poetry and art, required the fresh sensibility of a new race, and also the medium of a language which, while enriched and refined, had not lost its sensitiveness and its power of producing immediate impressions on the inner eye of fancy. The first attempt to make this old world of romance and human passion live in Latin was made by the early tragic poets. What life they gave to the stories with which they dealt, and how they gave it, it is impossible to discover. We can only say that they dealt with them in a serious spirit, dealt with the manlier passions and made them a medium of moral teaching. But it was not through the masculine spirit and moral fervour of the Roman tragic poets that the Greek mythology was destined to live a second life in Roman literature, and thereafter to pass with renewed vitality into the art and poetry of the Renaissance. The Italian sensuous fancy, not the Roman serious spirit, was the power by which it was revived ; and it was in Ovid above all other ancient Italian poets that this sensuous fancy was embodied. He had all the knowledge of the Alexandrians ; and the knowledge of the fables of the past and the varied regions of the world, which in them was dead learning, was in him combined with vivid curiosity and active creative power. The time in which he lived was analogous in many ways to the Alexandrian age, but much more quickening to the imagination. There was the same want of original speculation or real learning, but much curiosity and interest in books ; the same tendency of a tame and blase time to seek an outlet for itself in an imaginary world of adventure, and an idyllic restoration in the imaginary life of woods, streams and mountains, like the idyllic return to Nature that preceded the French Revolution. It was Ovid's great gift that, feeling these needs of the real world, it came naturally to his imagination to create the other. He had no vague sentimental longing, no regrets for an ideal past. But he had the power of directly making present to the 348 OVID. [On. V. minds of others what seemed to rise spontaneously in his own fancy. He had a keen enjoyment in the life of Nature, in the outward refreshment to the eye and ear, if not the inward contemplative enthusiasm of Lucretius or the deep meditative joy of Virgil. His visits to the Pelignian moun- tains, the charm of all the varied scenes in Sicily, Greece and Asia through which he had travelled, whatever he had received through books or observation or social inter- course, became a vital influence in his poetry. Though no one could be more thoroughly a child of his own a g e > ve t from the sensuous richness of his nature, the buoyancy and youthfulness of his spirit, the activity of his fancy, even his deficiency in critical and reflective faculty, it came as naturally to him to recreate the stories of gods and nymphs, of heroes, or even peasants, of a primitive time, as it came to Scott to recreate, out of his keen interest and his abundant treasures of reading, the romance and human story of the Middle Ages. He had no belief in the supernatural, but it was as vividly present to his fancy as if his reason had accepted it for a reality. Curiosity, not faith, was the source of his inspiration. The interest appealed to is simply the love of the marvellous and the love of the picturesque in human action and in outward scenes. It was by a rapid and orderly succession of new and vivid surface impressions, not, like Lucretius and Virgil, and, though in a much inferior degree, Pro- pertius, by making one deep concentrated impression, that he spoke to his own and to later times. He is more like Horace in the variety of the aspects of life which he pre- sents. But he has none of Horace's ethical quality. He keeps entirely to observation and intuition. Horace tells a story not so much for its own sake as for the lesson it con- veys. Ovid seems absolutely unconscious of having any lesson to impart. If any moral may be drawn from his tales, it is not to take the world too seriously. Punishment is meted out, not for offences against duty, good faith, affection, reverence, but for stupidity, austerity, vanity, and ungraciousness. IV.] THE GODS. 349 In his absence of reflexion and any kind of ethical feeling, he was true to his own nature ; and he probably satisfied the taste of a shallower, if more light-hearted generation than that for which Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace had written. The gaiety of youth was the ideal for which society lived, and Ovid more than any other Latin poet kept alive in him till his great misfortune the spirit of youth and gaiety. It is their ' inconsumpta iuventas ' that attracts him to the gods and nymphs and youthful heroes of the ages of romance. He gives us Homer's gods, but with a difference. It is not exactly in the spirit of Aristophanes or Lucian, but in a light artistic half-belief that he brings them back again, emptied of all majesty and grandeur. .There is probably no intentional, or at least no systematic satire in this ; no thought that the things attributed to them are unworthy of the gods in whom the world had believed. He does not ask whether these light lovers among woods and streams, these sharp avengers of slights to their vanity, are the ultimate powers who deter- mine human destiny for good or evil. He rejoices in their youth and vigour and grace, and their free power of ranging over sea and air, and the beautiful places of the earth. Though in no ancient poem do the old gods play a larger part, no work is more irreligious. If the gods of Olympus first assumed their attributes and took their place in the belief of men through the poems of Homer, in the Meta- morphoses of Ovid they seem to reappear again divested both of their original majesty and of all the other attributes which the reverence of the wisest of Greek artists and poets had added to their original endowment. The Metamorphoses, while perpetuating the outward forms and many of the tales of the old mythology, must have been more fatal to any belief in a Divine Providence or a spiritual life than the iconoclasm of Lucretius. The feeling of Lucretius in regard to all the symbols and objects of old religious belief is really nearer to that of Virgil than to that of Ovid. The great gods of Ovid are - in all the moral attributes of man much more below the 350 / OVID. [CH. v. average standard of humanity, than the gods and goddesses of Homer are below his human heroes and heroines. The exercise of power to avenge some slight to their dignity is the mode in which they chiefly make their presence felt in the world. The ' semidei,' the Fauns and Nymphs with their human sensibilities and their life fused in the life of Nature, with their favourite haunts, the spring and river- bank, the lonely mountains of Arcadia, the woods and groves, have a charm which does not belong to his repre- sentation of the greater gods. His imagination is more at home in their forests than in the celestial spheres. He cannot conceive what calls for reverence or inspires the spirit of awe. He has no sense of mystery, no feeling of anything sacred either in life or above life.. Hence his great gods are merely the old elemental powers, animated with the most elementary of human instincts and passions, but vigorous with the fresh and perennial force of the ele- ments, and superadding vigour and grace of movement to the force that comes from Nature. It was the fashion of the times for ambitious poets to take up some of the great subjects of heroic action and adventure, and reproduce them in elaborate epic poems. Thus Ponticus, the friend of Propertius and of Ovid, aspired to tell over again in a Latin epic the story of the war of Thebes : Macer, the friend with whom Ovid travelled, to tell anew ' the tale of Troy divine.' The ambition of Roman writers, both great and small, inclined them to works ' de grande haleine.' Ovid, though professing in his earlier poems the spirit of a trifler, had abundance both of ambition and industry. He lets us know how he con- templated his completed work of the Metamorphoses. He makes for it as strong a claim to immortality as Horace does for his Odes : Quaque patet domitis Komana potentia terris Ore legar populi perque omnia secula fama, Si quid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam. He regarded this as the serious work of his life, and in his IV.] HIS OWN ESTIMATE OF THE POEM. 351 despair at not having been able to give the finishing touches to it he endeavoured to destroy it, as Virgil for the same reason had endeavoured to destroy the Aeneid. He never regards it, like his Elegies, as mere pastime. He dis- carded the form and metre of which he was so practised a master, and adopted that which from the time of Ennius had become the recognised metre for all long and ambitious undertakings. In adopting the metre he did not aim, as later epic poets for the most part did, at reproducing the intricate harmonies of Virgil, but gave an entirely new movement to the hexameter, making it a more fitting medium for the buoyancy of his own spirit, and the variety and rapidity with which his imagination worked Con- centration on any single action and group of figures, and the elaboration of a poem according to the rules of epic art, were repugnant to his versatile genius, with its abhorrence of monotony or satiety. His artistic instinct, as well as his natural liveliness, preserved him from the attempt in which so many of his countrymen failed, to make an epic out of some one of the great themes of epic poetry in the past, a Thebaid, an Achilleid, or a new version of the adventures of the Argonauts. Lucretius, who added a rich endowment of fancy to his great intellectual gifts and the Roman gravity of his tem- per, had shown his susceptibility to the charm of the old stories. The taste and instinct of Catullus had taught him to paint one or two idealised pictures from the large world of fancy, in the form of epic idylls. Propertius satisfied him- self with recalling to the imagination some poetic aspects of some of the many ancient tales of love, by which he might enhance the glory or the misery of his own. Horace used mythology as an artistic embellishment for his graver or lighter admonitions. Ovid conceived a much more ambitious plan. It was to embrace in a long series of tales, bound together by a thread of connexion and yet each complete in itself, the great mass of tales of super- natural agency and heroic adventure, to tell the story of the world from its origin out of Chaos down to his own 35 2 OVID. [CH. v. day, in so far as it was conceived of as the sphere of super- natural agency. The idea which gives unity and conti- nuity to this great mass of traditional fancy at first sight seems too slight and trivial to give coherence to so vast a work. It is the idea of the transformation of human beings by superhuman power into constellations, stones, trees, plants, birds, beasts, serpents, or insects, and in some cases the reverse process, as in the re-creation of the human race from the stones thrown down by Pyrrha, or the creation of the Myrmidons from ants. Thus, much of what is most familiar in ancient legendary story, especially in the border-land between history and fable, does not come within the scope of his work ; yet it is wonderful what a mass of incident and adventure, famous in older story and connected with the great heroic families, comes through some incident within the range of his plan, and also how many representations of homely incidents and personages otherwise unknown he is able to work into his poem. He moves from first to last in a region of fable and miracle, and yet through all the phases and vicissitudes of this region he makes us feel that we are in the closest con- tact with human nature, from heroes and heroines of the great princely houses, to peasants and fishermen. He described his subject as ' mutatae formae.' Both the title and the actual subject were apparently suggested by the work of an Alexandrian poet, known as 'AXXotwo-ei? 1 . How far he borrowed his materials and methods from that or any other single work it is needless to inquire. But if the Metamorphoses are the result of large reading and a memory of wonderful retentiveness, no work of ancient or modern literature produces the impression of more prodigal invention, of greater ingenuity in varying the methods of telling a story, of keener observation or greater command over all the details of description. Ovid has the liveliest sympathy with the beings of his fancy, and the keenest curiosity about all they do and feel, and the transformations 1 Parthenius, Virgil's master and the friend of Callus, had written a work called y IV.] FORM AND SPIRIT OF THE POEM. 353 through which they pass ; the keenest enjoyment in all that meets their eyes, and all the environment of wood, mountain, sea, and lake with which he surrounds them. This world of romantic adventure and supernatural agency is not represented either as a mere dream of the imagination or as a thing of the past. The same power which had worked so many miracles in the morning of the world, is again, in these later times, made visible in con- nexion with the central fact and dominant sentiment of the age, the elevation of Augustus to supreme power and divine honours. This sense of a vital connexion between the world of fancy and the world of reality does not indeed pervade the Metamorphoses as it does the Aeneid. There are only the most incidental allusions to the actual life of the present, as where the dwelling of the Sun-god is called the ' alta Palatia caeli,' where the laurel into which Daphne is changed is said to be destined to adorn the brows of Roman generals, or where the amber into which the tears of the sisters of Phaethon are changed is spoken of as being ' nuribus gestanda Latinis.' Again, among the rivers whose waters are burned up by the conflagration of Phaethon, we read of the Tiber Cuique fuit rerum promissa potentia Thybrin. These slight threads of connexion with the actual life of the present gave something of an epic unity and a kind of credibility to a collection of tales, the motive of which was an agency irreconcilable with the rational con- victions of the time. But the great difference between an epic poem such as the Aeneid and an epic or long narrative poem such as the Metamorphoses is that, in the one, this central idea of relation to the Rome of the Augustan age is what chiefly imparts interest to the details, in the other it seems to come in only as an afterthought. The Aeneid is essentially a Roman poem : the Metamorphoses are Greek, though coloured by Italian vivacity, sensuousness and love of Nature. The chief attraction of the stories, as of the old stories A a 354 OVID. [CH. v, of chivalry, is in love and adventure adventure of the chase, of battle with fabled monsters of all kinds, of the sea, and of war. The tales of love are generally of the love of gods for mortals or nymphs of the woods and fountains. The great charm of them is derived from the picturesque scenes in which the adventure is laid, and the atmosphere of idyllic sentiment that surrounds it. It is the intermingling of the sensuous feeling of human rela- tions with the sensuous feeling of natural beauty in its purest and freshest influence, which has made these tales of Ovid as favourite a subject for modern, as similar tales seem to have been for ancient painters. It is on the actual figures and the scenes in which they move that the atten- tion is centred, much more than on the inward emotions, which Ovid, with only partial success, had attempted to reproduce in the Heroides. In such a scene as the rescue of Andromeda it is the outward spectacle, not the inward drama of emotion, that he sets before us. The elegiac poets speak sometimes as if love and war were the only themes for the art of the poet, and they speak of them in their elegies as if they were antagonistic to one another, and as if their own genius were only fit to deal with the former. Ovid, however, not only does not shrink from reproducing the details of single combats either with human antagonists or with the fabulous monsters, superhuman in force, who play so large a part in all mythologies, but goes into all the details of wounds and carnage in the long account of the battle of the Centaurs and Lapithae which he tells through the mouth of Nestor. Perhaps the manner in which this is done is characteristic both of the society for which it was written and of the temperament of the author : though at first sight nothing seems more irrecon- cilable with the soft, pleasure-loving, essentially kindly nature of Ovid than such ghastly details. The descriptions of wounds and violent death are sometimes objected to even in Homer, who spoke to a warlike people who prob- ably had no rest from actual warfare, and for whom it was a necessity of life for each man to know how to defend IV.] SCENES OF WAR. 355 himself, and even to take delight in slaying his adversary. In Ovid the details of wounds and slaughter are even more ghastly than in Homer. In the luxurious and effeminate society for which he wrote, there still survived so much of the old instinct of the she-wolf as to make them gloat upon the horrors of the gladiatorial spectacles. 'Sated lust' found a new stimulus from scenes of death. In the artistic tem- perament of Ovid there is that strange juxtaposition of what might be regarded as oos T aAet