UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO ~WJK Tie I. THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE HORACE AND THE ELEGIAC POETS SELLAR HENRY FKOWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE HORACE AND THE ELEGIAC POETS BY W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D. LATE PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH AND FORMERLY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR BY ANDREW LANG, M.A. SECOND EDITION jforfc AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1899 '"% f-. PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, H.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 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. 149, ' If Horace lived/ &c., to the end, p. 199) has had less of the author's revision than the others: the manuscript, however, is perfectly 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 Revinv, 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 supplement this chapter from the essay on Ovid contributed by Mr. Sellar to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the 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, VI EDITOR'S PREFACE 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. I. PAGE Horace as representative of the Augustan age . . . . . X The permanent charm of his writings . . . .. . . 4 Biographical sources ; . tf The Sabellian race : Venusia 8 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 19 Friendship with Virgil and Varins: introduction to Maecenas . . 20 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 Vlll 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 34 Date of the Ars Poetica 36 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 40 Independence of spirit 41 Horace's masters : Lucilius 42 Aristippus ........... 42 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. 2) 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 CONTENTS IX PACF. Apology for Satire (i. 4) . -57 Horace on Lucilius (i. 10) . . 57 His answer to his detractors (i. 6) . . . . . -59 Horace's dramatic manner : the encounter in the Via Sacra (i. 9) . 6a Ethical discourses (Sermones) (i. i and 3) 60 Stoicism criticised . . . ";... . . . .61 Discontent: the malady of the time and its remedy . . . .61 The progress of Satire . . . . . . . . .62 III. THE SATIRES. BOOK II. Interval between the two books : change of view .... 63 Dramatic character of the second book : Horace's personages . . 64 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) 67 The banquet of Nasidienus (ii. 8) 69 Dialogue on baseness (ii. 5} 70 Town and Country (ii. 6) ^ . . . . . . . .7 1 Ethical discussions : Damasippus and Davus (ii. 3 and 7) . . . 71 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 X CONTENTS PACE Resemblances between Epistles and Odes : letter to Tibullns . . 90 to Iccius, Aristius Fuscns, the ' villicus,' Bullatius : the wise enjoy- ment of life . . . . . . . . . 91 to Julius Floras : public virtue . . . . . . .92 Maecenas in town .......... 92 The didactic element in the longer Epistles . . . . . 93 The Prologue to Maecenas : philosophic culture .... 94 Epistle to Lollins on the formation of character 95 ' Nil admirari ' 95 True and apparent happiness (i. 16) 96 Worldly wisdom (i. 17 and 18) 96 Horace on his critics and imitators (i. 19) 97 Epilogue : his estimate of himself 97 Ethical value of the Epistles ........ 98 Relation between Horace and his readers ...... 98 Poetical value of the Epistles ........ 99 The Epistles an original addition to poetic forms . . . .102 CHAPTER IV. HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC. EPISTLES. BOOK II. ARS POETICA. The Epistle to Augustus 103 The Epistles to Julius Floras and to the Pisos 104 The Epistle to Augustus a defence of poetry 104 Criticism of the older Latin, poets 105 Perfection to be learned from the Greeks 106 The literary temperament ......... 107 The Epistle to Julius Florus : its date 108 Horace's account of his poetical and critical powers . . . .no The cultivation of style . . . . . . . . .no Ethical teaching in this Epistle : Horace's final message to his generation in The Ars Poetica in Its sources and contents 112 The cultivation of Roman tragedy 113 Education of the Poet 114 The Ars Poetica not a systematic didactic poem . . . .115 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 . . . . . . . .116 Horace's literary ideals . . . . . . . . .117 CONTENTS XI CHAPTER V. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. THE EPODES. PAGE Horace's imitations of Archilochus . .119 ' Iambi ' of Catullus 120 Horace's iambic couplets . . .120 Date of the Epodes : their subjects 121 The enemies of society . . . . . . . . .122 Political Epodes: Epod. 16 a lament after the civil wars : its poetical character . ..'. . . . . . . .123 Cleopatra: Epod. 9 . . . .124 The more gentle poems among the Epodes : Maecenas : the virtue of wine 126 Praise of a country life : Epod. 2 : difficulty of the last four lines . 127 The Epodes not fully representative of Horace's mind at the time when they were written 130 Catullus, Horace, and Martial 131 CHAPTER VI. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. THE ODES. I. Various aspects of the Odes 133 Graver and lighter moods . 134 Horace and the Greek lyric poets : Alcaeus 135 Earlier and later Odes 136 The first book of Odes : imitations of Greek poets .... 137 Predominance of the lighter themes . . . . . . .138 The second book reflective and didactic 139 The third book : culmination of Horace's lyrical faculty . . .140 The fourth book and the Carmen Seculare 141 Books i-iii a complete series . . . . . . . .141 Date of publication : difficulties in regard to certain Odes . . .142 Virgil (i. 3) . 142 Eastern victories (ii. 9) , " 144 Marcellus . .. . . . 145 Murena (iii. 19, etc.) . . . . . . . . . 145 Books i-iii probably published in 23 or 22 B.C 147 xii CONTENTS II. PAGE Horace a poet of culture : Greek element in the Odes . . . 147 Horace's study of the older Greek poets and neglect of the Alex- andrians 148 Intellectual and artistic movements in the Augustan age . . . 149 National element in the Odes : the ideal of Rome . . . -150 Three chief kinds of Ode to be considered : (i) the national, religious, and ethical Odes; (2) the lighter poems in the Greek manner, iparriKa and ovfjnronied ; (3) the occasional poems of Horace's own life and experience 151 HI. The national, religions, philosophical, and ethical Odes . . . 152 Earlier political poems : ' Caesaris ultor ' (i. 2) 153 The Saviour of the State (i. 1 2) ; Cleopatra (i. 37) ; lament over civil wars (i. 35, ii. i) 153 The great national Odes of Book iii ( 1-6) 154 Horace's lyrical art at its best in the best years of the Augustan age (27-23 B.C.) 154 The mission of Rome and Augustus 155 Political anxieties : warning and reproof (iii. 5 and 6) . . .156 The need for reformation (iii. 24) 157 Apotheosis of the Emperor (iii. 25) 157 Odes of the Fourth Book on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus : the glories of the rule of Augustus 157 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 . . . -159 The religions revival : Horace and the national religion . . .160 Association of religion with the political ideals of Horace . . . 161 The deification of the Emperor ........ 162 Rustic beliefs and holiday observances 163 Natural piety . . . , . . . . . . .164 Horace's graver philosophy . . . . . . . .165 Horace and Lucretius 165 The highest good . . .168 IV. The poems of love and wine 169 General character of Horace's lighter poems : his heroines . . . 171 Praise of wine i -. - . . . 174 CONTENTS Xlll V. PAGE Horace's occasional poems . . . . . . . . 1 76 Their likeness to the Epistles : Horace's friends 1 76 His respect for rank : urbanity . * .-. . . I 77 Degrees of friendship '. 178 Horace's most intimate feelings expressed in the praise of his favourite places in Italy 180 Influence of Nature in the poetry of Horace ..... 180 His artistic life ........."'.. 182 VI. Horace's style 184 Progress of his art 185 Forms of verse 186 The Sapphic and Alcaic measures . . . . . .187 Varieties of the Asclepiad 188 ' Curiosa felicitas ' : characteristics of his phrases .... 194 Imaginative force of his diction 196 The reflective element in his lyrical poetry 197 Horace and Catullus 197 Law and impulse .......... 199 THE ELEGIAC POETS CHAPTER I. ROMAN ELEGY. Horace on elegiac poetry 203 ' Querimonia ' : ' voti sententia compos ' 204 The earliest Greek elegy allied to lyric poetry 204 Early Greek elegiac poets : Mimnermns 205 Antimachus of Colophon : the Alexandrian elegiac poets : Philetas . 206 Callimachus 207 The earlier Roman elegy : Ennius and Lucilius 208 The elegies of Catullus . * , . . . . . . 209 The elegiac poetry of the Augustan age related to Alexandrian elegy as the pastorals of Virgil to those of Theocritus : cultivation of amatory poetry aio XIV CONTENTS PAGE Quintilian's four elegiac poets of Rome Callus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid 211 Common aims and methods of the elegiac poets . . . .212 The poetry of pleasure : ' dulcedo otii ' . .. . . .212 The perfection of Roman elegy in Tibullus and Ovid . . . 214 Change of literary taste : the circle of Maecenas and the circle of Messalla 215 Messalla and Tibullus 216 Exceptional character of Propertius and his poetry : Ovid the repre- sentative of his age . . . . . . . . .217 The ' bondage ' of love as represented by these poets : decay of fortitude 218 Roman strength subdued by Italian ' mollitia ' 219 Roman elegiac poetry the best product of the great age of Roman literature 220 Value of the elegiac poets : their rendering of personal feeling and experience 231 Their mastery of verse 221 CHAPTER II. CALLUS, TIBULLUS, LYGDAMUS, SULPICIA. I. Cornelius Callus and his fortunes :' Lycoris ' 223 Place of Callus in Roman literature : his character : Callus and Virgil 224 Callus styled ' durior ' by Quintilian, in comparison with Tibullxts and Propertius "5 II. Albius Tibullus 225 His life 226 Tibullus and Horace: identity of Horace's 'Albius' (Od. i. 33, Ep. i. 4) with Albius Tibullus the poet 227 His delineation of himself in the elegies 233 The first book : his home ' patrii lares ' 235 Messalla's Aquitanian campaign, B. c. 30 235 Delia 3 35 Messalla's mission to the East: Tibullus detained by illness in Corcyra 3 3 6 Return to Rome : estrangement of Delia 237 Messalla's triumph (i. 7) 2 38 CONTENTS XV PAGE The second book : Nemesis 238 Materials and character of the poetry of Tibullus . . . .239 Melancholy 240 The spirit of Italy : love of the country : resemblances to Virgil . 241 Love of peace . . . . . , . i 242 Friendship for Messalla . . 242 Tibullus and the greatness of Rome : an exceptional passage (ii. 5) . 243 Relation of Tibullus to other poets : affinities with Virgil . . . 244 Elegy brought to perfection by Tibullus 245 Versification, style, and diction 246 Idyllic passages 248 Relation of Tibullus to his contemporaries and to the Empire . .250 His rank among poets 251 III. Lygdamus : the author of six elegies in the third book ascribed to Tibullus: a member of the circle of Messalla . . . .252 Problems regarding Lygdamus 253 Lygdamus and Neaera 254 Character of the poems, and of the author 255 IV. The Panegyric on Messalla, in hexameters : its value as an illustration of the taste of the time 256 V. Sulpicia ' 258 Eleven poems relating to the fortunes of Sulpicia : six of these by Sulpicia herself ...'....... 258 The story of Sulpicia and Cerinthus 259 Value of the poems 260 CHAPTER III. PROPERTIUS: LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. Varying estimates of Propertius 262 Fortunes of his poetry in different ages 363 His biography : founded chiefly on his own statements . . . 264 Problems of his biography 265 Dates of his poems .......... 267 XVI CONTENTS PAGE The birthplace of Propertius 270 Interpretation of the passages in which his birthplace is referred to . 270 His early life and recollections 278 The siege of Perusia 279 Propertins taken to Rome by his mother 280 Studies and friends : Tullus .281 Bassus, Lynceus, and Ponticus : Gallus : Paetus .... 282 Cynthia 283 The record of the first book ' Cynthia Monobiblos ' 286 Publication of the first book : Propertins recognised by Maecenas . 288 The second book : protestations and reproaches .... 288 The third book : disillusion 289 Cynthia in the fourth book 289 The fourth book probably left unfinished at the death of Propertius . 290 Poetical ambition : relation of Propertius to other poets . . .291 The Roman Callinuchus: Horace's estimate of Propertius . . 292 Character 293 CHAPTER IV. THE ART AND GENIUS OF PROPERTIUS. The poet's claim to be the first Latin representative of Alexandrian elegy 295 ' Querimonia ' : ' lacrimae ' 296 ' Cynthia Monobiblos' : artistic excellence of the first book . . 297 The second book 34 elegies : reasons for and against subdivision of the book 298 Themes of the second book : want of chronological or artistic sequence : Prologue to Maecenas : Epilogue praise of Virgil . 299 The third book more orderly and less passionate : new motives . . 300 The fourth book, containing two sets of poems : projected series on the antiquities of Rome . . . . . . . .301 Elegies on various subjects : Cynthia's ghost ..... 302 Arethusa : Cornelia .......... 303 Defects of the antiquarian poems : variety and interest of the others . 305 Manner of Propertius 305 Imagery and diction 306 Verse 308 The strength of Propertius : the temper of his poetry . . . .312 The thought of death . . 3*3 Lament for Paetus . 314 Paetus and Lycidas 315 CONTENTS xvil PAGE Lament for Marcellus . .. . . . . . .316 Gloom and terror of the grave : ' sunt aliquid Manes ' . - . . 316 Descriptive passages : the City 317 Nature in lonely places : the mountains . . . , . .318 ' Vesani murmura ponti ' . . 319 The solitudes of Nature associated with the romance of Greek mytho- !ogy 3*9 Milanion in Arcadia : Ariadne: Andromeda: Antiope '. . . 320 Hylas: imaginative value of mythology 321 National themes : Cleopatra . . * 321 Roman myths and ritual * ... 322 Estimate of the art and genius of Propertius 324 CHAPTER V. OVID. I. AMORES. Want of seriousness in Ovid's love poetry : the Amores . . . 326 ' Musa genialis ' : the elegy on Tibullus an exception among the lighter poems 327 Corinna 3 2 ^ Subjects treated in the Amores- 330 Spirit of the Amores 330 U. HKROIDBS. Two sources of interest in Ovid's poetry knowledge of Roman society, and exuberance of fancy ....... 332 The Heroides : matter and form of Ovid's heroic epistles : their rhetorical and modern character 333 Spurious epistles 334 Ovid's heroines 335 Picturesque, romantic, and pathetic elements in the Heroides . . 336 Style .- 337 III. ARS AMANDI. Publication of the Ars Amandi -337 Roman society : the pursuit of pleasure 338 XV111 CONTENTS Ovid's didactic poem . . . . . . . . . 339 His purpose in the Ars Amandi 340 Ovid's theory of life .......... 341 Excellence of the poem as representative of the time, and of the author's genius : Ovid's wit, vivacity, and sane judgment . . 342 Picturesque and fanciful passages ....... 343 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 344 Ovid's essay in tragedy : the Medea 345 Failure of tragedy in Rome . 345 Ovid's strength and weakness in dealing with mythological and heroic subjects : his imaginative revival of old stories .... 346 Mythology in the Greek poets 347 Greek mythology in Latin literature : spontaneity and freshness of Ovid's work 349 The Gods in Ovid's poetry : their loss of majesty : want of reverence in the Metamorphoses 351 The Fauns and Nymphs 351 Cultivation of epic poetry by Ovid's contemporaries . . . -352 Ovid's own estimate of his poem : his renunciation of the strict epic form . 352 Plan of the Metamorphoses 353 Ingenuity of the structure . ' 354 Imperial sentiment employed to give unity to the poem . . . 354 Motives of the stories : love and adventure : scenes of war : occasional exaggeration of repulsive details 355 The battle of the Centaurs 356 Predominance of rhetoric: unimaginative precision : absence of mystery and sublimity .......... 357 Ovid's congenial ground : Arcadia : the loves of the Gods . . . 359 The Palace of the Sun : Phaethon : power of description : command of poetical associations 360 Psychological insight 362 Romance and pathos : Cadmus and Harmonia : the sea-idyll of Ceyx and Alcyone : Baucis and Philemon : Ovid's homelier passages : humanity of the Metamorphoses 362 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 \ 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 Sutherland family. In middle life he purchased the estates of Ardtornish and Acharn, on the Sound of Mull. His children were seven boys and two girls, Mr. William Young Sellar being his fourth child, and third son. Their childhood 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. XX11 MEMOIR OF 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 un- bounded, 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 extremely brief. At the early age of seven, he was sent with his brother, Mr. Patrick Plender- leith 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 standing 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. Williams, whom, though Scott was not fond of schoolmasters, 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 quoied Dr. Johnson's remark, that, of learning, WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XX111 ' 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 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 XXIV MEMOIR 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 mathe- matics ? ' 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 scholarship. 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. 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. WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXV From the Edinburgh Academy, Mr. Sellar went, before he was fifteen, to Glasgow University. The College buildings 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. Fortu- nately, 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. Lushing- ton. 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 of irony which shewed that dulness could annoy even his temper *. Under the Greek Professor, Mr. Sellar improved his scholar- ship, and, no doubt, acquired that sound and earnest taste for and love of the literature of Greece which distinguished 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 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! XXVI MEMOIR OF 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, 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 industrious, 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 mentioned. 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 Edin- burgh), Mr. Walrond, and Mr. H. H. Lancaster, a friend of WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXVH 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, doubt- less 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 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 Moderations), which included scholarship, history, and philosophy. 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 XXV111 MEMOIR OF 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, in the Latin Chair at Glasgow (1851-53). In the neighbourhood 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 hence- forth 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 endeared 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 instruct 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 WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR xxix 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 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 are of the age that then they had, XXX MEMOIR OF 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 probably Mr. Sellar's happiest years, nor was he idle, for he was engaged on his ' 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 elementary teaching had often been less copious and pro- longed. 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 Philosophy at Oxford, ' and Fellow of Merton College. Mr. Wallace was so easily our foremost scholar, that competition 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 educa- tional 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 WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXXI 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 important 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 V This volume treats of Roman Poetry from the beginning 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 ncCivete 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 com- parisons with the popular and oral poetry of other peoples. But this is comparatively a recent study, though Wolf expected much from it, and Mr. Sellar's tastes were not exactly anti- quarian. Icelandic and Eskimo satiric songs, 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 rapproche- ments, but there can be little doubt as to their interest. The 1 Edmonston & Donglas, Edinburgh. 1863. XXX11 MEMOIR OF most excellent parts of the work, and the most popular, are doubtless the chapters 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 'religious 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 sunrise 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 vagitibus 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 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, how- ever, 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. WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXXlll 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 apprecia- tion with sound scholarship 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 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 c XXxiv MEMOIR OF appreciated Mr. 'Matthew Arnold, and he would not allow Mr. Clough to be depreciated. When his biographer began to rhyme, he looked at the performances dubiously. '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 Nf 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 claim a high place in literature. M. Xavier de Monte"pin beguiled many of his hours ; a favourite was Le Mtdecin des Folks. To one or two popular and admired novelists he had rather a rooted objection, which gave rise to animated discussions, but to no conversion on either side. Of modern novelists, he chiefly admired Mr. Norris. He thoroughly enjoyed Richard Feverel, on its first appearance, 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 acquaintance 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 Edinburgh WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXXV 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 Alexander Grant, who became Principal of the University. Others were of a younger genera- tion, 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. Mr. Lushington often came to Edinburgh from Glasgow, a welcome visitor, Mr. E. F. S. Piggott from London, and Pro- fessor 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 adventures 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 C 2 XXXVI MEMOIR OF vivacious learning and originality. Mr. Sellar contradicted the saying that \ve 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 of so young a colleague ; of one so rich in learning, in vigour, in every amiable and attractive quality. But Mr. Sellar's attach- ment 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 charm- ingly 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 biographer gratefully remem- bers 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 remembrance. 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 somewhat 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 WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXXVii as fortunate as mortal life could be, happy in abundant leisure, provided with congenial work, enlivened by friendship, 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 shooting, 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 gradu- ally 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 Switzerland, 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 hospitality 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 un- touched 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 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 c 3 XXXV111 MEMOIR 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 remembers his denning 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 demanded from the literature of the imagination ' a rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.' Such 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 WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR XXXIX 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, profound re- flexion, and unexaggerated truthfulness of statement, 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 appre- ciating 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 cultiva- tion -justissima lellus' The same word mtditari 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 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 comparatively easy ' for Virgil to produce a more noble and vital impersonation than the Medea of Apollonius ' ; and elsewhere, probably with Euri- pides, 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 XI MEMOIR 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 obsequentissimam 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 exemplified in Virgil, how fruitfully the Greek seeds fell in the Italian soil of his genius, how Greek, yet with what an original colour and flavour, were the fruits and flowers 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 WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR xli 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 pre- paring 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 appreciated 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 dis- cerned or imagined beyond the gloom, they make it seem more easy to be borne. 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 September 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 weak- ness 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.' xlii MEMOIR OF 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 somewhat 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 demonstrative. 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 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 Pro- fessor 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 other- wise concern himself with pretenders and their performances. Among the best gifts of humour is, or should be, a clear WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR xliii sense of our own lack of importance ; a disposition not to be fretted by the unfriendly, nor elated by the sympathetic recep- tion which the world may give to ourselves and to our work. This element of equanimity Mr. Sellar possessed 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 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 Republic 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, Proper tius, 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 com- parison with Virgil and Horace, men of essentially lighter character, living for pleasure, making the life of pleasure the subject of their art, and showing little sympathy with the new B 2 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 nrbe sui. They came too late to feel deeply the change which was coming over the world. None of them lived in close intimacy with the great minister who bore so large a part in shaping the policy of the new Empire, and in reconciling 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 catholic significance in the time, Horace i] HORACE AS REPRESENTATIVE OF HIS AGE 3 is the most complete 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 intercourse of maturer years, the idyllic delight of days passed among beautiful scenes endeared by the sense of possession 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 con- ditions, 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 masculine 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 com- pletest 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 promi- nent place assigned to him in the study of Roman literature. But he has another claim which makes him 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 B 2 4 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 admiration. 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 occa- sionally amid the strained phraseology of his imitator Persius, is that in which he characterises this peculiar gift : Admissus circum praecordia ludiL 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 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 between an author and his readers. For it was the i] ADMISSUS CIRCUM PRAECORDIA LUDIT 5 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 trustworthy than that produced by the appa- rently 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 personal character there has been, and still is, so much controversy. 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 consistency 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 know- ledge 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 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 maturity of his powers, he looks back on his past experience 6 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 contemporaries. 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 modem 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 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 admiration 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 r] BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES 7 writer on the world in which he lived was transmitted to after times. Thus the only contemporary evidence 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 Maecenas 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 con- temporary 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 ayth 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 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. 8 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 ' con- tained 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 circumstances 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 consulship 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 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 i] THE S A BELLI AN RACE 9 of his business. The district in which he was born was peopled by men of the old Sabellian stock ; and although, in conse- quence 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 sympathetic 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 over- threw Pyrrhus and Antiochus, and stained the seas with Carthaginian blood. The ' Marsian and Apulian ' (Od. iii. 5) are mentioned together as representatives of the Italian soldiery. One of the best types of the Italian yeoman is introduced to us in the person of Ofellus (Sat. ii. 2), 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 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. 10 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 boy- hood 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 1 , and by the hold which these scenes gained on his affections. The earliest trace of this definiteness of per- ception 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 affection for particular places which he shows in later life, in his mention of Tibur, Lucreiilis, the stream Digentia, and the fountain of Bandusia, seems to have been first awakened by the great natural objects by which his childhood was surrounded; such as the 'im- petuous ' 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 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] HIS FATHER II 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 whatever 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 pro- vision 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 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 12 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 immunity 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 experience. There is scarcely any individual portrait in all ancient literature which leaves on the mind so real an impression 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 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 tempered, 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 Bewv (ptKvSea 5wpa off era Ktv Avrol Swtriv, ticwv 5" OVK av ny lAoiro but the grain of character which saved him from becoming the i] ORBILIUS 13 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 defmiteness and clearness of Latin style is to be attributed. A line from Domitius Marsus, preserved in a fragment 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 remunera- tion,' 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 educa- tional as in other matters. But Horace received also, before he left Rome, some direct initiation into Greek 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 14 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 residence 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 Archi- lochus 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 sugges- tion of his own common sense and national feeling. Yet this early attempt to catch the melodies of the old Greek lyrical poets in their own language may have prepared him for that mastery over musical effect and poetical expression which he afterwards 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 i] HIS EDUCATION: ROME AND ATHENS 15 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 philo- sophers 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 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 Memmtus in his provincial government, and, somewhat later, of Julius Florus, Titius and other young poets with Tiberius, suggests the inference that his 1 Cf. Tacitus, Annals, ii. 53 : ' Hinc ventum Athenas, foederique sociae et vetustae urbis datum ut uno lictore uteretur. Excepere Graeci quaesi- tissimis honoribus vetera suorum facta dictaque praeferentes, quo plus dignationis adulatio haberet.' 16 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 yth 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 speak also of convivial pleasures often enjoyed with the comrade who had shared his dangers ; and these reminiscences 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 com- mand 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 i] HORACE IN THE ARMY OF BRUTUS 17 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 adapta- tion 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 confession is in accordance with his habitual candour and ironical self-deprecia- tion. 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 of the world of action and letters, a subordination of enthusiasm 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 advo- cacy, after a common danger and common triumph had united the conquered 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 compositions. c 1 8 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 vicissitudes 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 immediately following the battle of Philippi, recorded in the first book of the Satires, imply his adherence to the speculative 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 2] THE PERIODS OF HORACE'S LITERARY LIFE ig from the two books of Satires, published 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. 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. C 2 20 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 pro- minent representatives 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 aggressive personalities, that Horace, on his first return to Rome, was neither so happy in his immediate social relations, 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 aniraae quales neque candidiores Terra ttilit neque quis me sit devinctior alter, a] VIRGIL, VARIUS, AND MAECENAS 21 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 deter- mining 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 afterwards that the relations between the poet and the statesman 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 gratified 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 understand 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 personal qualities than to his genius. Horace cultivated more 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 frankness and sincerity, the tact and reticence which he in- culcates 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 intercourse with 22 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I 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 became the intimate friend of Maecenas. Coincidently with this change in tone and temper \ve 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 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 '. The two Epodes apparently written 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 (Iii. 14-40) represents Maecenas as advising Augustus on the principles 2] MAECENAS 23 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 attachment 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 produce a great national literature which so conspicuously distinguishes the Augustan age. Among those who took part in this effort were men who in the previous generation would have devoted themselves to a political career, but who, when that was denied to them, united with men of obscure or provincial origin in the creation of a literature, more comprehensive in its scope, more serious in its aim, more perfect in form and style, than had existed in any previous age. There was no rivalry among these competitors for fame. Each selected a province for himself, and did not interfere with any 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 nfTa.ppvOp.ioov avr^v (i. e. rr)v irarpiSa) KCU Karaicoa prjaov irpos TO aajfypovfOTtpov and KO.V yt teal &s vtwxpoiori TI, ical i\fy\Or)T(a *<" Ko\aaO-f)Toj. The ' Nescit equo rudis Haerere ingenuus 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 Hi. 26, tVa twsTt tTt iraitits flaw, is TO, 8<8a(T/z\a avufyoirwai, KOI fTifi5a,v ts fi.fipa.Kia. fK0d\aiffiv t tiri Tt TOVS firirovs ai irt TO, ojrXo TptirajvToi. The stanzas about immortality being the reward of virtue and not of popular favour, ' Virtus repulsae nescia sordidae,' and the reference which they undoubtedly have to the ' Justum et tenacem propositi virum ' of the follow- ing Ode, in which the deification of the Emperor is for the first time formally declared to be the result of his virtues, are best explained by the words (c. 35), apfTi) fitv yap IffoOfOvs woXAovs itoift, xfipoTovrjTus 5' ovSth -nwiroTt Ot&s fytvfTo. And the importance of the revival of the forms and worship of the national religion as a bond of social and political order, insisted on by Horace, is in accordance with the whole tenour of chapter 36, /cat irpofftTi TO ptv Ofiov -navT-y travTus ain6s Tf atflov /card TO. irdrpia *ai TOVS dAAous TI/J.O.V dvayica^f, &c. That the policy of bringing about a great moral and religious reformation, attributed by the historian to Maecenas, was really his, appears to be confirmed by the emphasis with which the Epicurean poet, as he is usually regarded, urges this policy during the years in which Maecenas had most influence in the counsels of Augustus. 24 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. r other. Varius claimed that of epic poetry, Pollio of tragedy, Fundanius of comedy, Virgil of pastoral and rural poetry, Octavius of history, and Horace himself of satire. As their relative capabilities developed themselves, these parts were altered or interchanged. Varius resigns epic for tragic poetry : Pollio does not seem to have resumed ' the Cecropian buskin ' after he applied himself to history. Those among this circle who were not poets contributed to the advancement of the national literature as critics, grammarians, and orators. There had been a similarly combined and consciously directed effort in the previous century, made by the members of that Scipionic circle by which Roman culture was first established on a firm basis. Maecenas, though himself a man of no literary or oratorical genius, was by his sympathetic appreciation of genius, as well as by the position which he filled in the early and best years of the new Empire, able to exercise over the most gifted members of this new circle an influence similar to that exercised by Scipio over his in the preceding century. There is another side to the character of Maecenas which also formed a bond between Horace and himself. Historians and moralists attribute to him, not only the almost universal love of pleasure, but an effeminate weakness conspicuous in his dress, manner, and literary style. The tone in which Horace occasionally addresses Maecenas leaves no doubt that a common love of pleasure was one of the bonds of union between them, as it was in a friendship not unlike theirs, that of Goethe and the Duke of Weimar. The appearance of effeminacy was the unfavourable aspect of a sensibility and tenderness of feeling, which perhaps it is not fanciful to trace, combined with a care- worn look, in the expression of the bust preserved, along with many of the same age of a harder and stronger type, in the Museum of the Vatican. His one irretrievable error, his betrayal to his wife Terentia of the danger to which her brother Murena was exposed, arose from an excess of tenderness. More than one of Horace's writings show how dependent Maecenas was on the sympathy and affection of his friend. 2] MAECENAS 25 The relation of dependence and protection was thus not all on one side. The character of Horace was probably either naturally of a stronger metal, or better tempered by his philo- sophy and experience. The inequality between them was thus lessened, and the affection of Horace must have been strengthened by the knowledge that he was necessary to the happiness of his patron. Though Horace expresses a loyal feeling of regard for many friends and a deep affection for one or two, there was , no man or woman who really shared his devotion to Maecenas. He makes frequent acknowledgement that he owes his independent position to the liberality of his patron. On his first return to Rome he had procured as a means of livelihood a post in the order of scribae, attached to the great admini- strative offices. We find in the sixth Satire of the second book that that body availed themselves of his friendly offices and consulted him on matters concerning their interests: but the account he gives of his daily occupations some years previously leaves no room for the ordinary round of official duties. Within a year or two of the time when he is admitted to the intimacy of Maecenas, Horace writes of himself as having his time entirely at his own disposal, and as occupying himself with the ordinary amusements and exercises of a Roman gentleman, with that quiet observation of the peculiarities of Roman life apparent in his satire, with reading, and with writing down for his amusement the results of his observation and reflection. Thus the leisure and freedom from care which enabled him to devote himself to literature were the immediate results of his relation to Maecenas. A year or twp later he received from him a gift which may without exaggeration be described as the condition which enabled him to become one of the great lyrical poets of the world the gift of his Sabine farm. Though this gift was received and though Horace's enjoyment of it began in his first literary period, yet the great influence which it exercised on his life and his literary art belongs to the second period ; and any further reference to it may be deferred till that is reached. The Satires and the Epodes reflect the habits, 26 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I the pleasures, the society of the town : the inspiration of the Odes comes from the heart of the Sabine hills, and the cool stream of Digentia mingles its refreshment with the current of philosophic meditation in the Epistles. Of the other incidents of this decennium, of his mode of life, and his growth in opinion and character, we learn some- thing from both the Satires and the Epodes. The most notable incident of the earlier part of this time is his journey to Brundisium, in company with Virgil, Varius, Plotius, and the Greek rhetorician Heliodorus, in the train of Maecenas and Cocceius, who, as friends respectively of Caesar and Antony, had been sent to arrange some important matter between the rivals. The mission referred to, as has been shown by Mr. Palmer in his edition of the Satires, must have been that of Maecenas in the autumn of 38 B.C. to arrange with Antony for assistance against Sextus Pompeius. From the terms in which Maecenas is spoken of in this Satire, compared with all the later notices of him, we should infer that the poet's intimacy with him had not been fully established at this time. At a later time, before the battle of Actium, he professes his anxiety to accompany him to the scene of danger : and expressions in the song of triumph which utters the feelings of exultation and scorn called forth by the victory over Cleopatra, have been understood to imply that Horace was on board ship, and a witness of the scene of the battle of Actium. But even if the meaning of the words was perfectly unambiguous, it would be impossible to say in such a poem whether we were reading of a real experience, or of a situation imagined to give more force to the passion of the hour. The Epodes and the Satires are the expression of the two different sides of Horace's nature. In later life these two sides became thoroughly harmonised in the union of self-command with the full enjoyment of life. He was, by his own account, naturally impressible and fond of pleasure, irascible and impatient, and at the same time, genial and sociable. This is the nature apparent in some of the Odes and in many of the Epodes. 2] ODES, EPODES, AND SATIRES 27 In the Epodes the love of pleasure is less restrained and refined than in the Odes; there are indications of strong animosities, which in the Odes take the milder form of a contemptuous toleration. In later life he looks back to his youth and early manhood as a time of pleasure, but of a pleasure that left no painful sting behind it. In some of the more Anacreontic Odes written about his eighth lustre, we have probably the reflex, softened by memory and glorified by fancy, of his life in Rome between the age of twenty-five and thirty-five. But the other side of Horace's nature asserted itself also during this time, and has found expression in both books of the Satires. In the sixth Satire of the first book we have a sketch of his ordinary daily life, which is far removed from the careless life of a man of pleasure from that for instance of Catullus and his young associates, or from that of Propertius and Ovid at a later time. If he enjoyed the good things and the good conversation at the ' parasitica mensa ' of Maecenas, he knew equally the pleasures of simple living both in town and country, of being alone, of reading, -and of studying the life which passed before his eyes in the streets, and the strange characters who gathered in the Forum after the business of the day was over. He could tolerate the society of parasites like Milvius or Maenius, in the interest of that study of character which he carried on along with his self-examination. His liaisons with the Leuconoes and Neobules of his Odes, whether they are of the ' Dichtung ' or of the ' Wahrheit ' of his life, seem to be as much inspired by an interest in human nature as by any more ardent feeling. We hear little about them in the Satires, which record the reality of his life. He could extract the good from every variety of social life, from intercourse with Maecenas or Messalla, and with Milvius or Maenius, without being absorbed by it ; and, without ever losing his hold on the world, he could retire from jtime to time into the solitude of his own thoughts and live the life of a meditative recluse. His intimacy with Maecenas did not produce an immediate 28 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I change in his political sympathies. The tone of the earlier 1 Epodes (the seventh and sixteenth) expresses merely a general horror of the continuance of civil war. In the two (the first and ninth) written immediately before and immediately after the battle of Actium, Caesar is identified with the national cause, but the earlier poem is called out by personal anxiety for Maecenas; and even the later poem (if we adopt Pliiss's interpretation of lines 23-26) does not err on the side of flattery 1 . In the first book of Satires the name of Caesar occurs only once, and then in not too respectful connexion with the Sardinian Tigellius. But in the first Satire of Book ii, written after the capture of Alexandria, but before the title of Augustus was conferred on the Emperor, his tone is different. The epithet ' invictus ' is there applied to him ; and Horace already contemplates the duty of celebrating him in his verse. Though it was not till a later period, probably after the publica- tion of the three books of Odes, that he began to enjoy the personal favour of the Emperor, there is no doubt that, with the close of the first period of his literary activity, he had become reconciled to the Monarchy, not only as a necessity, but as a form of government desirable and beneficent in itself ; and this reconcilement was the necessary condition of the second and the maturer period in his literary career, that extending from 29 B.C. to 19 B.C. III. [Second Period: from 29 B.C. to 19 B.C.] Two conditions mainly determined the current of his literary inspiration and activity during this second period. The first was the state of public affairs ; the second the enjoyment which he derived from his Sabine farm. The enthusiasm awakened by the triumph of the national cause in the victory of Actium 1 Cf. p. 124, 125, infra. 3] HORACE AND THE MONARCHY 29 and the capture of Alexandria made Horace one of the great lyrical poets of the world. Although the earliest of his public Odes the second and the twelfth of Book i may have been composed to celebrate the successes over Sextus Pompeius, yet in those Odes of Book i, which appear to have been composed before the year 30 B. c., Horace is essentially the Anacreontic singer of the lighter joys of life, and the exponent of a philo- sophy suited to them. But his deeper nature was powerfully moved in sympathy with the general enthusiasm which hailed Octavianus as the saviour of the world, and also with the new ideas and the new policy which were introduced at the establish- ment of the Empire. His imagination was impressed by the spectacle of power and re-established order; and his higher nature responded to the revival of the moral and social ideals of the happier days of the Republic. The same influences acted on him, as had acted on Virgil in the composition of the Georgics and the conception of the Aeneid. His philosophy, in its two aspects of Epicurean renunciation and of Stoical devotion to duty, assumes a deeper and graver note. His satire, as irj Od. iii. 24, becomes, for the first time, severe and earnest, allies itself with his poetical imagination, and is employed, not in the form of light ridicule of personal follies, nor as a weapon of personal animosity, but as the censorial condemnation of the corruption which was eating into the heart of the commonwealth. In the great revolution which had come over the world, in the new hopes which it awakened and the new ideals which it presented to the imagination, in the striking personality, in the prestige and fortune, in the actual career, of the remarkable man by whom this revolution was accomplished, there was a theme prepared for lyrical and for epic poetry. And it was the good fortune of the age to have, in the culminat- ing crisis of the national destinies, two poets in the maturity of their powers and still in the freshness of their inspiration, who both by the susceptibility of their imagination and their intimate relation to the statesman at the centre of affairs, were enabled to perpetuate in lyrical song and in epic poetry the 30 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I ideal aspirations and the romantic memories by which the heart of the world was then stirred. Horace owed his knowledge of, and sympathy with the Imperial policy, to the familiar footing on which he was received in the stately house on the Esquiline. But the inspira- tion and art which enabled him to shape into lyric poetry the thoughts and impressions which he there received, came from his more peaceful home within the folds of the Sabine hills. He had acknowledged the happiness which he derived from this gift of his patron, in one of the Satires of the second book ; but it was during the second period of his literary career that he most availed himself of the leisure and seclusion from the world which it afforded him. He tells us, both seriously in his Odes and playfully in his Epistles, that it is among the Sabine hills and in other beautiful spots in Italy that he feels his devotion to the Muses, and that life in Rome is incompatible with all poetical effort. Like Virgil he feels the power of poetry in association with the love of the woods and streams. No more suitable home for an Italian poet can be imagined than the valley 'folded in Sabine recesses,' watered by the stream Digentia and crowned by Mount Lucretilis. It was widiin a few hours' drive from Tibur and so within easy access of the most refined and cultivated social life. But it afforded, if he chose, a complete retreat from all the distractions of society. He might live there alone, enjoying the companion- ship of the ' veterum libri ' which he brought with him, or wandering, as some of his Odes indicate, in poetical mood, among woods and river banks, and lonely heights ; or he might mix familiarly with his rustic neighbours, amuse them by sharing awkwardly in the work of the farm, and join, with the sympathy of a poet, himself country-bred, in the celebration of their rustic festivals. Or his lonely days of study and devotion to poetry might be varied by a visit from Maecenas or some of his literary friends, or from Tyndaris or Phyllis who might come to amuse him with their talk and song. Numerous passages in the Odes show the supreme contentment and happiness 3l THE SABINE FARM 31 which he derived from his country home, and the charm which he found in its beauty. The expressions he applies to it show how absolutely his heart was satisfied. It was associated with the happiest hours of his life, the hours of inspiration and of fitting the thoughts and feelings of those hours to perfect words and music l . 1 The beauty of the scenery in the midst of which his farm lay and the happiness which he derived from it find their simplest expression in the line Hae latebrae dulces etiam si credis amoenae. There has been much controversy as to the actual position of his farm and country house in the valley of the Licenza, which runs at right angles from the road between Tivoli and Subiaco. The village which is passed on the left hand just before reaching the junction of the Digentia with the ancient Anio is Vico Varo, the Varia mentioned by Horace as the town to which the five farmers from his estate had been accustomed to repair for the trans- action of the public business of the district. After entering the valley, which runs due north for four or five miles till it is stopped by a picturesque amphitheatre of mountains, rising to between 2000 and 4000 feet in height, the first conspicuous object is the village of Cantalupo Bardella, high up on the somewhat bare hill-face on the right, which represents both in name and in appearance the ' rugosus frigore pagus,' though the word ' pagus ' properly denotes the whole country district Festus in pratis vacat otioso Cum bove pagus not a particular village. About a mile up the valley, on the left hand, a steep rocky hill, on which stands the village Rocca Giovine, rises abruptly, and on it there are still found the remains of the old temple of Vacuna 1 fanum putre Vacunae ' with an inscription declaring that it had been restored by Vespasian. It is on a plateau at some considerable height above this ruin that M. Gaston Boissier and others place the country house and the 'aprica rura' of Horace. The late Mr. Justice Lawson in a letter in the Times, some years ago, gave convincing reasons for holding that the farm was higher up the valley, and situated not on the side of the mountain, but near the river, not far from where it is joined by the ' fons etiam rivo dare nomen idoneus ' which it is natural to identify with the ' fons ' to which Horace gives the name Bandusia. The writer points out that the lines in the Epistle to the Villicus Addit opus pigro rivus, si decidit imber Multa mole docendus aprico parcere prato show clearly that the farm extended along the bank of the stream. He points out also that '.angulus iste' corresponds with the nook at the upper end of the valley. On the identity of Bandusia with the ' fons ' spoken of and not with the fountain near Venusia, the writer says convincingly, ' Why should Horace celebrate in such beautiful strains a fountain at Venusia, which place there is no trace of his ever having re-visited after he came to Rome? Does not his description, and the intended sacrifice of a kid to dye its waters, import 32 LIFE OF HORACE ]:H. : The years which followed the publication of the Epodes and the second book of Satires, when he was between thirty-five and forty, daring which he lived much in his Sabine farm, were the years of his purest inspiration and most sustained industry. During this time he concentrated himself entirely on his lyrical art. If he did not bring to his task the fresh enthusiasm of youth, he brought the wisdom and experience of his maturity ; and by this predominance of reflexion over pure emotion, he may be said to have created a new type of lyrical art, which, while it brings back in the idealising light of retrospect the pleasures and amusements of youth, finds a poetical expression for the interests, the experience, and the convictions of mamrer life. It was probably early in the year 23 B.C. that he gave to the world the three books which contain the results of the occasional lyrical inspiration of the years before the capture of Alexandria, and of his more continuous efforts between that year and the date of publication. Our next knowledge of him is derived from the first book of the Epistles, published a few years later. Expressions in the dedicatory Epistle to Maecenas, such as *' Non eadem est aetas, non mens,' imply that an interval of some years had elapsed between the publication of the Odes and the composition of that Epistle. He professes hi that Epistle to desire to with- draw altogether from poetry, and to devote himself to philo- sophical study and the realisation in practice of his contempla- tive ideal. From the Epistles contained in this book we learn that the taste for seclusion and for a more simple life grew on a daily familiarity with it and an affection such as a poet would feel for a dear spring near his favourite haunts?' The estate of Horace included woodland and pasture for goats, as well as meadow and ploughed land, and probably extended over a considerable part of the valley. There seems no ground for fixing the site of the house on to uncomfortable a position for a man of Horace's habits as a height rising steeply some hundred feet above the valley and the stream which gave him se much refreshment. There are still seen the remains of a tessellated pave- ment on the other site suggested, and though that is declared to be of later date than the Augustan age, it seems natural that the possessor of the estate in a later age should have built his more luxurious villa at or near the site which must have been Bade classic by its previous occupant. 3] WORKS OF HIS SECOND PERIOD 33 him with advancing years. The delight which his Sabine home afforded him was strengthened by familiarity. He has cele- brated its praises in his Satires and his Odes ; but we learn even more in the Epistles of the restorative influence which it had on his whole nature. We learn also that the choice of a simpler and quieter life was forced upon him by some failure in health. During this decennium he had lost the beauty and gaiety of bearing which had characterised him in youth, had become prematurely grey, and had undergone that change of constitu- tion which disposes a man to quiet contemplation rather than the energetic enjoyment of life. He found his companionship in books more than in society. We learn from the Odes that he varied his retreat to his Sabine citadel with residence at such health resorts as Tibur, Baiae, and Praeneste ; and he speaks of himself as having passed his time at the last-named place in reading through the Iliad and Odyssey. We learn also that he was at this time a patient of the fashionable physician Antonius Musa, and that he was ordered by him to pass his winters at some place on the South Italian coast, such as Velia or Salernum. But, while living much away from Rome, he did not lose his hold on society. He combined his love of retirement with his love of social life by the new vehicle which he found for the expression of his thoughts, the poetical Epistle. This form of composition not only kept him in the minds of the men of his own generation, but enabled him to establish new bonds with the younger men who gave promise of distinction. The date of the publication of the first book of the Epistles was probably 19 B.C. In the last poem of the series he tells us that he had completed his forty-fourth December in the consul- ship of Lepidus and Lollius, i.e. in the year 21 B.C. But he does not tell us whether that was the year immediately preceding the date of publication. A reference to the successes of Tiberius over the Armenians and of Agrippa over the Cantabrians indi- cates that the work was not given to the world, as it now stands, before 19 B.C. In any Epistle written after the September of that year, we might have expected to find some expression of D 34 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I sorrow for the premature death of Virgil, which must have been felt as a great national loss, and as a cause of personal grief to many in the circle of Horace's correspondents. It is probable that Horace and Virgil saw less of one another after Virgil's retirement to Naples; but the Ode addressed to him in 24 B.C. on the death of their common friend Quintilius, shows that there had arisen no coolness in his affection towards him ; and, apart from personal feeling, Horace must have felt the profoundest literary interest in the progress of the Aeneid, to which many references are made in the fourth book of the Odes. IV. [Third Period : from 19 B. c. to 8 B. c.] When Virgil died, Horace was recognised as the greatest living poet, certainly the greatest of those who made the serious interests of their own time the subject of their art. When Virgil turned his thoughts to epic poetry, Varius diverted his genius to tragedy, and produced the Thyestes, which Roman critics ranked with the master-pieces of the Attic stage. The art of Ovid was as yet limited to the celebration of his own pleasures in the Amores, and possibly re-awakening the romance of Greek mythology in some of the Heroides. At the celebration of the Secular Games in the year 173. c., Horace was called upon by Augustus to compose the Ode sung on that occasion. Two other Odes were composed by him three years later, also at the instance of the Emperor, in celebration of the victories gained by Drusus and Tiberius over the Vindelici and Rhaeti. These were published along with other Odes inspired by the state of public affairs, and a few others in his lighter vein, about the year 13 B. c. The long Epistle of the second book, in which he vindicates the literature of his own age, in answer to the admirers of the old Republican literature, was written also at the instance of, and was dedicated to, Augustus, and published along 4] LATEST WORKS 35 with an Epistle to one of his younger friends, Julius Florus. In it he gives a retrospect of his own literary career, and speaks of himself as having abandoned poetry to younger men, and as devoting himself henceforward to the study of the true harmo- nies of life. There is nothing which actually determines the date of this Epistle, but it is as likely to have been written after as before the publication of the fourth book of the Odes. He shows in it, as he does in the Epistles of the first book, and in the fourth book of the Odes, that he is interested in the work of the younger generation of poets, and he makes the results of his own experience and study available for the improvement of Roman poetry. A similar impulse directed him to the compo- sition of the long Epistle to the Pisos, the didactic poem, known as the Ars Poetica, which has, until recent years, been accepted as his latest work, and has by some critics been supposed to have been left unfinished and given to the world after his death. Critics of distinction both in Germany and England have con- tended in favour of an earlier date, and assign its publication to the time between the publication of the three books of Odes and of the first book of Epistles '. 1 The grounds of their contention are that as the L. Calpurnius Piso to whom, in conjunction with his sons, the Epistle has been supposed to be addressed, must have been born not later than 49 B. c. Tacitus in mention- ing his death in 32 A. D. says that his life had extended to his eightieth year he was not likely to have had two sons old enough to be addressed as ' iuvenes ' in the year 8 or 9 B. c. They accordingly suppose that the person addressed is not this L. Calpurnius Piso, consul in 15 B. c., who returned to Rome in B. c. 1 1, after having obtained some important success in Thrace, but that he was Cn. Calpurnius Piso, consul in 236. c., whose son of the same name was consul in B. c. 7, and became so notorious in connexion with the death of Germanicus. It is said further that the Maecius Tarpa and the Cascellius who are spoken of as both alive at the time when the poem was written, are known from Cicero's correspon- dence and from a statement of Macrobins to have attained an established position the one as what corresponds with the modern office of licenser of plays, the other as a ' iuris-consultus ' in the years 55 B. c. and 56 B. C. and thus were not likely to be actively engaged in life, if they were still alive, so late as 8 or 9 B. c. Further, it is stated that the reference to Quintilius Varus the critic, who died in 24 B.C., implies that he had been known to the young Pisos and was not long dead, and that the reference to Virgil and Varius indicates that they were both still living at the time of the publication of the poem. The time assigned for the composition of the D 2 36 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I In contrast with all the other works of Horace, the Ars Poetica is singularly impersonal. It also has scarcely any refer- ence to current events. The only allusion by which the date can in any sense be fixed is the mention of Quintilius as no longer alive ; but there is really nothing in the way in which he is mentioned to suggest that he had been personally known, though he must have been known by reputation, to those to whom the Epistle is addressed. He is quoted simply as a candid and judicious critic whom Horace himself probably was in the way of consulting. Virgil and Varius are named together as representatives of the art and genius of the Augustan age, in contrast with Plautus and Caecilius, the representatives of the old Republican literature, just as they are mentioned together, as recipients of the favour of Augustus, in the first Epistle of the second book, written certainly after the death of one, and probably of the other. Cascellius maybe mentioned in line 371 merely as the type of an eminent lawyer of a past age ; but as men of quiet intellectual pursuits often lived and retained their faculties to a great age at Rome, there is no difficulty in sup- posing that he was known to fame in the year 56 B. c. and was still alive in the year 10 B.C. Trebatius must have been quite a young man when Cicero writes to Caesar that he is at the head of his profession ' familiam ducit ' as a lawyer. There is still less difficulty in supposing that the Maecius Tarpa of line 387 was a young man under thirty in the year 55, when he is mentioned by Cicero as superintending the choice of plays, or that he was still a hale veteran about the year 8, 9, or 10 B.C. Nor is there any great improbability in supposing that the L. Piso to whom ancient authorities tell us that this poem was dedicated, who is sai3 himself to have been a poet, and who, as we gather from Tacitus, died in or after his 8oth year in 32 A.D., should have had in the year 8 or even 10 B.C. two sons who poem is thus some date between 24 B.C. and 19 B.C. A reference in Tacitus implies that Piso, the enemy of Germanicus, had entered on his public career in 26 B. c., so that he was not likely to have been so possessed by literary ambition five or six years later, as to be the subject of Horace's advice, which is evidently addressed to a young man just entering on life. 4] DA TE OF THE ARS POETICA 37 might be spoken of as ' iuvenes.' It was not uncommon for young Roman nobles (e. g. to take well-known instances, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Dolabella, and the young Marcellus) to be married before they were twenty. None of these considerations are sufficiently strong to invalidate the direct testimony of Porphyrion, that the father to whom the poem was dedicated was L. Calpurnius Piso, who was consul in 15 B.C. There is a much greater improbability in supposing that the whole current of Horace's thoughts and interests was changed in some short interval between the publication of the Odes and the com- position of the Epistles of the first book. While the subjects treated of in those Epistles and the tone adopted are similar to the subject and tone of the Odes, especially of the third book, there is no relation whatever between either and the subject of the Ars Poetica. On the other hand, it seems quite natural that the bent to literary criticism, shown in the two Epistles of Book ii, should have continued after Horace had said all he had to say on the criticism of human life, and that it found systematic expression in the composition, during the last years of his life, of a didactic poem. The question put to Julius Florus in the third Epistle of Book i. about one of his young friends An tragica desaevit et ampullatur in arte? and other similar references to the drama in Book ii, the publi- cation about this time of the Medea of Ovid, and references made by him to the art of some of his contemporaries, show that during the last years of Horace's life an attempt was made to establish a classical Roman drama, which seems to have failed more from want of appreciativeness in the audience than want of art and genius in the writers. It would be entirely in accordance with the interest which Horace felt in bringing the national poetry to perfection, that after his own creative activity ceased ' nil scribens ipse ' he should give in didactic form the results of his Greek studies and of bis own reflexion to the younger generation, who devoted themselves to the one form of serious art which might contend with the fashionable poetry of love, represented by Propertius and Ovid. 38 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I During all these later years of his life Horace stands in closer relations to Augustus and the members of the Imperial family, and to the favourites of the Court, than in the earlier period of his literary career. On the other hand the name of Maecenas, whose influence had during that period declined, occurs only once in the writings of the last decennium of his life. Dispar- agers of Horace, as being more of a courtier than a firm friend, may find in this silence a confirmation of their estimate of his character. But his silence may be explained on a more worthy supposition ; that, as Maecenas could not occupy the first place in works commanded by Augustus, Horace did not care to assign him a secondary place; and this may have been in accordance with the wishes of Maecenas. The intimacy of Horace with Augustus was the result, not of time-serving on the part of the poet, but of repeated importunity on that of the Emperor. Yet Horace, notwithstanding this importunity, refused to quit the ' parasitica mensa ' of Maecenas to fill the important office of the Emperor's private secretary. That his new relations to the Court produced no coolness between him and his old friend is proved by sufficient evidence. The whole motive of one of the lighter Odes of the fourth book, introduced among those celebrating the Imperial policy, appears to be the wish to express his undiminished affection for him to whom he had dedicated all the great works of his earlier years. The invitation to Phyllis his latest love meorum Finis amorum is pretty and graceful, like many of the lighter Odes of the earlier books; but it gains a serious interest from the stanza in which he tells her that the day for which she is invited is almost more sacred to him than his own birthday qnod ex hac Luce Maecenas metis affluentes Ordinat annos. A still stronger testimony to their unbroken friendship is found 4l LAST YEARS AND DEATH 39 in the words (already quoted) addressed in his will by Maecenas to the Emperor, ' Horati Flacci ut mei sis memor/ If the two friends were happy in their intercourse and true to one another in their lives, in their death they were not long divided. In the late autumn of the same year in which Maecenas died, 8 B.C., Horace was taken suddenly ill, and became rapidly so much worse that he had scarcely time to declare the man against whom he had fought in his youth his heir. Living in a changed world, he too had changed much, and had found his most cherished friends among those who had defeated the cause for which he had fought in his youth. Yet the last charge which can be justly made against him is that of being false either to his country or his friends. It might more justly be said that the supreme duties of life in Horace's eyes were patriotism and loyalty to friendship. The true test of the happy man is found in his willingness to die for his friends or his country Non ille pro caris amicis Aut patria timidus perire. V. Personal Characteristics. To most readers, the perfect frankness with which Horace reveals himself at once inspires confidence ; and this confidence deepens into a strong conviction of the truth of his delineation of himself, or at least of his true self, which is really all that we need concern ourselves with in the lives of the great writers of a distant past. If we have to qualify by after reflexion the immediate impression of his temper and character, derived from his writings, it is by making it more favourable to him. The intellectual quality which distinguishes him above all his countrymen is his irony. ' Ut tu semper eris derisor ' is a com- ment on himself which he attributes to one of the speakers in his Satires. This irony is as conspicuous in his judgments 40 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I and statements about himself as about the world. He did not want to think himself, or to allow others to think him better than in his heart he knew himself to be. We have to remember also that in his various works we have pictures of himself painted at different periods. And there is perhaps an apparent discrepancy between these pictures. We find a difficulty in realising that the author of some of the Epodes is the same man who wrote the first book of the Epistles. In trying to picture to ourselves his personal appear- ance, we must take into account not only his ironical self- depreciation, but the outward changes which time produced upon him. Thus, when he speaks of himself, at the age of forty or forty-five, as ' pinguem et nitidum bene curata cute ' and as ' corporis exigui, praecanum/ and hints at his indolent and valetudinarian habits, we do not easily associate such a figure with the enthusiasm of a great lyrical poet, or with the wreaths of flowers which play so conspicuous a part in his con- vivial Odes. But we can correct this picture by glimpses which he affords us of his appearance in youth of ' the black hair clustering round his narrow forehead ' (a trait of beauty in a Roman, as their busts show that their foreheads were generally low and broad) and by the thought of the days when his ' soft accents and graceful smile ' were welcome at the banquet, and when it became him to 'wear a toga of delicate texture/ and to have ' his hair ' (after the Roman fashion of the time) ' glistening with unguents.' We have to remember also that if it was not in his graceful youth that he sang of love and wine, it was then that he lived the life which he afterwards revived in his lyrical art. At the stage when we know him best, that is, in the maturity of his productive powers, with the grace and adventurous activity of youth he had lost also much of its fire and passion ; but he regarded the loss as well compensated by the philo- sophic mind which years had brought, and by the consciousness of becoming a kindlier and better man, ' lenior et melior.' It is at this stage of his career that we gain the best image of the si PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 41 man, though we can trace through all his career how he became what be then was. His most marked characteristic is his self-dependence. He judged of things for himself, and refused to measure what was good or evil by the standards common among his countrymen (Ep. i. i. 70, &c.). While he thankfully enjoyed all outward advantages, his aim was to be independent of them for his happiness. He desired to regulate his life by reason, to intro- duce consistency into his desires and pursuits, to know what he really cared for, and to limit his efforts to attaining it. To ' live for himself that is, not to live in selfish isolation, but to be true to his own nature, to be what he was meant to be, and not to try to be or seem anything else and to be independent of fortune, is the sum of his philosophy. This doctrine was not learned from the schools, though it combined what was most real in the teaching of Epicureanism and Stoicism, but was gathered from reflexion on the experience of life. He learned something from the teaching of his father, from the example and precepts of such men as Ofellus. But the spirit of independence was inborn in him. We trace it in the account he gives of his way of life in Rome and in the country. We see it, combined with the poetic impulse, in his love for lonely rambles among the hills and woods, such as he describes in the twenty-second Ode of the first book and the twenty-fifth of the third. But, so far as his choice of a mode of life was influenced by books, it is to the record of his own life by Lucilius that we should ascribe one at least of the forces which moulded the character of Horace. The attraction which the satirist of the Republic had for the satirist of the Augustan age was personal as well as literary. There is a tone of sympathy with the man in those often-quoted lines, Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olira Credebat libris, &c. All that is known of Lucilius from ancient testimony and from the fragments of his writings his self-criticism, and his critical 42 LIFE OF HORACE [CH I attitude to the world around him, his intimacy with the best men of his time, his love of independence, his enjoyment of society, and the pleasure which he found in withdrawing him- self into ' some quiet haven,' his contentment and love of simple fare, his freedom from all pedantry and asceticism seems to be the counterpart of what Horace was in his ordinary prosaic mood. When Horace says that he would t not exchange his independent ease for all the wealth of Arabia, he writes in the spirit, almost the tone of Lucilius. Horace, indeed, had none of the ' fierce indignation ' of Lucilius, which reappeared long afterwards, under different circumstances, in Juvenal. Nor had Lucilius any of the ' ingeni benigna vena,' which was the chief endowment of Horace. But in their ordinary tastes and habits there was a real affinity between the ' vafer Flaccus,' the friend of Maecenas, and the ' comis et urbanus Lucilius.' the friend of Scipio and Laelius. This resolute spirit of self-dependence influences his relation to others and determines his deepest convictions. He main- tains the attitude in presence of both Maecenas and Augustus, though ungrudging in the expression of his gratitude to the one and his loyal admiration for the other. It enabled him to live on an intimate footing with many distinguished contemporaries without being absorbed by any of them. While confessing, in a vein of humorous exaggeration, to innumerable follies arising from his love of pleasure, in the earlier part of his career, he never, as Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius did, allows his happiness and peace of mind to be at the mercy of any one. In his attitude to the leaders of the philosophic schools, he does not, like Lucretius, give way to any excess of hero-worship, but acknowledges allegiance to no school or master. He judges them all candidly, and can take from all of them what he finds true in his own experience. But the only philosophical teacher by whom he seems personally attracted is the Cyrenaic Aristippus. He recognises in him that same detachment from alien influences which he recognised in Lucilius, and which he cultivated in himself. So too in his art, while knowing how to turn to the si HIS INDEPENDENCE OF SPIRIT 43 best account the master-pieces of Greek lyrical poetry, he proclaims his own reliance on himself Qui sibi fidit Dux regit examen. His success is due to the union of absolute trust in his own powers with perfect knowledge of their limit. We see the same spirit manifesting itself in his contemplation of the ultimate mysteries of human life. He is as free as Lucretius from the superstitions which disturbed the peace of many of his con- temporaries Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, Nocturnes lemures, portentaqne Thessala. He seems half to believe in a Power, uncontrollable by man. which determines the destinies of individuals, to which he gives the various names of Fortune, God, Jove, a Power which gives and takes away the blessings of life according to its own will or caprice (for in different moods he regards it as a righteous will or a mocking caprice) but even of this Power he claims to be independent, not indeed for external goods, but for his happiness Sed satis est orare lovem qnae donat et aufert ; Det vitam, det opes, aequum mi animum ipse parabo Iii the midst of all his contentment with his lot, he never forgets the inevitable end. But he seeks no comfort outside himself. He does not, like Virgil, meet ' the thought of inexhaustible melancholy ' with the vague hope of a spiritual life hereafter. He accepts it with a resignation calmer than, if not so lofty as that of Lucretius. Like Montaigne, he seems to feel that the way to ' fight death ' is to ' disarm him of his novelty and strange- ness, to converse and be familiar with him,' and that the ' pre- meditation of death is the premeditation of liberty/ He draws from this premeditation the lesson rightly to use and wisely to enjoy that which alone is at his command, the present hour. This self-dependent attitude seems to be the central quality in the character of Horace, and the chief source of his intel- 44 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. i lectual and moral power. But this after all explains only one side of his nature. No one, of whom we know so much, seems to have combined in the same degree the capacity of being happy alone, with aptitude for and enjoyment of social life. While the first was the condition of his inspiration, of his meditative habit, and of his literary excellence, to the second he owed many of the materials of his art, and also the sanity of his genius, the moderation and truth of his judgment, his immunity from the weaknesses and extravagance of the literary temperament. His relations to society were determined by re- flexion as much as by impulse. In his lonely musings he considered not only how he should be true to himself, but how he should be ' dulcis amicis.' His early admission into a social circle inheriting the traditions of a governing aristocracy, implies the possession of some great social charm ; and the nature of that charm is indicated not only in the humour and gaiety of many of his writings, but in the manifold proofs which he gives in his Odes and Epistles of appreciation and consideration for others, and in the evidence which all his writings afford of tact and good sense, of freedom from vanity and self-assertion. His satire indeed made enemies, and he was feared and disliked by those who felt themselves to be exposed to it. But the exercise of this faculty was restrained in him by a high sense of honour. There is no charge which he repels with more grave earnestness than that of taking pleasure in hurting the feelings of others. There is no character which he describes with such concentrated scorn as that of the slanderer and backbiter Absentem qui rodit amicuna, Qui non defendit alio culpante, solutos Qui captat risus hominum fatnamque dicacis; Fingere qui non visa potest, commissa tacere Qui nequit ; hie niger est, hunc tu, Romane, caveto. Among the breaches of honour which he most strongly con- demns is the betrayal of a secret, and among the qualities to which he assigns the highest place is faithful silence. He professes to use his satiric 'stilus' only in self-defence or Si HIS RELATIONS TO OTHERS 45 against the enemies and nuisances of society, Rufillus or Gargonius. There is no doctrine which he preaches with more sense and good feeling than that of charitable indulgence to the faults of our friends. If it is safe to infer what his conduct was from that which he fervently approves, we should conclude that his relations with all those with whom he lived on terms of intimacy and they included all who were best worth knowing in Roman society were regulated like those of the best men in our own day, by a high sense of honour, a tolerant temper, and a kind heart. We find traces of the same temper in his relations to slaves and social inferiors, as in the liberties which he allows Davus to take with him, in the indulgence which he shows to his overseer, his sympathy with the 'rustica Phidyle/ who may have been his 'villica,' and the kindly appreciation which he expresses for his country neighbours. Yet while he was a true friend, we do not seem to recognise in him that impulsively affectionate nature which is the great attraction of Catullus. There is a certain degree, not of coldness as in his 1'ove affairs, but of reserve, in his expression of feeling, except towards one or two, notably Maecenas and Virgil. He is more ready to sympathise with the signs of warm affection bestowed on others than to claim them for himself. Thus, for instance, the Ode on the return of Plotius Numida from Spain naturally suggests a comparison with that of Catullus on the return of Verannius. But while Catullus thinks of his own joy in greeting his friend with the most unrestrained demonstrations of affection adplicansque collum lucundum os oculosque suaviabor Horace pictures to himself those proofs of affection as bestowed on a dearer friend and a younger man than himself Caris multa sodalibus Nulli plura tamen dividit oscula Quam dnlci Lamiae '. 1 From the fact that Aelius Lamia is mentioned in Tacitus as dying in the last year of Tiberius (Annals, vi. 27), he must have been a considerably younger man than Horace. The poem shows that sympathy which, like 46 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I So too in his sorrow for the loss of Quintilius, he thinks more of the pain which it will cause to Virgil, than of his own pain Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit, Nulli flebilior quam tibi, Vergili. Such expressions may be explained partly by his dislike to make any parade of his deepest feelings, but they may be due in part also to that spirit of renunciation which he shows in -regard to worldly honours, to wealth, to life itself. As he held that most was to be got out of life by not valuing it too much, and most enjoyment from worldly goods by not cal- culating too absolutely on their permanence Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit A dis plura feret so even to the higher blessing of affection he did not abandon himself too unreservedly. He cultivated ' mediocritas ' in feeling as he desired the ' aurea mediocritas ' of station. While he seems to attach more importance to the practical duties and the right management of life than to literary fame, yet he undoubtedly regards literature as the serious business of his life. The proudest feeling of his being expresses itself in the confident claim to immortality which he makes for his lyrical poetry. Of his Satires and Epistles, which have found nearly as much favour in modern times, he speaks almost slightingly as undeserving of the title of poetry, and as likely to be popular at Rome only so long as they are new Carus eris Romae donee te deseret aetas. Yet even in those works which he seems to regard as intended merely for the current age, and which seem to be the result of such natural and easy workmanship, he aims at correcting, both by precept and example, the fashion of careless composition which had come down from ruder times. But he undoubtedly felt that the great work of his life was to discover and make Cicero, he always had with younger men, rather than his own feeling for the subject of it. 5l INFLUENCES IN HIS POETRY 47 perfect the vehicle of expression for that vein of lyrical in- spiration ' spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae ' the first trace of which he finds in the poetic fancies of his childhood, and of which he must have become more fully conscious through the sympathetic study of the early Greek lyric poets. But a gift so delicate and rare could not be perfected, could indeed hardly be kept alive amid the bustle, distraction, and pleasures of Rome. By a man of Horace's social temperament the career of a lyrical poet could only be followed apart from the crowd and amid the peace and beauty of nature me gelidum nemus Nympharumque leves cum Satyris chori Secernunt populo. It is to the ' streams among the orchards of Tibur, and the thick foliage of the groves ' that he attributes ' his distinction in Aeolian song.' It is around ' the groves and river banks of Tibur' that, 'like the Matine bee sipping the sweets of the wild thyme/ he, with unremitting toil and joy, moulded his thoughts and experience into form and melody. It is in the same place, or among the Sabine highlands, or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, or beneath the clear skies of Baiae, that he is most conscious of his inspiration / Vester, Camenae, vaster in arduos Toiler Sabinos. That love of Nature which is one of the greatest charms in Horace's lyrical art may be said to be the condition of its existence. The Augustan age and the age preceding it were times in which the Roman mind became eminently susceptible to the beauty of art, in the form of architecture, sculpture, gems, cups, pictures, furniture, &c. The desire to possess the most precious works of art became a strong passion among the richer classes, and the affectation of connoisseurship was apparently as common as in modern times. Horace hits at these weaknesses in his Satires, and professes his o\\n indifference to the possession of those objects of desire, and his contentment \vith the plain 48 LIFE OF HORACE [CH. I furniture, the 'munda supellex/ which suited his tastes and means. But we need not in his case, any more than in Cicero's, who equally condemns the extravagant devotion to art, and whose early letters to Atticus attest his anxiety to adorn his villas with the works of Greek artists, take these expressions of Horace as indicative of any insensibility to the refining influence of the pleasure of the eye. In the license which he allows to Davus in the seventh Satire of the second book, he seems to admit the pleasure which he derived from the pictures of Pausias, who was famous for the minute perfection and delicacy of his workmanship. And passages both in his Odes and Epistles (e.g. Od. iv. 8, Ep. ii. i) show his appreciation of these ' deliciae/ though he will not allow them to disturb the balance of his mind, nor allow that they have an equal claim with the work of the poet to perpetuate the great qualities of men. But the form and workmanship of his Odes are indirect testimonies to the power which art had over his taste and imagination. The mythology of his Odes seems in many cases to be trans- ferred from the figures of the artist, and especially, as is remarked by Munro in his introduction to Mr. King's edition, from the engraving on gems, which probably had the same attraction for him as the minute art of Pausias. The finished form and delicate workmanship, and the clear impressions of the Odes, show a power of representation akin to that of those nameless artists whose works have come down to us. The power of musical sound, equally with the power of artistic form, has passed into his verse, and it is in their song and music that he finds the chief charm of Tyndaris and Phyllis when he invites them to his Sabine farm. In his love of books Horace is a type of the finest culture of his own or any other age. If he appears to undervalue the older national literature, we must remember that he was almost alone fighting the cause of his contemporaries, Virgil, Varius, and the rest, against the critics who disparaged the present age as compared with the past. Yet he shows a true appreciation of the merits as well as of the faults of Ennius, 5l HIS TASTES IN ART AND LITERATURE 49 Accius, and Pacuvius ; and his Satires and even his Odes show how deeply he was imbued with the style and sentiment of Terence as well as of his master Menander. If he does not name Lucretius or Cicero, he shows that he was a student of their philosophy and their style; and, notwithstanding his slight and apparently disparaging mention of Catullus, he shows his appreciation of him by not infrequent imitations of his language and tone. But it is his love of Greek literature that especially distinguishes him. In poetry, alone among his con- temporaries, he disregards the Alexandrians, and goes back to the oldest and purest sources the ' integri fontes ' Homer, Archilochus, and the whole range of Greek lyrical poets from Alcaeus and Sappho to Pindar and Simonides. As a satirist he was a student of the authors both of the old and the later Greek Comedy Eupolis as well as Plato and Menander. In his studies of moral philosophy he seems to have also gone back to the older writers, and professes to be a disciple of Aristippus rather than of Epicurus : Chrysippus and Grantor, rather than the more recent representatives of the school, are quoted as the authorities on the philosophy of the Porch and the Academy. As a critic he seems to have attached himself to the Alexandrians, who were in that department as strong as they were weak in the province of creative literature. Apart therefore altogether from the artistic charm of his works and their power of bringing back the life, and mind, and spirit of a great age in the history and the development of civilisation, the study of Horace brings before us a personality of a great human interest, which we can know as intimately as we can any man of letters of recent times, and a repre- sentative of the best and purest literary and artistic culture. It would be to run counter to the spirit in which he appeals to us, to make him out more perfect or more earnest in character than he has represented himself. But with all admission of some weakness, of a love of pleasure, of a love of the great world, which he does not profess to conceal, of some failure in the highest enthusiasm and of obvious limitations both of 50 LIFE OF HORACE genius and spiritual life if he shows neither the deep piety of Virgil, nor the superiority of Lucretius to all human weakness, nor the impulsive warmth of heart of Catullus, nor the wide human sympathy of Cicero yet we feel that there is hardly any writer of any age of whom we seem to be able to make so familiar a friend, from whom we can learn so much in knowledge of the world, in manners, in culture, in good sense, in consideration for others, without feeling him too far removed from the sphere of our ordinary life and associations. CHAPTER II. THE SATIRES. I. HORACE is an instance of a kind of writer more common in modern than in ancient times, who was equally eminent as a satirist, moralist and critic, and as an idealising and creative poet. He combines, in a measure greater than any of his countrymen, the Italian practical understanding with the Italian receptivity of Greek art and culture. Had he lived in recent times he would probably have been as accomplished a writer of prose as of verse. The subjects of his Satires are essentially prosaic. They deal with the material of daily life in a style as nearly as possible approaching to the language of familiar conversation or correspondence. The question might be asked whether the Odes or the familiar writings were the truer expression of the man. Was his habitual mood that of the shrewd and amused spectator, the moralist and critic of human life, or that of the lyrical artist and enthusiast ? The review of his life shows that though the ' ingeni benigna vena ' was never altogether dried up within him, yet it was not to him as it was to Virgil, the source which through all his life fed the main current of his thoughts. It was only in the meridian of his career that the pure poetical gift asserted itself as his master faculty. The work accomplished by him then demanded a laborious and sustained effort, and a fre- quent withdrawal from his ordinary interests and associations. The Satires on the other hand were the principal work of the E 2 52 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n first, the Epistles of the last ten years of his literary activity. They express his familiar moods, and the aspects of life habitu- ally present to him, while living in the world, or while maintaining his relations with the world through the medium of correspon- dence. If we want to know how Horace regarded the actual world of business, of pleasure, of society, of literature, we turn to his Satires and Epistles. If we want to see what there was in his own life and in the life of those around him which he could invest with a more ideal grace, we turn to the Odes. In tracing the development of his character and opinions, we naturally read his various writings' in the order in which they were written. In estimating his quality as a literary artist, we naturally consider together those which are of the same kind in form and manner ; on the one side, the Satires and Epistles, the product of his critical faculty, on the other his lyrical art. The object of Horace in his first literary adventure was to adapt the satire of Lucilius to the manners and taste of the Augustan age. Though one or two attempts had been made to revive it, this national form of literature, the one important literary invention of Rome, had fallen into abeyance. The lampoons of Catullus, Calvus and Bibaculus, in the previous generation, were as aggressively personal as anything in Lucilius ; but in form, substance and spirit, they belonged to a different kind of literature. The Satires of Lucilius and of Horace belong to didactic, not to any kind of lyric or epigrammatic poetry, to which the iambics of Catullus and the Epodes of Horace belong. They had a practical purpose, that of reform- ing and regulating life, as well as the literary purpose of affording amusement. Personal criticism was made subsidiary to moral teaching and reflexion on life. Satire in the hands of Horace became associated with the new interest felt in moral philosophy. Among the literary influences affecting the substance of his satire, we should rank the more strictly ethical passages in Lucretius, and the ethical writings of Cicero, especially the Stoical Paradoxa. The more systematic reflexion on life intro- duced by Horace into his satire was certainly an advance on 2] GENERAL CHARACTER OF HIS SATIRE 53 Lucilius. As a form of literary art, satire, as treated by Horace, is still in process of development. It has not yet assumed the definite purpose of a systematic treatment of special vices, as it has in the hands of Juvenal. It still retains much of the char- acter of the old ' medley.' It serves, as it did to Ennius and Lucilius, as a medium of personal communication between the poet and the outside world, and as a weapon of offence and of defence. By examining the Satires of Horace in the order of their composition, so far as that can be ascertained, we can follow the process of development from the more personal and desultory treatment of Lucilius to the more general didactic type which this form of writing ultimately assumes. There is a considerable advance in literary form between the Satires of the first and those of the second book of Horace. The latter, though not formally didactic, are with the exception of the first, in which the use of satire is vindicated, intended to convey some lesson in manners or conduct, as well as to paint and comment on character. The aim of most of those in the first book is less definite. In some the object is merely to give amusement. One is apologetic, another polemical. One is almost purely autobiographical. Only two can be described as being of a general or reflective character. An advance may be noticed from the merely personal and polemical attitude which Horace at first assumes, to the more disinterested attitude of a spectator and critic of life. There is a marked advance also in urbanity of tone. There is a further advance from imita- tion and reproduction of Lucilius to greater independence of treatment. II. The Satires. Book I. There is a general agreement that the earliest in date of the Satires of the first book is the seventh. This is a page out of Horace's earlier experience, while he served with Brutus in Asia. It probably was written at the time of the occurrence, and 54 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. II included in the collection as his earliest attempt in the manner of Lucilius. It represents a contest in wit between a scurrilous Italian, who is said to have offended Horace by sneering at his parentage, and a half-bred Greek, engaged in business trans- actions at the scene of the occurrence. The actors are real persons, introduced under their own names ; and if the piece has any merit, it consists in the reproduction of their personal peculiarities. Similar encounters and similar presentation of character are found in the fragments of Lucilius. The scene witnessed by Horace probably recalled those passages of arms in the older satirist, and stimulated him to make his first essay after his manner. The Satire serves no other purpose than that of giving vent to the high spirits of young men, engaged in military or official duties, and finding amusement in the peculiari- ties of the civilians among whom they were quartered. In the mock heroics from line 1 1 to 1 7, there is a note of youth, not long emancipated from the schools ; but there is also (as is pointed out by Mr. Palmer) in one line one of the few poetical touches in the Satires Flumen ut hibemum fertur quo rara securis one of those graphic touches, oftener found in the Odes or Epistles, by which the poetical features of some natural scene are condensed in a phrase. Among the Satires written after his return to Rome the second was the earliest in date. In jt the direct influence of Lucilius is siill more marked. It is more aggressive in tone, and coarser in substance and expression, than any later Satire. In it he uses words only found in Lucilius. It has nothing of the kindly spirit or the delicate irony characteristic of the other familiar writings of Horace. The occasion which gives rise to it is the death of the Sardinian Tigellius, one of several personages who figure both in the Epistles of Cicero and the Satires of Horace. He is introduced as a special favourite with the ' Bohemians ' of both sexes on account of his lavish prodigality. This trait suggests the contrast between the rake and the miser. The 2] THE EARLIER SATIRES 55 remainder of the Satire is an indictment of that extreme of character of which Tigellius is the type, and of which other instances are adduced among the adherents and personal friends of Caesar. One ancient tradition states that Maecenas, with whom Horace was not then acquainted, was sketched under the name of Malthinus; and Sallustius Crispus, who enjoyed a similar place in the later intimacy of Augustus to that enjoyed by Maecenas in the earlier, is introduced by his own name. In this Satire Horace shows familiarity with the coarser side of life ; but the tone in which the scandals of the time are discussed is neither like that of Juvenal, one of indignant disgust, nor the ironical tone of the ' urbanus,' characteristic of Horace himself in his treatment of human weaknesses. The fifth Satire is also one of the earliest, and one of those in which Horace most closely follows Lucilius. It answers more nearly to the original meaning of the word ' satura,' before it assumed the censorious character afterwards indicated by the word. It is simply a narrative of a journey to Brundisium, made in company with Maecenas, Virgil. Varius and other men eminent in the State and in literature. The idea of it is taken from a Satire of Lucilius, giving an account of a journey by land and water from Rome to the Sicilian Strait. With the excep- tion of a few caustic remarks on some of the people encountered on the journey, there is nothing of a purely satiric, still less of an ethical character in the piece. Neither is there anything in it of striking incident or adventure ; and in this respect it may have been less interesting than that of Lucilius, who, travelling a century earlier and by less frequented roads, had evidently found more difficulties and discomforts on his way, and had besides to encounter a dangerous storm at sea. It is a descrip- tion of a pleasant holiday passed in the society of congenial and distinguished men, of which, however, Only the outward inci- dents are briefly recorded. It brings back vividly a page from the actual experience of ancient civilisation, and has thus the same kind of interest as that possessed by a chapter in some of our older novels recording the humorous adventures and dis- 56 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. U comforts encountered in an ordinary journey. Among all the Satires of Horace it has most distinctly the character of the old Satura, as it had been transmitted by Ennius to Lucilius. Another of a somewhat later date, the eighth, is written also in his earlier manner. So far as it serves any purpose beyond that of describing a ridiculous scene, it holds up to contempt the Canidia of the Epodes, and, indirectly, the class of women to which she belongs. As, near the end of the fifth Satire, he gave expression to the freethinking fashionable among the educated classes in the later years of the Republic, so in the lines near the beginning of this Cum faber incertus scamnum faceretne Priapura Maluit esse deum he still more unmistakably scoffs at the popular beliefs ; and as perhaps one object of the fifth Satire was to let the world know of his recently gained position among the friends of Maecenas, so the selection of the scene of the eighth may have been deter- mined by the wish to draw attention to the great service rendered by his patron to the community, in changing the Esquiline from a burying-ground of the lowest classes into pleasure-grounds and a healthy habitable place. In these four Satires Horace is an imitator of the coarser, lighter and less angry moods of Lucilius. He never aspired to reproduce his more vehement indignation against individuals and classes. But in the course of this book he follows the example of his prototype, in making his satire a medium of bringing himself into frank communication with his readers. Three of the Satires of this book, the fourth, sixth, and tenth, are distinctly apologetic in tone. In them he vindicates the quality of his satire as compatible with honour and kindly feeling, and asserts his own social and literary claims to consideration. The fourth is an answer to the criticism excited by the cen- soriousness of his earlier Satires, especially (as appears from line 92) of the second. He appeals in his own justification to the license accorded to the poets of the old Comedy and to Lucilius. He shows that the ordinary detraction of society is a] HIS SELF-DEFENCE. SA T. I. 4 57 more malignant than his satire. While disclaiming all back- biting, and professing to be restrained in all that he writes by the laws of social honour, he claims the liberty of commenting freely on the vices and follies of the world, and of illustrating his comments by living examples. He traces his habit of observing and judging the characters of men to the teaching and practice of his father, and shows how moral teaching becomes real by being thus brought into relation with actual life. Tacitus says that the great object of history, which in his hands assumes much of the character of satire, is to deter men from vices and to stimulate them to virtue by regard for the award of public opinion. A similar function is claimed by Horace for satire Sic teneros animos aliena opprobria semper Absterrent vitiis. In nearly every department of Roman literature the connexion between literature and morality was intimate, and the justifica- tion of personal criticism was that it acted on the lives of men through their sense of shame, and their fear of ridicule or reprobation. He professes to apply the same criticism to his own faults with a view to self-improvement. With his habitual tendency to disguise the seriousness of his purpose under a veil of irony, he concludes with the plea that to write in his style is at least a venial fault at a time when the majority of men were authors of some sort or other. It is in this Satire that Horace first assumes the serious tone of a satirist, and clearly indicates both the kindly and tolerant view of life, and the sense of personal honour, which guided and restrained him in his comments on individuals and classes. But this apology gave offence to another class of critics, and as he defended himself in the fourth against those who objected to the writing of satire altogether, in the tenth he has to meet the opposition which his criticism on the literary merits of Lucilius excited among the admirers of the old writers. As in the fourth he defines the moral and social aim of his satire, in this he seeks to establish its literary position. With full appreciation of the boldness and caustic wit of the old satirist, 58 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n he denies to him all claim to be a careful and finished writer, and at the same time states and exemplifies the conditions of style which the satirist of a polished age has to observe. He claims the same right of criticising Lucilius, while acknow- ledging his own inferiority to him, as Lucilius exercised in the case of Accius and Ennius. As in the fourth Satire he indicated the moral affinity of his position to that of Lucilius, in this he indicates his literary relation to, and divergence from him. Lucilius wrote carelessly and for an uncritical public. Horace writes with the conscious aim of perfecting the ruder workmanship of an earlier time, by which the circle of writers with whom he was associated Varius and Virgil, Pollio and Fundanius was animated. He desires to satisfy the taste of a ' fit audience ' of men distinguished in the State and in literature. The disregard of vulgar opinion, expressed in more than one passage of his Odes, here finds vent in contemptuous phrases applied to the popular music-masters, Demetrius and Hermogenes Tigellius, and their apes and satellites. Thus, even in his satire, the least artistic of his works, Horace writes for the judgment of the few, and begins that warfare with the critics and poetasters of the time, Crispinus and the ' tur- gidus Alpinus/ which he continued to wage until the end of his career. This Satire, as it stands last in the book, may probably have been one of the latest in order of composition. But it stands in immediate logical connexion with the fourth, which gave occasion to the criticism to which the tenth was a reply. From the connexion between the second, the fourth, and the tenth, we learn that whether or not each Satire was separately published immediately after it was written, it was at least widely circulated and discussed. Horace disliked the practice of public recitation, either as actor or listener, and he had no desire to have his books thumbed at the common book-stalls. Yet while he ironically complains that he finds few readers, the criticism which he answers in these Satires shows that they were not merely known to his friends, but were in some way or other a] HIS SELF-DEFENCE. SAT. I. IO, /. 6 59 circulated among the general reading public, before thty were collected into one book. His social advancement, and especially his intimacy with Maecenas, no less than his literary attitude, procured him enemies and detractors. The sixth Satire is his apology in answer to them. In it, more than in any of those of Book i, the satire of Horace fulfils the office of autobiography assigned to that of Lucilius in the familiar lines Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim, &c. There is none of them which gives so full information about his early life and education, describes so vividly his habits and mode of life at the time when the Satire was written, and is so true an index of his character. He answers the sneers to which his birth exposed him, in such a way as to make out of this ground of obloquy his best claim to consideration. He shows unmistakably that his relation to his patron was one of mutual esteem, not of servile dependence. There is little of the caustic spirit of satire in this piece ; but none of the Satires of the first book contained so true, and for Roman society, so new a lesson. He teaches the worth and the worthlessness of the claims of birth. They give, or at least they gave in an aristocratic Republic like Rome, a right to aspire to rank and office ; they gave a man a certain prestige in popular estimation ; but they made no difference in his real value or in the judgment which men of virtue and sense formed of him. Horace, in this vindication of himself, announced a great change in social opinion, which the Empire, as the great leveller of ranks, introduced. The extent of that change may be estimated by a comparison of the aggressive tone of the eighth Satire of Juvenal with the modest apology of Horace. In the favours and distinctions enjoyed by Virgil and Horace we see the best effects of this change of opinion ; in the influence enjoyed by parasites and ' delatores ' at the court of Nero and Domitian, and in the degradation of the representatives of the ' Fabii and Aemilii,' we see that extinction of ancient prejudice was not an unmixed gain. 60 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. II While these three are mainly personal and apologetic, the ninth is the earliest and happiest specimen of Horace's dramatic manner. It brings a scene from actual life before us with the vividness of Catullus, and with even finer irony. It imitates the style of conversation with the vivacity, the grace, and the turns of expression of Terence. It sketches a common type of character with the keen observation of Martial, and with more truthful moderation. We seem to know the casual acquaintance of the Via Sacra more familiarly than we know the ' bellus homo ' of Martial, and feel more certain that he is not a caricature. In none of his other Satires does Horace indicate more clearly his intellectual affinity to Addison. Although there is no direct teaching or reflexion on life in the treatment of the subject, yet it indirectly conveys a lesson on manners and on the essential difference between self-assertion and self-respect. In the part which Horace himself plays in this light comedy, he makes use of the ironical courtesy charac- teristic of the ' urbanus ' ; while in the other chief interlocutor he represents, to the life, the pushing and unscrupulous impor- tunity of the kind of literary adventurer of whom a man of culture and honour is most reasonably intolerant. The third and first approach more to the type which satire ultimately assumed. They have more of the character of a regular discourse on a definite subject. The word ' sermo/ applied by Horace to his Satires, may sometimes more appro- priately be rendered ' conversation/ in other cases, as in these two, ' discourse,' although even in them the discussion is partly carried on in dialogue with an imaginary opponent. These are essentially didactic in tendency. They are part of that systematic ethical teaching introduced into Roman literature by Lucretius in verse and by Cicero in prose. In both of these Satires we recognise the influence of Lucretius in ex- pression and thought, although the spirit in which Horace, in the Satires, regards life, is as far removed as possible from the passionate feeling of human dignity which animates the older poet. In the third Satire, the theme of which is the 2] ETHICAL DISCOURSES 6 1 indulgence due to the faults of our friends, Horace, like Lucretius, takes up an attitude of antagonism to Stoicism, and appeals to the standard of utility against the paradox that all offences are equal. In the controversial tone which they adopt there is, however, the strongest contrast between the light irony of Horace and the polemical severity of Lucretius. While the contemplative Epicureanism of Lucretius appeals to higher elements in human nature, the practical Epicureanism of Horace appealed more effectually to the ordinary moods of his con- temporaries. The admirable side of Epicureanism is conspicuous in the subject dealt with in this Satire, the duties, graces, and amenities of social intercourse. Friendliness was among the virtues, and friendship among the sources of happiness especially prized by the Epicureans. And no wiser teacher of the way to make the social relation of friends pleasant and permanent can well be found than Horace. The first Satire, which serves as an introduction to all the others, is more purely an ethical discourse, illustrated by living examples and sketches of character, than any of the others of the first book. In it, as in the third, he shows by the choice of subject and by many expressions his relation both to Lucilius and Lucretius. In the general question which he raises, why the majority of men find no satisfaction in their lives, he is on the same ground as Lucretius. In the answer which he gives and which he reiterates in the Epistles and the Odes, he follows the more practical guidance of Lucilius. Lucretius answers from the contemplative point of view that the causes of human unhappiness are the fear of the gods and of death on the one hand, and the blindness and insatiable craving of human desires on the other ; and he finds the only cure in the systematic study of philosophy. Horace finds the cause of the discontent which he witnessed, in what he regarded as the master-passion of his time, the desire to become rich and the sacrifice of the ends of life to an over-anxious care for the means of living; and he sought the cure in a practical appeal to men's common sense and their sense of ridicule. Lucilius had satirised the sordid 62 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n saving and money-making of his day, and his fragments show- that Horace makes frequent use of his language in this Satire ; though it does not appear that Lucilius gave to this subject a greater prominence than to others. But the end of the civil wars and the loss of free political institutions gave a new impulse to all the modes of money-making, and brought the middle-classes, largely engaged in trade and money-dealing, into greater social prominence than at any previous time. In Horace's manner of dealing with the subject we recognise the weakness and strength of his method. He has no claim to be a systematic thinker. He forms a just judgment about the facts immediately before him, and arrives by a kind of intuition at general principles of conduct in conformity with common sense and human feeling. He has a true eye for character. But he neither tries to think out, nor is willing to accept any complete and connected theory of human life. In his treatment of his subject, he allows one thought to suggest another as it might in conversation or in quiet meditation. In the desultory, often inconsecutive way in which he discusses a question, we recognise his dislike of pretention and formality, which so often leads him to assume the mask of irony. But it is in keeping with his unsystematic way of observing life and drawing his lessons from it. One of the chief difficulties of his style arises from his mode of raising or meeting objections. We sometimes find ourselves at a loss to say whether he is speaking in his own name or that of an imaginary opponent. The same difficulty meets us in the interpretation of some of his Epistles. Horace seems thus to have felt his way from the direct personality and scandals of the second Satire, to the more abstract and ethical type realised in the first and third. In all the Satires of this book he addresses the public in his own person. Yet he adheres to the original dramatic character of the Satura by frequently conducting his arguments by means of dialogue. He adheres to it in giving occasionally a narra- tive of some adventure or scene with no particular satirical or ethical tendency. He shows the direct influence of Lucilius in 3l THE PROGRESS OF SA TIRE 63 the personality of his attacks on well-known individuals, and in the exposure of a particular class of vices in the second Satire. In using his satire as a means of bringing himself into immediate relation with his reader, in answering criticism and justifying his position, and giving personal details of his mode of life and his tastes, he is also following the example of his model. In devoting separate Satires to his discussion and reproof of certain specific errors or vices as he does in the first, second, and third, he approaches that type of satire, latent in the original Satura and Fescennine verses, partially, realised in several of the Satires of Lucilius, first fully realised in the Satires of the second book of Horace, and still more systemati- cally in the Satires of Persius and Juvenal. The desultoriness of the original Satura still clings to these more reflective essays. In the first there are two distinct subjects, discontent and avarice, which find a not very satisfactory connexion at the end of the discussion. Human discontent is an excellent subject for a penetrating philosophical satire ; avarice is one of the most common themes of social satire. But though in certain states of society the desire to be rich may be the prevalent cause of discontent, yet this affords an inadequate answer to the question propounded at the opening of the book ' Qui fit Maecenas,' &c. The common-place maxim that error lies in extremes has no logical connexion with the subject of the second Satire ; nor does the exposure of inconsistencies of character in the person of Tigellius appear to be a logical prelude to the inculcation of charitable indulgence to the faults of our friends, and the refutation of the paradox that all faults are of equal magnitude. III. The Satires. Book II. The second book of Satires appeared about six years after the first. The position of the poet had become, in the mean- time, more firmly established. He had entered on possession 64 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. II of his Sabine farm, and was in the habit of dividing his time between the social pleasures and distractions of the town, and the simpler life' and more studious leisure of the country. Though the Satires continue to be essentially the literature of the town, yet in this book may be traced the restorative effect which his genius and spirit derived from his frequent retreat to his Sabine citadel. He is now in sympathy with the new Government, and for the first time appears as the panegyrist of Caesar. The aggressive personality of some of his early Satires has given place to good-humoured raillery. While the tone of his satire is more kindly and genial, it is, at the same time, more serious. The pronounced Epicureanism of the first book is no longer apparent. The disciples of that school are satirised in the person of Catius, and the 'vitae praecepta beatae ' are identified with the tenets of gastronomy, which, as we learn from Cicero's correspondence, had become a science and a fashionable pursuit among the disciples of Epicurus in the last years of the Republic. He shows at the same time a truer understanding of the attitude of Stoicism, though he still regards the personal peculiarities and literary pedantry of its professors as legitimate objects of satire. Thus, though he dissembles his serious meaning by attributing the moral teaching of the third and seventh Satires to a bankrupt connoisseur of art and antiquities, and to a slave, who profess to retail the teaching of two of the pedants of Stoicism, Stertinius and Crispinus, yet the first of these Satires is the most elaborate, the second the most searching, of all those in which he probes the diseases of human life. There is a marked change in the literary form of the Satires of the second book. In those of the first book, though there is a frequent use of dialogue, Horace for the most part speaks in his own person. The Satires of the second book are, with scarcely any exception, dramatic. In one of them, the fifth, he does not appear at all ; in the second and eighth he appears only as introducing the speaker or narrator ; in the first, third, fourth, and seventh, he bears his part in the dialogue, but in 3] DRAMATIC CHARACTER OF SECOND BOOK 65 all except the first he is rather a listener than a speaker. The sixth alone, in the earlier part, is directly personal and auto- biographical. But the latter part of that Satire is a fable told in the form of dramatic dialogue ; and the narrator of the fable is not Horace himself, but one of his country neighbours who was in the habit of dining with him at his Sabine farm. One motive of Horace in adopting the form of dialogue was probably to make his satire less invidious, ' invidiam placare.' He avoids the pretentiousness of preaching to and reproving his neighbours by putting his censures into the mouth of Damasippus and Davus, and making himself the object of them. He probably felt also that the dramatic dialogue was a truer form of literary art, and more suited to his own ironical way of regarding the world, than the direct expression of opinion. While engaged in the composition of this book he was a student of the Greek comic poets Quorsum pertinuit stipare Platona Menandro, Eupolin, Archilochum, comites educere tantos? and these studies must have strengthened his own dramatic tendency. The personages introduced by him are appropriate to the part they play, and play it consistently. We seem to know Trebatius, a hale veteran in his relation to Horace, as \re know him some twenty-five years earlier in his relation to Cicero. We recognise some of the same traits in both repre- sentations of the famous lawyer, as his love of swimming and his love of wine. Ofellus and Servius are characteristic specimens of the Italian yeoman, shrewd and simple, serious and genial, thrifty and hospitable. Fundanius, the reviver of Roman comedy, is appropriately selected to rehearse the comedy from real life, known as the 'Banquet of Nasidienus.' In the Damasippus of the dialogue, who, like Trebatius, is one of the personages familiar to the readers of Cicero's letters, we have a specimen of the busy-body ('ardelio') and the collector of antiquities, whom we meet again in the Epigrams of Martial; and in the Davus of the seventh Satire we have a slave who speaks with F 66 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n even more freedom and a more satisfied sense of superiority than the slaves in Plautus and Terence assume to their masters. In the Catius of the fourth again, whether or not he is the Matius of Cicero's letters, we seem to recognise a real person, who treats the science of cookery with the gravity which its professors habitually assume ; which meets us in the parasites of Plautus, and even in the fragments of the Hedyphagetica of Ennius, and in the irony of Cicero's concessions to the philo- sophy of Hirtius and the other Epicurean friends of Julius Caesar. The first Satire is a prologue to the rest. In it Horace justifies his attacks on individuals by the example of Lucilius and the esteem in which he was held by the best men of his day. He professes to use his ' stilus ' merely in self-defence, as the weapon with which nature provided him against his detractors and enemies. But by the words in which he characterises the attitude of Lucilius Scilicet uni aequus virtuti atque eius amicis he seems to indicate the moral purpose with which he wielded it. The true relation of Horace to his master in satire, the admiration which he felt for his genius and character, and his ambition to emulate him, are more agreeably indicated in this than in any of the other numerous passages in which Lucilius is spoken of. Three out of the eight Satires of this book are devoted to the luxury of the table, a form of indulgence which was a common topic with Roman dramatists, satirists and moralists, from Plautus and Lucilius to Juvenal, Martial and Tacitus. The number of Latin words, such as ' lurco/ ' comedo/ ' helluo,' 'catillo,' 'popino,' denoting sots and gluttons, all used with a contemptuous application, indicate the Roman propensity to this form of indulgence, and the resistance which it met from the censorious spirit in the Roman character. The living examples which are found in satire, in Cicero's speeches, and in actual history, testify to the frequency of the vice and the 3] THEMES AND PERSONS INTRODUCED 67 moral reprobation awarded to it. There is no literature in which the virtue and the art, To live on little with a cheerful heart, is so frequently inculcated. Lucilius, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Persius, Seneca, Juvenal, Tacitus, are all keenly conscious of the contrast between the luxury of the wealthier classes in Rome, and the ideal of 'plain living.' Horace, while often praising the ' dapes mensae brevis' which he says it is the office of the dramatic poet to recommend, admits, by the reproof which he allows his slave Davus to administer to him, his own liability to the common temptation. Lucilius had lent authority to his discourse on this form of excess by putting it in the mouth of Laelius. The serious treatment of the subject enables Horace to introduce into the Satires one of his finest sketches of character, the yeoman Ofellus. But it is Horace himself who speaks to us by the voice of this Rusticus, abnormis sapiens, crassaque Minerva, with all the manliness and good sense which he drew from his Apulian home. At the same time he avails himself of the language and illustrations of Lucilius, to describe the coarse profusion of Roman banquets. He holds up the standard of a refined simplicity ' mundus victus ' as the proper mean between a luxurious and a sordid style of living. An example of the serious tone which his satire occasionally assumes, and by which it almost rises into poetry, may be found in the lines 94 to in, beginning 'Das aliquid famae,' and ending 'aptarit idonea bello.' As he treats the subject in the graver relation to human life in the person of Ofellus, he treats it in the serio-comic view appropriate to gastronomy, regarded as a fine art, in the person of Catius. If Catius is the C. Matius who is one of the corre- spondents of Cicero, to whom Cicero attributes 'consilium, gravitas, constantia, turn lepos, humanitas, litterae/ we cannot F 2 68 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n recognise his identity with the professor of the art of good living, who enunciates the precepts of wisdom qualia vincunt Pythagoran Anytique ream doctumque Platona as we recognise the identity of the Trebatius of the letters with Horace's legal adviser. But it is not unexampled to find men who in an earlier stage of their career give indication of much good feeling, good sense, and culture, and who in later life come to attach great importance to their reputation as ' Amphi- tryons,' and we may remember that Tacitus (Annals, xii. 60) speaks of the influential position enjoyed by the ' Matii and Vedii/ and (Annals, i. 10) speaks again of the luxury of Vedius as one of the chief scandals of the reign of Augustus. The ridicule in this Satire is directed not against the precepts themselves, but against the importance attached to them. As he brings in Damasippus to enunciate, in the manner of the Stoical dialectics, serious truths about human life, so he brings in a Roman epicure to teach, with elaborate unction, how to make Roman banquets not only more luxurious but more refined and wholesome. The experience of Horace as the guest of Maecenas, and probably also of rich men such as Dellius and Sestius (the father of the latter, if we trust Catullus, had a reputation as a ban mvant^\ might suggest to him the double object of giving such instructions to his generation, as Ennius did to his in his Saturae 2 , and at the same time of satirising the extreme type of fashionable and exquisite Epicureanism, as he had satirised the extreme type of gauche and pedantic Stoicism. He himself holds the position of the man of sense who could enjoy the amenities and pleasures of social life without being a slave to them, as he could hold to a serious purpose in life without becoming an ascetic or recluse. 1 Catullus, xliv. 7-10 ff. :. tussim Non inmerenti quam mihi meus venter, Dum sumptuosas adpeto, dedit, cenas ; Nam Sestianus dum volo esse conviva, &c. * The Hedyphagetica most probably formed one of the Saturae. 3 ] C ATI US AND NASIDIENUS 69 As the fourth deals with the refined epicurism of the men of old-established wealth and station, who found in the luxury of their houses, gardens and entertainments, some compensation for the loss of a political career, the eighth gives a picture of the vulgar ostentation, extravagance, and meanness of one of those whom the rapid changes of a revolutionary time had raised from obscurity to wealth and position in the world of fashion. If under the name Nasidienus is disguised the person* of Salvidienus Rufus, who was raised from a low station by Octavianus, and put to death for treachery in the year 40 B. c., Horace must in this Satire have recalled an incident of an earlier date than that of the time when the piece was written. But there is nothing in the sketch of Nasidienus to suggest the military adventurer; and between the time when Horace returned to Rome and the date of the death of Salvidienus, the latter was so constantly engaged in military command that it is difficult to see when he could have assumed the position of a fashionable entertainer at Rome. Perhaps the nickname of Nasidienus may first have been given to Salvidienus, and Horace may have applied that name to a notorious parvenu of a later date, just as he so often uses names borrowed from Lucilius to indicate some notorious person or some marked type of character in his own time. The type of character here held up to ridicule is common to the satirists of every age ; but Roman society under the Empire was especially rich in speci- mens of it. The banquet of Nasidienus is a faint foreshadowing of the banquet of Trimalchio. There is no more common character in the Epigrams of Martial than that of the mean and ostentatious host. Nasidienus, like Catius, professed an elaborate and inventive skill in gastronomy, but made himself so intolerable by discoursing upon the subject, that the guests fled from the good things before them, velut illis Canidia adflasset peior serpentibus Afris. Among other points of interest in this piece we see by the living examples of Porcius and Nomentanus on the one hand, 70 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n and Vibidius and Balatro on the other, the difference between the obsequious parasite, such as he appears in Greek Comedy, and the audacious ' scurra ' who plays so large a part in Roman satire. The most trenchant of all the Satires is the fifth. The weapon employed is not the genial irony of the fourth, but bitter sarcasm, ' rigidi censura cachinni.' It is not so much moral indignation, as intellectual scorn, which is expressed for a type of character, known to all times, but especially common in Rome under the Empire the fortune-hunter, or 'captator,' who rose to wealth by obsequious attention and base services to rich and childless old men and widows. Folly, vanity and meanness are the objects of his other Satires, and the tone in which these subjects are treated is that of serious remonstrance, good-humoured irony, or contemptuous ridicule. The subject of the dialogue between Tiresias and Ulysses is baseness, and the tone is one of restrained but incisive sarcasm. If Juvenal recognised any affinity between his own invective and the 'Venusina lucerna,' it must have been with the spirit of this Satire, and perhaps the second of Book i, that he found himself in sympathy. As it is in the fifth that Horace shows himself in his most censorious temper and most observant of the viler side of life, so in the sixth, which with his artistic love of contrast he places beside it, we see him in his happiest mood, and turning his mind to that quarter which always restored him to his best self, ' the Sabine farm he loved so well,' and the homely virtues of the people living in that primitive district. This Satire, like the sixth in the first book, is a page of his autobiography. We learn from it that his town life had become a weariness to him. It no longer affords him that sense of independence and ease which he expressed in the former Satire by the words ' domes- ticus otior.' His intimacy with Maecenas lays upon him new responsibilities. He is no longer his own master. Hence arose the longing which he expresses here and in the Epistles, to escape from the distractions of the town to his ' citadel among si TOWN AND COUNTRY 71 the mountains.' His home among the Sabine highlands the ' ardui Sabini ' was to him a source of inspiration, and that is its influence which is present in the Odes. But it was a place also which afforded the quiet and leisure needful for self- restoration, for ' keeping his soul alive,' and that is the influence which is present in this Satire and the Epistles. He could, when there, ask himself and discuss with his neighbours, Strong in sense and wise without the rules, such questions as ' What makes men really happy ? ' Quid pure tranquillet, honos an dnlce lucellum, An secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae or, 'What is the true bond of friendship?' such questions as Cicero represents the cultivated statesmen of his own and of an earlier time discussing in more academic fashion in the porticoes or walks in front of their country houses. In his happiest vein of irony he points the moral, that contentment is the ground of happiness, and that contentment is to be found in the simple fare and simple ways of the country, rather than in the glare and amid the luxury of the town, by the fable of 'The Town and Country Mouse,' which his neighbour Cervius is supposed to tell at one of the unceremonious dinners at which Horace entertained his country neighbours. This poem or discourse is really a peaceful idyll of rustic life embedded among the Satires dealing with the distractions, follies, vices, and characters of the town. The third and seventh are serious ethical discussions, con- ducted with dramatic irony. They are based on the Stoical Paradoxa of Cicero, or on the authors whom Cicero used in the composition of that work. But the serious meaning of the discussions is partly disguised by the manner in which they are given to the world. In the one the spokesman is the bankrupt Damasippus, who repeats the teaching of Stertinius, a pedantic professor of the day, and discourses on the theme that all men are mad except the philosopher, in the abrupt dialectical fashion of the Stoics. The other expounds the 72 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. II thesis that the wise man alone is free ; and the propounder of this thesis is the slave Davus, who professes to repeat what he had heard from the door-keeper of Crispinus, a voluminous pedant with whom Horace, in an earlier Satire, disclaimed rivalry. But while one object of these Satires is to criticise the personal and literary peculiarities of the Stoical teachers, in none is the ethical purpose of Horace the wish to expose the moral waste of life more evident. In the third Satire the prevailing forms of human error are reviewed and illustrated by examples taken partly from actual life, partly, as was usual in Stoical dissertations, from the familiar personages of Greek legend and poetry. The prevailing forms of human error, discussed in order, are avarice, political and military ambition, luxury and extravagance, the passion of love, and superstition. These appear to Lucretius also the chief moral diseases of human life, but it is characteristic of the difference between the two men, and of the difference in the spirit of their age, that Horace, living in the world, at a time when political ambition was condemned to inaction, and when the energies of the middle-class were absorbed in money-making, and those of their sons and heirs in wasting money, should attach supreme importance to avarice and prodigality, and view superstition as a harmless folly ; while Lucretius, the philosophic recluse, born and bred among the exclusive Roman aristocracy, the spectator of the fierce political passions through which the Republic perished, should see in superstition and the struggle for power the supreme evils under which humanity was crushed. The protest of Lucretius against the power of the various passions is uttered more with the zeal, the scorn, and the pathos of an inspired prophet, than with the calm conviction of a philosophic moralist. The protest of Horace is that of a man of sense and a man of the world, who sees that the happiness and dignity of life are sacrificed to an exaggerated care for the means of living, to false aims and infirmity of purpose, to the slavery of some ruling passion or appetite, or to intellectual weakness and fanaticism. He 3] DAMASIPPUS AND DAVUS 73 exposes these weaknesses from a real desire to cure them, as well as from the literary pleasure of moral analysis and representation. But he claims for himself no immunity from human infirmity. He allows his self-appointed mentor to charge him with indolence and irresolution, extravagance and social ambition, excessive love of pleasure, and a most irritable temper. Though his irony leads him to exaggerate his own faults, yet admissions in other places indicate that these, or some of these, were what he regarded as his besetting weak- nesses. The seventh Satire discusses the thesis that the wise man alone is free, and that all the rest of the world is mad. It is the same thesis as that discussed and illustrated in the fifth of Cicero's Paradoxa, and Horace shows his familiarity with the previous treatment of the topic by Cicero. The doctrine inculcated is the necessity of self-mastery and consistency of conduct. Consistency in vice is spoken of as less miserable than weakness and inability to resist temptation. The tempta- tions which are treated of are the love of pleasure, the fashionable craze for pictures and other works of art, and the appetite for luxurious living. The nemesis of yielding to these temptations is the unrest and ennui which Lucretius had so powerfully described as one of the moral maladies of the previous generation, and which Horace himself in the Epistles and in the Odes regards as one of the chief diseases of his time. In this Satire Davus is allowed to make Horace himself the object of his caustic comment i Adde, quod idem Non horam tecum esse poles, non otia recte Ponere, teque ipsum vitas, fugitivus et erro, lam vino quaerens, iam somno fallere curam : Frustra, nam comes atra premit sequiturque fugacem. Horace may have realised enough of this condition in his own experience to make him better understand the lives of the idle and luxurious class of his day. But a comparison of this passage with other passages in the Odes and the Epistles, 74 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH.H in which care is represented as the accompaniment of wealth and luxury, suggests the inference that, as in the Satires directed against avarice, he has the middle class, engaged in business, in his eye the ' profanum vulgus/ the ' Philistines/ with whom he disclaims all sympathy so in this analysis of the bondage to the pleasures of sense he has in view the rich, idle, and for the most part, noble classes, who formed the bulk of his readers, whose favour he enjoyed, and whom he did not care to offend. He avoids the invidiousness of appearing a censor of this class, by making himself the object of the Satire. IV. How far has Horace carried out his original purpose in writing satire, and how far has he introduced something new into literature ? The older Augustan poets, in founding a new school of literature, did not wish to separate themselves abruptly from the past literature of their country. While expanding the national literature in different directions, they aimed at giving artistic shape and literary finish to the forms already established. Thus Varius aimed at reviving and perfecting the contemporary epic ; Virgil ultimately gave the proportion and finish of a work of art to the national epic of Ennius ; Pollio was a reviver and improver of Roman tragedy ; Fundanius of comedy. Along with this restoration of the older forms, the most gifted of the new school aimed at conquering and reducing to the rule of Latium new provinces from the old domain of Greek art, in the spirit in which that had been done by the poets of the preceding generation. In this spirit Virgil produced his pastoral poems and Georgics. Horace, with apparently more conscious purpose than any of his contemporaries, desired both to improve an existing type of literature, and to expand the range of Latin letters in a new direction. He desired to be the Lucilius, as well as the Archilochus and Alcaeus, of his generation. In the Epistles he created for himself a new instrument. In assuming the tone of the old popular national satirist, and 4] HORACE'S PURPOSE IN THE SATIRES 75 in seeking to substitute artistic proportion and literary finish for the desultory treatment and rough workmanship of his pre- decessor, he recognised the new conditions imposed by the change of the times and by his own position. The motives which actuated Lucilius in writing satire were public spirit and political passion. He was as much a combatant in the warfare of politics as if he had been a tribune or censor, The essential condition of the ' virtue ' which he upheld by his incessant attacks on vice and corruption is public spirit Commoda praeterea patriae sibi prima putare. The position secured to Lucilius by his birth, fortune, and intimacy with the best men in the State, and the republican freedom enjoyed in his time, enabled him to assail openly men in every grade of society and every sphere of political influence. In the stress which Horace lays on the relation of his predecessor to the writers of the old comedy, he indicates that his satire was primarily political, and that his most powerful weapon was direct personality the boldness with which he stripped off the skin, nitidus qua quisque per ora Cederet, introrsum turpis. From the whole field of political life the greatest field for satire as for oratory Horace was more absolutely debarred than any of the great satirists, ancient or modern. He found too, after his first experiment, that the temper of the society in which it was his ambition to live did not tolerate aggressive personalities on men of conspicuous station. The new satire, in so far as it was aggressive, had to limit itself to the field of social life, and to select its examples either from the notorious bores and nuisances of society, or from men of a past genera- tion who had become notorious for their meanness or their prodigality. In so far as his satire is aggressive, it is limited to the general aspect of social life. And it is chiefly two extreme types of social life the miser and usurer, Ummidius, Avidienus or Fufidius, and the roue and prodigal in his various gradations from the ' scurra Volanerius ' to the son of Aesopus 76 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. n and the two sons of Arrius that he has preserved from oblivion. Avarice and luxury are the chief offences denounced by him and exposed through living examples. These are the excesses which a prosperous and unrefined middle-class presents to a spectator regarding its members from the ' templa serena ' of a polished and cultivated social circle. So far as his satire is aggressive his field is thus much more limited than that of either Lucilius or Juvenal. The spirit in which Horace uses his satiric pen is different from that attributed to Lucilius and apparent in every line of Juvenal. Two opposite characteristics are attributed to Lucilius. All who speak of him agree in ascribing to him the greatest boldness and freedom of speech. But while to Horace and Cicero his urbanity and wit appear his chief qualities ' comis et urbanus ' are the epithets applied to him by Horace, 'doctus et perurbanus' by Cicero the fierceness of his indignation, the bitterness and vehemence of his invective, are those which attracted the satirists of the Empire to him. The fragments of Lucilius justify both views of his character. His spirit was as far as possible removed from that of a cynic, an ascetic, or a misanthrope. He appears to have been a man of the world, enjoying his life in manifold ways, laughing heartily at the follies of his contemporaries and not sparing his own, a genuine humourist not without a strong Rabelaisian vein in him. But he was also a man of great public spirit, a warm friend and a warm hater ; the last more on public than on private and personal grounds. Patriotism, the basis of virtue, required him to be the enemy of bad men and bad morals Hostem esse atqne inimicum hominum morumqne malorum as well as to be the champion of the men and the morals through which the good of the State was promoted. His com- bative temper and keenness of intellect fitted him well for the part he had to play in the political and social warfare, so actively waged during the last thirty years of the second century B. c. 4] HORACE AND LUCILIUS 77 With this side of Lucilius the spirit of Juvenal was in thorough sympathy. Patriotism was to him too the basis of virtue ; and his worst enemies would not refuse to him the title of a good hater. What roused his indignation to the utmost was the degeneracy from the old national standard of manliness and morality; and the men whom he most hated were the tyrant and his ministers to whose rule and influence he attributed much of this degeneracy. Horace had no such consuming passion. His Odes show that at a later time he was not wanting in the patriotism and public spirit evoked by the new Empire, and that he too cherished an ideal of the old national virtues. But at the time when the Satires were written there was no public virtue to which he could have appealed. The cause of the Republic, with which whatever remained of the old national spirit seemed to have been identified, was lost. The task which was left to the satirist was to make social life more pleasant, and the life of the individual more rational. The part which Horace had to perform was much the same as that which Macaulay attributes to Addison, in a time not unlike the early Augustan age, when a state of settled order and social respectability was beginning to succeed a time of revolution and of moral license. It was natural that he should find his relation to Lucilius, not in the vehemence and freedom of his invective, but in his irony, his knowledge of the world, and his tact in dealing with it. But with another side of Lucilius Horace was more in sym- pathy than any other ancient writer. The satire of Lucilius, besides being aggressively critical on individuals and classes, was largely autobiographical. How this element was combined with the other elements in his satire must be matter of conjec- ture. It was probably, like the same element in Horace, partly fused through his general comments on the world, and partly the subject of separate episodes. His satire sometimes took the form of a narrative of adventures in which he had taken part, and a description of scenes of which he was a spectator. This, one of the original functions of satire, disappears from the type which it ultimately assumes in Juvenal. Scarcely any Roman 78 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. il writer tells us so little of himself, and is personally so much of an enigma, as the great satirist of the Empire. This personal element is the chief charm in the satire of Horace, as the rela- tion established with the reader, by a real or assumed personality, is one of the greatest charms of the Spectator. It is through his social tact that Horace exercises a moral influence over others. He wants his reader to be in sympathy with him, and makes himself known to him in his habits and circumstances, thoughts and feelings, with good sense, good taste, perfect candour, and full reliance on being met with equal candour. As pure satirists, as masters of satiric invective or irony, others in ancient and modern times may claim a higher rank than Horace. They Have written with more of passion and of the power imparted by passion, or with a more penetrating insight into the abysses of human nature. But Horace ranks among the foremost of those writers who have left a true record and picture of themselves to after times. Others have gained a permanent place in literature by the vivid memorials they have left, in the form of confessions, of the inward tragedy of their lives. Horace among the ancients, as Montaigne among the moderns, has made the record of his habitual moods profoundly interesting by the absolute candour and the self-knowledge of his revelation. He has done this also largely in his Odes and Epistles, yet it is to the Satires that we turn as our fullest and most authentic source of information about his actual life and habits. In the Odes we know him in the hours of inspiration ; in the Epistles in his deeper thoughts and in his inner life ; in the Satires in his daily life and habitual intercourse with men. As in the Odes and Epistles, so too in the Satires, though he is there less formally didactic, Horace is a moralist. His work is positive as well as negative. His positive aim is to induce men to guide their lives by reason and common sense, to be consistent, to avoid extremes, and to be masters of their appetites. A definite purpose in life, and moderate wants, are the secret of contentment. But a man has to be not only at peace with himself, but on good terms with society 'dulcis amicis.' And nowhere is Horace 4 ] HORACE'S DISTINCTION AS A SATIRIST 79 more admirable than in inculcating charitable indulgence to the faults of our friends and courage in defending them. Nowhere is his satire more penetrating than in his exposure of the arts of slandering and backbiting. And while he directly inculcates the more serious duties of friendship, he indirectly, by the living representation of impudence and self-assertion, and the urbanity with which they are met, inculcates the minor duties of good manners in social intercourse. One pervading quality of all Horace's satiric writing of his reproof, his sketches of character, his narrative, his self-delinea- tion, his positive teaching is its truth and moderation. This is a ground of superiority over Juvenal and most satirists, ancient or modern. It is another point of resemblance between him and Addison. It was probably the recognition of a similar moderation and sobriety of treatment in the great master of irony and urbanity before his day, which explains the attraction that drew Horace to the comedies of Terence. Nowhere is the absence of these qualities more conspicuous than in Horace's great imitator Persius ; and the contrast between the two satirists is especially marked in those passages in which the disciple has tried to improve on his master. This sobriety and truth to nature are especially admirable in his sketches of character. Roman society presented more extreme types of manners and character than modern society. But even such sketches as those of Avidienus, pouring his rancid oil drop by drop over his cab- bage; of Tigellius praising the virtues of plain living and spending a million sesterces in a week; of Priscus, one day a rake in Rome, another a scholar in Athens; of the young prodigal, on the day of his accession to his fortune, summoning a council of the ministers of his extravagance, do not seem forced or caricatured. Often by a single trait, as that of the ' scurra Volanerius,' broken down by well-earned gout in the hands, and hiring a man to put the dice into the box for him, he suggests a whole career. If we have few elaborate and com- plete portraits such as those we find in Juvenal and Martial, we have suggestive glimpses of a great number of individuals and 8o HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. II classes. Horace sketches character as he sketches outward nature, by seizing some vital characteristic of his object. In estimating the literary value and originality of the Satires, we have to bear in mind the inartistic character of the older satire, and the aim which Horace set before himself in their composition. The merits of Lucilius, which Horace fully admits, were his freedom of speech, his wit, his vigorous understanding, his courage and manliness. But these qualities of a strong man and a good writer did not secure him from the careless execu- tion which he shared with all the older writers, Terence alone excepted. The fragments of his Satires fully justify the criticism on his literary defects. Horace, while disclaiming for the satire either of his master or of himself the name of poetry, yet sets before the satirist a high standard of good writing Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia neu se Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures ; Et sermone opus est modo tristi, saepe iocoso, Defendente vicem modo rhetoris atque poetae, Interdum urbani, parcentis viribus atque Extenuantis eas consulto (Sat. i. 10. 9-14)- It is the part of the ' urbanus,' not of the poet or orator, that Horace habitually sustains. In composition, diction, and rhythm, the Satires profess to be ' sermoni propiora.' They reproduce in a natural, familiar and varied manner the serious and humorous comments on life illustrated by anecdotes, sketches of character, and personal criticism and the frank confidences of a courteous and culti- vated man of the world. They afford the same kind of enter- tainment as we derive from the reported ' table-talk ' of remarkable men in modern times. They confirm what we should infer from many passages in his writings (e.g. Od. iii. 21, Ep. i. 5), that Horace had great enjoyment in conversation, and, as we should infer from his social popularity, that he was a great master of the art. There is no elaborate introduction or formal division of his subject, as in Juvenal, in whose satire successive paragraphs are marshalled in order, so as to work up to a pre- 4] THEIR CONVERSATIONAL TONE 8l arranged effect. When he speaks in his own person he begins abruptly with some simple statement of fact, such as 'Ibam forte via sacra,' some general observation, such as ' Omnibus hoc vitium est cantoribus,' or some reference to a recent event, such as the death of the Sardinian Tigellius, in the natural, easy way in which men glide into conversation. And where the satire is dramatic, he allows Davus or Damasippus to begin without a prologue, or begins himself without one, as in the conversation with Catius, where he borrows the conversational manner of Plato. In the absence of formality with which he introduces his subject, he again reminds us of Addison and the other writers in the Spectator. Sometimes his transitions from one topic to another seem too abrupt, and sometimes two lines of thought seem to get entangled with one another. But even this seeming confusion adds to the impression of the easy, familiar, unsyste- matic teaching of the ' abnormis sapiens/ detesting all pedantry and pretention, and shrinking from nothing so much as from the infliction of weariness on himself and other people. The style, as well as the method of treatment, is natural and familiar. It does not force attention, as that of Juvenal does, by perpetual point and emphasis. It rarely rises above the tone and pitch of animated conversation. In the graver passages he seems to aim at that excellence of style which Cicero (de Orat. i. 60) ascribes to the oratory of Scipio and Laelius, ' qui omnia sermone conficerent paullo intentiore.' In some of the lighter passages he reproduces the dramatic liveliness of Terence. In passages of broader humour, in which he is much less successful than in his finer irony, he allows himself, after the manner of Lucilius, the use of coarser words and turns of expression than Cicero would have written in his most unreserved correspondence. He might have treated his materials in prose, had he been master of a prose style, such as that into which Cicero seems occasionally to fall as it were by accident, such as French litera- ture has had at all times, and such as English literature produced in the first half of the eighteenth century, before the influence of the pulpit, the senate, and the lecture-room had superseded G 82 HORACE. THE SATIRES [CH. II that of the social clubs in forming the manner of English prose a style absolutely unrhetorical, and combining the light touch, the colloquial charm, the individuality of refined and lively conversation with the studied grace and modulation of literary expression. But it was as great a triumph of art to bend the stately Latin hexameter into a flexible instrument for the use of his ' Musa pedestris,' as to have been the inventor of a prose style equal to that of Addison or Montaigne. The metrical success which Horace obtained in an attempt in which Lucilius absolutely failed, is almost as remarkable as that obtained in his lyrical metres, though of a quite different kind. To compare the hexa- meter of Horace, as employed in the Satires, to that of Lucretius or Virgil, is to apply a false standard to it. Had he come nearer to them he would have entirely failed in his object. He abso- lutely disclaims for himself the ' large utterance of the poet,' the ' os magna sonaturum.' The ' deep-chested music ' of Lucretius, the ' linked harmonies ' of Virgil, are as alien to the mood in which Horace writes his Satires, as the rhetorical pitch of Juvenal. The ' magic spell,' the ' mira lenocinia,' which fasci- nated the few hearers to whom the music of Virgil's verse was first revealed, would have been as ' misplaced in reading the Satires, as the declamatory tones by which the verse of Lucan and Juvenal awoke the applause of the recitation-rooms. To impart measure and modulation to an idealised conversational style was the use of the hexameter discovered by Horace, and by him alone successfully applied. No later writers found the secret of it, any more than of his lyrical metres ; although Martial, a successful imitator of the metres of Ovid and Catullus, attempts, but soon abandons the attempt, to use the hexameter for similar purposes. In one or two passages, as in the sixth Satire of Book ii, O rus, quando ego te adspiciam? quandoque licebit Nunc veterum libris, nunc somno et inertibus horis Ducere sollicitae iucunda oblivia vitae? where his feeling is deeper than usual, Horace imparts to his 4] STYLE AND RHYTHM 83 metre something of the smooth and liquid flow, though not the grander cadences of poetry. In the Epistles, in which the feeling is both graver and more tender than in the Satires, the musical effect is often more allied to that of poetry. He shows that the general effect aimed at is different from that of elevated poetry by the variation of his cadences when he aims at a mock-heroic effect, as by the coincidence of the metrical ictus with the accent in the last three feet in the line, in Rumperis et latras magnorum maxime regum, or by the more artistic balance of dactyl and spondee in the lines fontes ut adire remotos Atque audire queatn vitae praecepta beatae. Generally the rhythm is more rapid than when used in graver poetry. The sense does not often end with the line, and, what is rare in other poets, there is not unfrequently a pause at the end of the fifth foot. The ordinary practice of making the accent and ictus coincide in the last two feet is often disregarded. The laws observed by severer poets as to the caesura are dis- regarded more frequently than in the Epistles. Generally the metre tends to produce the same effect of freedom, ease, and familiarity as is produced by the informal and unlaboured com- position, and the natural and colloquial diction. The style and rhythm are less finished than the style and rhythm of Terence. They are thus better adapted to writings which contain an immediate copy from the humours of society and a direct expression of the comments of a spectator upon them, than to a work of art in which the comedy of life is shaped into a dramatic representation. The Satires have thus the interest of marking an important stage in the development of Roman satire, the parent of the poetical satire of modern times. They give to Horace a place among Roman moralists, in company with the old dramatists, with Lucretius and Cicero, with Seneca, Persius and Juvenal. 6 2 84 HORACE. THE SATIRES They have preserved many sketches of individuals and classes, representative of contemporary social life. But their real origin- ality and chief literary value consist in being the earliest and among the best specimens of a form of literature which sets before us the moods, experience and observation of ordinary life, through a natural, sober, familiar, truthful and yet artistic medium. Other poets we know in their ' singing robes.' Horace is one of the very few whom we know also ' discinctum'; in the seemingly careless but not unstudied undress of every day. CHAPTER III. HORACE AS A MORALIST. Epistles. Book I. THE Epistles belong essentially to the same branch of literature as the Satires. To both Horace applies the term ' sermones,' to distinguish them from the Odes, which he calls ' carmina.' They are both written in hexameter verse, in a style more akin to the urbanity and conversational ease of Terence, than to the tones of elevated poetry or high-pitched rhetoric. They make little demand on that pure but not very abundant spring of feeling and imagination, which seems to have flowed only scantily and intermittently during the years when the Satires were composed, and which Horace himself felt was becoming less active at the time when he wrote the dedicatory introduction to the first book of the Epistles. But the epistolary form gave a freer outlet than any other form adopted by him, to that observation of the ways and course of life, that constant reflexion on himself, that sympathy with and power of probing the inner life of others, that informal didactic tendency, which mingle with the social and personal criticism of the Satires, and are an important element in his lyrical poetry, but which formed the main current of his intellectual being at the time when the first book of the Epistles was composed. While the Epistles are a new and more original product of the intellectual faculties which produced the Satires, they belong to a different stage in his intellectual development, and indicate a considerable change in his social relations, his literary position, his habits of life, his spirit and temper. He is no longer, as 86 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. in he appears in the earlier Satires, one among many rivals, struggling for his position in the world of letters, making enemies as well as friends in the struggle, having to defend every position by polemical criticism, finding out by tentative efforts the true bent of his own powers, living himself in the world and sharing in the follies which he criticises. He has now to complain more of servile imitation than of jealous rivalry. The ten years which intervened between the publica- tion of the second book of the Satires and of the first book of the Epistles wrought a change in his whole view of life. The ordinary pleasures of life had lost much of their zest for him, but he had found ample compensation for them in the pleasures of the mind. Though still an amused spectator of life, he had outlived the animosities as well as the other passions of his earlier manhood. He had in the composition of the. Odes of Books ii and iii assumed a higher position than that of negative criticism or indulgent toleration. Without falling into any ascetic extreme, he had realised by experience and reflexion that his own happiness and that of the cultivated classes, to whom his teaching is addressed, depended on a true understanding and wise direction of the inner life. He pro- fesses to regard even his lyrical art, in which he had found his happiness and his vocation, as a mere light amusement in com- parison with the study how to regulate conduct and build up character. What chiefly distinguishes the Epistles from the Satires is their more definite ethical purpose. They aim at effecting, not that mere reformation in outward life and manners which may be indirectly forwarded by acting on the sense of ridicule, but a change of heart, by acting on the higher nature, by substituting ' culture ' in the Latin, not the English, sense of the word for the disorderly desires and passions of the natural man. In the Epistles Horace deals with the problems of life more search- ingly than in the Satires, more systematically than in the Odes. Though not in form, they are in substance and spirit essentially didactic. To teach the true end and wise regulation of life, CH. in] CHARACTER OF THE EPISTLES 8^ and to act on character from within, are the motives of the more formal and elaborate Epistles. And in those of a lighter and more purely personal meaning, which with his artistic love of variety he intermingles with those of a graver sort, by some incidental remark he seems to probe some weakness of character or to hint the way to a better and wiser life. The epistolary form, while avoiding the pretention of a set philosophical discourse, is well suited to his object. It enables him to apply the different aspects of his philosophy to different circumstances and to individual cases; and at the same time to give expression to the feelings by which he was attached to many of his contemporaries, and the interest which he took in younger men entering upon life. It served as a medium for that frank communicativeness about his own tastes and habits which was seen to be one of the great literary charms of the Satires and the Odes. The original suggestion of the form may have been due to Archilochus ; or perhaps to a still older poet, who in the lines addressed to Perses gave the first specimen of didactic poetry. Some of the Satires of Lucilius were written in the form of letters. There was, too, a still older instance of this form' in Latin literature, the humorous verses addressed by Sp. Mummius to his friends at Rome during the siege of Corinth, which Cicero had often heard quoted by the grandson of Mummius. Two of the elegiac poems of Catullus are written in the form of letters to personal friends. Many of Horace's own Odes, expressing maxims of conduct and re- flexions on life, are short lyrical epistles, addressed to persons whose position or character suggested the reflexions. The art of letter-writing was essentially Roman, not Greek, because to the Romans, constantly separated from their friends and from the chief centre of their interests by absence in distant provinces, it was a necessity of social and political life. The recent publication of the most interesting collection of letters in any language, the correspondence of Cicero, must have gained for the epistle recognition such as it had not hitherto enjoyed in literature. To a man of Horace's friendly and social temper, 88 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. in living, partly from taste, partly owing to failing health, on his Sabine farm or in such favourite resorts as Tibur and Tarentum ] , it was natural that he should wish to maintain his relations with his friends in Rome and with others engaged in business or official duties, or simply travelling for pleasure in the provinces. By using verse instead of prose as his vehicle, he was able to impart to the epistle a finer literary grace without sacrifice of the frankness and familiarity which give life to the ' colloquia absentium amicorum/ By the use of the epistolary form he adds human interest to his moral teaching, applying it to each individual whom he addresses and the circumstances in which he is placed. By acting on the principle that a different kind of admonition is suited to men in different circumstances and of different character, he can write without inconsistency, at one time in the spirit of a Stoic, inculcating independence of the world ; at another in the spirit of a disciple of Aristippus, who understands from watching rather than from sharing in the game of life how to win or lose it ; more often simply as a friend, expressing friendly sympathy, performing some friendly office, or offering friendly counsel. The Epistles thus combine the interest of unsystematic discourses or essays on the conduct of life by a man of much reading, observation, and reflexion, with the charm of a collection of actual letters, written to many persons, whose individual traits are indicated as those of Cicero's correspondents are in the letters addressed to them. They have thus a natural charm, entirely wanting to the formal ethical epistles of Seneca, in which only the individuality of the writer is present. These Epistles vary considerably in length and importance. A few extend to between ten and twenty lines only ; a considerable number to between thirty and fifty ; a few of those in which he is more expressly didactic from about seventy to about one hundred. The shortest among them is simply a letter of introduction Mihi iam non regia Roma, Sed vacuum Tibur placet aut imbelle Tarentum. Ep. i. 7. 44, 45. CH. Ill] EPISTLES OF THE FIRST BOOK 89 similar to those of which we have so many in the thirteenth book of Cicero's correspondence. This letter is interesting as showing Horace's relation to the future Emperor Tiberius, then a young man beginning to gain that experience and distinction in military and diplomatic service which prepared him for the great position he had afterwards to fill. It is written in behalf of Septimius, for whom, if he is the Septimius of the Odes, Horace entertained an especial affection. It is in its tone its tact, its self-depreciating yet self-respecting irony, and self-forgetful interest in his friends an admirable specimen of his urbanity, and a model of what a letter of introduction to a social superior ought to be. Another short letter, in which his tact and irony are conspicuous, is the thirteenth, addressed to Vinius, to whom he had intrusted the three books of Odes ('signata volumina') to be conveyed to Augustus, then appar- ently absent from Italy J . The eighth is a short letter of congratulation addressed to Celsus Albinovanus, a young man on the staff of Tiberius, on his appointment as secretary. It is written apparently in bad health, and dissatisfaction with his own infirmity of purpose and restlessness of spirit. Here, as so often in the Satires, he admits his own liability to the moral maladies which his teaching is intended to heal. Perhaps his self-reproach was partly meant to soften the caustic admonition with which he concludes one which successful young men at all times would do well to bear in mind Ut tu fortunam, sic nos te, Celse, feremus. The fifteenth is also written by Horace in bad health, but in 1 'Si denique poscet' seems to imply that Augustus was expecting to receive the poems. The directions given to Vinius imply a longer journey than from the Sabine farm to Rome, and Horace was more likely to have his copies of the work in Rome than at his Sabine farm. The words ' simul ac perveneris illuc' imply that the letter is supposed to be addressed to Vinius, at some intermediate place before he reached his destination. Augustus went to Sicily in B.C. 22; thence to the East, from which he did not return till 19 B. c. Thus this letter could not be written before the latter half of 22 B.C. Is it likely that the Odes had been given to the world some time before Horace ventured to send them ^o Augustus, or is it more natural to suppose that one of the earliest copies was sent to him ? 90 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. HI a more genial vein. It is a letter of enquiry as to the relative advantages of Velia and Salernum as a winter residence, at a time when he was forbidden his usual course of baths at Baiae by Antonius Musa, the fashionable physician of the day, who cured the Emperor and may have killed his son-in-law by the cold-water treatment. In it he admits his liability to the common infirmity of valetudinarians a difficulty in resisting the tempta- tions of good living when they came in his way, though he could be independent of them when he had no opportunity of yielding to them. This self-criticism affords the opportunity of intro- ducing in the person of Maenius the most finished and life-like picture of the ' scurra/ who plays a similar part in Roman satire to that played by the parasite in Greek comedy, though the Roman appears to be a more reckless and less inoffensive person than his Greek prototype usually is. Other Epistles are written in the vein of some of the lighter Odes, and are addressed to some of the friends who are also addressed in the Odes. Thus the fourth is a letter to Tibullus, whom, under his gentile name of Albius, he consoles or rallies, in one of the Odes of Book i, on his desertion by his mistress. In this Epistle Tibullus is characterised as a poet and scholar, endowed with all personal advantages of mind, body and fortune, and cultivating his art or meditating on the wise conduct of life among the health-giving woods of his estate near Pedum. To one so blessed by fortune and so wise, the only lesson recom- mended is the Epicurean maxim which forms the burden of several of his Odes Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum ; Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora. He concludes with an invitation couched in terms of ironical self-disparagement like those used in the Epistle to Vala Me pinguern et nitidum bene curata cute vises, Cum ridere voles Epicuri de grege porcum. The fifth, addressed to the same person as the seventh Ode of Book iv, a man of distinction and a rising advocate of the day, is in the form of an invitation to an entertainment, and CH. ni] EPISTLES TO TIBULLUS AND OTHERS 91 enables us to judge of Horace in the character of a host. It shows the discrimination with which he chose his guests, his love of good conversation, and the importance he attaches to that article in the code of social honour, that the friendly conversation of the dining-room should not become a matter of gossip outside ne fidos inter amicos Sit qui dicta foras eliminet. Other letters intermingle hints on the conduct of life with words of friendly courtesy or good-humoured banter. Such are the Epistle to Iccius, the student of philosophy, whose new-born zeal for military adventure is the subject of raillery in one of the Odes ; the Epistle to the friend to whom the ' Integer vitae ' is addressed, Aristius Fuscus, in which he contrasts his own love of the country with the town-bred tastes of the critic and grammarian, in all other respects so completely his ' alter ego ' ; the letter to his steward, in which the charm of the country is contrasted with the pleasures of the town with still stronger emphasis; and the interesting letter to Bullatius, in which he questions him about his travels, and reminds him that the cure for restlessness and ennui the common malady of the age was to be sought, not in change of scene, but in change of heart and mind. The familiar quotation, Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currant, is what we so often find in the Epistles, a paraphrase of a thought expressed with lyrical fervour in the Odes patriae quis exul Se quoque fugit? In all of these the same lessons are taught or hinted at as in the Odes, the lessons of self-dependence, of simple living, of a love of nature and all natural pleasures, and of a grateful enjoyment of the present, undisturbed by any anxieties for the future. The wise enjoyment of life is the general lesson of these shorter Epistles, as the wise conduct of life is of those which are more formally didactic. Among the most pleasing of those the interest of which 92 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. HI is chiefly personal, is that addressed to Julius Florus, while serving on the staff of Tiberius in the East, in which a friendly regard for the circle of young poets or aspirants to literary distinc- tion, with which Tiberius had surrounded himself, is combined with candid counsel on the propriety of making up some quarrel with an old friend. The part of a mentor could not be filled with more tact or more consideration for the self-esteem of younger men. He touches lightly but impressively on the more serious teaching, which forms the main subject of his more elaborate Epistles ; and happily indicates that the motive for the application of a rational philosophy to life is patriotism and self-approval Hoc opus, hoc studium parvi properemns et ampli, Si patriae volumus, si nobis vivere cari. (Ep. i. 3. 28, 29.) So much of the teaching of the later Greek moralists and of the Romans who followed them, is directed to secure the happiness or the moral improvement of the individual, for his own sake, that it is interesting to note either in the Odes or the Epistles the recognition of that public virtue, which was the ideal entertained in the best days of the Greek and Roman republics. Perhaps the gem of the whole collection is the seventh, the interest of which is almost exclusively personal. In it Horace with delicate courtesy and warm affection, but at the same time with frank independence of spirit, excuses himself for absence in the country during the whole month of August, after promising Maecenas to return to Rome within a week. In this Epistle, as in some others referred to, we find the note of the valetudinarian. No other passage, among the many in Odes, Satires, and Epistles which indicate the relation between Horace and his patron, gives a juster idea of what that relation was not quite the friendship of social equals, but one of close intimacy and warm affection, of deference and gratitude, but tempered by self-respect, on the one side, and an affection springing from the need of sympathy and companionship, and tempered by courteous consideration, on the other. He soon relieves the strain of apology and self-vindication by an admir- CH. in] MAECENAS IN TOWN 93 able story admirably told, illustrative of the relation of patron and client, the story of the well-to-do citizen who had been happy and cheerful in his own way, till he was taken up, partly from good nature, partly for amusement, by Philippus, the famous politician and advocate of the time of the Social war; who was encouraged and helped by him to buy a farm, and after being nearly ruined in consequence, came to his patron and begged to be replaced in his former condition. The account of this citizen, changed into a yeoman (' ex nitido rusticus'), and of his experience of the actual hardships and vicissitudes of a small farmer's life, is perhaps the best specimen of Horace's gift as a teller of stories ; a gift largely possessed by Italian writers ancient and modern. His frequent allusion to fables and anecdotes would lead us to suppose that he had, as other good talkers have had, a large store of them among the resources of his conversational powers. In most of the longer Epistles the first, second, sixth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth to which may be added the latter part of the second of Book ii, the didactic spirit is more conspicuous ; the personal element, though not absent, is subsidiary. These Epistles present different aspects of his teaching. He seems aware of an apparent contradiction in professing at one time to uphold the tenets of Stoicism, and while entering in spirit into the duties of active life, and claiming to be independent of the outward conditions of happiness Virtutis verae custos rigidusque satelles at another time to speak as the disciple of Aristippus, and, without becoming the slave of external conditions, to study how to make them most conducive to the enjoyment of life. As there is nothing on which he more insists than the necessity of consistency in conduct and opinion Si curatus inaequali tonsore capillos Occurri, rides ; si forte subucula pexae Trita subest tunicae vel si toga dissidet impar, Rides ; quid mea cum pngnat sententia secum, Quod petiit spernit, repetit quod nuper omisit, Aestuat et vitae disconvenit ordine toto, Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis?- (Ep. i. 1.94-100) 94 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. in it appears, at first sight, difficult to understand his apparent adherence to irreconcilable philosophies. But, living among other men as well as meditating on the abstract tendency of things, he saw that human life was too complex to be reduced to any single rule. He felt the nobleness of an ideal of absolute superiority to the world ; and he has expressed the power which this ideal had over the Roman imagination in passages of the Odes and Epistles with as much fervour as any Stoic. But he recognised also the necessity of living in the world, and, in some things, adapting oneself to its ways. Like Cicero, he regarded it as pedantry to apply an impracticable theory of perfection to the unimportant minutiae of life ; and yet he knew how much of real well-being depended on these minutiae, what an important part pleasure played in life, and how much better it was to regulate than to eliminate it. The first Epistle, addressed to Maecenas, is introductory to the rest, and is intended to show the efficacy of philosophic culture in subduing the lower nature Invidus, iracundus, iners, vinosus, amator, Nemo adeo ferus est ut non mitescere possit, Si modo culturae patientem commodet aurem and to contrast the philosophic attitude of mind with the restless pursuit of wealth and pleasure, and the general dissatisfaction with the result, characteristic of Roman society at the time. Here, as in the introduction to the Satires, it is with the waste of human energy, the failure to attain satisfaction notwithstanding the eager pursuit of the means which each individual believes conduce to happiness, that he is most impressed. The spirit of his philosophy in this Epistle is more Stoical than Cyrenaic, as in the often-quoted text, Hie mums ae'neus esto, Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa. But with a characteristic touch of irony, like that with which he concludes the second Epode, he sums up his doctrine with the Stoical paradox, which he ridicules in .one of his earliest CH. Hi] PHILOSOPHY IN THE EPISTLES 95 Satires, that the wise man alone is rich, free, beautiful, a man of rank, a king of kings Praecipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est. The second Epistle is also Stoical in its general scope. It is addressed to the son of one of the favourites of the Court, the Lollius of the ninth Ode of Book iv, and is an address on the formation of character through philosophic study and moral discipline. The advice is practical, given in the form of short gnomic sentences, many of which, such as ' ira furor brevis est,' ' semper avarus eget/ ' nocet empta dolore voluptas,' have become commonplaces. Here, too, he seems to disdain the pretentious attitude of a preacher by the irony of his conclusion Quod si cessas aut strenuus anteis, Nee tardum opperior, nee praecedentibus insto. The sixth, Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici, is the most elaborate, the most enigmatical, and the most imper- sonal of all the ethical Epistles. It is difficult to follow his drift clearly and to distinguish between irony and earnest meaning. The ' nil admirari ' of Horace is a translation of the adav^airria of the Cyrenaics, and does not differ much from the apathy of the Stoics. Cicero 1 uses the same phrase for the state of mind produced by a philosophic estimate of the true value of all worldly things, and speaks of ' these arms ' as ' received from the Cyrenaics.' Probably Horace, in the abstract statement of the doctrine, may be following, as Cicero generally follows, a Greek original ; while his practical applications of it are taken from his observation of Roman life. The maxim of perfection which he lays down as the supreme condition of happiness is that a man should moderate his desires by moderating his estimate of external things. But those who are incapable of this philosophic quietism and who follow the common objects of worldly desire money, office, pleasure are advised to follow 1 Tusc. Disp. iii. 14 'nihil admirari quum acciderit.' g6 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. HI them with a will. Is this all irony, or serious advice? The terms in which the pursuit of money, of political influence, of pleasure, is spoken about, leave no doubt that to the moralist they are all irrational, and that in his eyes ' virtue ' alone is able to secure happiness. Perhaps his doctrine is that for the majority of men it is best to make up their mind what they really want, and to follow that strenuously. He seems to imply that energy and consistency, even in the pursuit of fortune, ambition, or pleasure, is a less hopeless condition than weakness and indecision of character; but that the state of mind which cares for none of these things because it thoroughly understands their inadequacy to satisfy man's true nature, should be the aim of all who wish to lead a higher life. The sixteenth has a special interest from its opening lines, which give a description of his Sabine valley, written with a quiet deep feeling of its peaceful beauty and its restorative influence on mind and body. The discourse which follows is on the difference between appearance and reality, true happiness and its outward semblance. The spirit is Stoical, though he holds that a man may still be of use to the world, even when he * has quitted the post of honour,' and has become entirely absorbed in the pursuit of money. He can at least contribute to the material wants of other men Naviget ac meuiis hieinet mereator in ondis; Annonae prosit ; portet framenta penusqne. The seventeenth and eighteenth are both in the vein of Aristippus, and give directions to two young men, Scaeva and Lollius, on the conduct necessary in their relations to the great men to whose fortunes they had attached themselves. Horace saw nothing degrading in a relation which, in the last century, was not held degrading by some of those who ultimately came to rank among the greatest of our countrymen Swift and Burke, for instance. The common sense of the world, according to Horace, condemns the attitude of Cynicism, and approves that of Aristippus, who was at ease in any dress, at home in a palace or a cottage, who enjoyed but was not a slave to CH. in] WORLDLY WISDOM 97 the comfort and amenities of others. In the letter to Scaeva there is an undertone of irony, like that in the Epistle to Celsus, a hint that if he wants to succeed in life he must not make his object too apparent. The letter to the younger Lollius, who seems to have been more likely to err on the side of rudeness than of humility, contains the advice of an older man, who, though not born in it, had lived much in the great world, to a young man just entering it. It contains admirable lessons on social tact, self-suppression, reticence, judgment of character, and care in the selection of associates. Near the end of the letter he passes into his more serious vein, and advises his young friend, while taking the means to succeed, to study at the same time the true end of life and the true means of securing inward peace 'quid te tibi reddat amicum.' He concludes with a charming reference to the restorative influence of his visits to his Sabine valley Me quoties reficit gelidus Digentia rivus, Quern Mandela bibit, rugosus frigore pagus ' and of the sources of enjoyment which he still had and hoped to have for what remained of life Sit bona librorum et provisae frugis in annum Copia, neu fluitem dubiae spe pendulus horae. The last two Epistles have an autobiographical and literary rather than an ethical interest. The nineteenth, though in form a letter to Maecenas, is a Satire on his imitators, an assertion of his independent position in literature, and a vin- dication of himself against the spiteful attacks of the critics of the day Non ego nobilium scriptorum auditor et ultor, Grammaticas ambire tribus et pulpita dignor. The twentieth contains a modest appreciation of the work to which it serves as epilogue, and a brief summary of his own career, in which pride in his great rise from an obscure position and in the approval which he had gained from the foremost men of the time in war and peace, is tempered by ironical H 98 HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. in depreciation of his personal appearance and a candid admission of his besetting infirmity Corporis exigui, praecanmn, solibus aptum, Irasci celerem, tamen ut placabilis essem. In the discussion which Horace raises as to the 'summum bonum,' we are sensible of the vagueness of all such ideals, and in the reliance which he seems to place on texts and moral maxims for its attainment, we feel the limitation of the Roman mind. But there is a charm and value in the first book of the Epistles independent of any claim to speculative originality. In the Epistles Horace performs the part of a physician, probing with delicate and kindly hand the causes of social and individual unhappiness and imperfection. He performs the same part for his age as Lucretius did for his, but in a less stern and uncom- promising spirit. He does not, like Lucretius, resolve all the evils of life into superstition ; but he sees in .the morbid and misdirected activity, the ' strenua inertia ' of all classes, the chief malady from which society was suffering. To each individual to whom he gives counsel, he seems with delicate irony to hint what is the matter with him ; to lay his finger on the place, And say, thou ailest here, and here, and at the same time to indicate the cure for his infirmity. And all this he does in the pleasantest manner, blending anecdotes and old fables, personal sketches and amusing social criticism, with the words of wisdom that fall from him. But the crowning charm of the Epistles is the intimacy which he allows every reader to form with him, and the delightful impression of his natural disposition and settled character which that intimacy produces. The attempt to establish this con- fidential relation between the writer and the reader is common enough in modern literature. But it is rarely done with the same success. The pleasure of the relation is marred by some indication of egotism, of a bitter feeling against the world, of mortified vanity, or impertinent familiarity. In Horace, as in Cicero, the power of giving is as strong as the desire of receiving CH. in] HIS ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF 99 sympathy. And in him the sympathetic feeling is unmixed with the exacting vanity which, in the case of Cicero, partially alienates the affection due to his large humanity of nature. Horace has really a modest, though a just appreciation of himself. He knows his own superiority as a writer to the mass of his contemporaries ; and in his Odes he shows a proud consciousness of his genius. But in presence of the great work of organising the Empire of the world in a shape to endure for centuries, he felt that all literary distinction was a secondary matter. Even as a poet he knew his inferiority to his Greek masters. He makes no demand on the reader of the Epistles for admiration or applause, but only for a just recognition on the ground of what he has done for Latin literature. He shows no personal animus against any one, and presents nothing but a friendly aspect to the world. He respects himself and his reader in the confidences which he makes to him. He never forgets the restraints of good sense, good feeling, and good taste; and his ironical humour is used quite as much in self-disparagement as in lowering the pretentions of others. In speaking of his Epistles as ' sermones repentes per humum/ Horace seems to waive for them, as he does for the Satires, the claim to be ranked as poetry. Yet there is a considerable difference in poetical rhythm and expression between the Satires and the Epistles. The Satires, in point of style, scarcely ever deviate from a prosaic level ; they are not animated by passion, nor raised above the tone of ordinary conversation, nor are they refined by imaginative reflexion. Their materials are not the ' thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers.' The Epistles, while never rising into powerful or impassioned poetry, maintain a modulated flow of thought, vivified and at the same time mellowed by feeling. As the prose writing .of a poet, well practised in his art, retains the musical intonation, the vivid presentation of objects and ideas, and the subtle allusiveness of his greater style, so Horace, in returning to the manner and metre of his familiar writing, does not forget the H 2 too HORACE AS A MORALIST [CH. in mastery he has gained over the meaning and music of words. If the ' callida verborum iunctura ' and the graphic conciseness of phrase do not arrest attention as perpetually as they do in the Odes, they yet add grace and power to the easy, familiar, yet serious and dignified style of the Epistles. There is absolutely no pretention in the style; nothing rhetorical, no undue emphasis, nothing formal or academic. Its character may be judged by comparison with the style of those passages in Lucretius in which he writes as a moralist, such as the introduction to the second and third books, and the conclusion of the third. From these passages it is clear that the habitual mood of Lucretius is that of a philosophic poet. He is pos- sessed by the enthusiasm and the awe the 'voluptas atque horror' of an imaginative mind, to which the wonderful meaning of human life is newly revealed. In the style and rhythm of Lucretius we feel the pervading presence of the ' mens divinior,' through its natural accompaniment, the ' os magna sonaturum.' In reading Horace, we feel conscious of the pervading presence of a mind calmly contemplating the field of human life within its range, but not insensible to the mellowing light cast by imagination over its familiar aspect. Whatever enthusiasm there is, is the ' enthusiasm of moderation.' The style has been happily characterised as that of ' idealised common sense.' It is a better example of Roman urbanity than even the style of Terence. It is like the conversation of a man who, under the quietest demeanour, conceals much reflexion, feeling, and dignity of character. That it is the style of a poet also is apparent in many touches of description and harmonious effects of rhythm, to which there are only very rare parallels in the Satires. Such, for instance, are the lines lightly suggesting the different aspects of late autumn and early spring- Quod si bruma nives Albanis illinet agris, and te, dulcis amice, reviset, Cum Zephyris, si concedes, et hirundine prima ; CH. HI] POETRY OF THE MORAL ESSAYS IOI or those bringing before the mind a wide sea-view Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, and Oblitnsque meornm obliviscendns et illis Neptunnm procul e terra spectare furentem ; or those recalling by the sound no less than the scene the refreshment of a running brook Purior in vicis aqua tendit rumpere plumbum, Quam quae per pronum trepidat cum murmure rivum, and at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum ; or those in which the power of a few words to convey at once the charm of familiar associations and the outward aspect of a country district is felt Me quoties reficit gelidus Digentia rivus, Quern Mandela bibit, rugosus frigore pagus. And not only do we recognise the poetical eye for what is most characteristic of natural scenes, but the power of imagination penetrating into the secrets of human life, condensing into a single phrase some complex social condition, or deducing a kind of proverbial wisdom from some particular opportunity, as, for instance Strenua nos exercet inertia, and Vilis amicorum est annona, bonis nbi quid deest. Again, we have an instance of deep feeling rinding for itself expression and rhythm consonant to itself in the lines Me quamvis Lamiae pietas et cura moratur Fratrem maerentis, rapto de fratre dolentis Insolabiliter ; a reminiscence, probably, as has been pointed out by Munro, of the still more heartfelt words in which Catullus mourns for his brother's death. Horace may not have cared to rank these Epistles as poetry, 102 HORACE AS A MORALIST because there was no recognised form of poetic art, Greek or Roman, other than the satura, to which they could be assigned. But they are a sufficient innovation on the Lucilian satire, to deserve to be regarded as an original addition to poetic forms ; while in substance they seem to belong to a kind of border- land between the worlds of observation and of idealising reflexion. CHAPTER IV. HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC. Epistles, Book II ; Ars Poetica. AFTER finishing the book of Moral Essays in verse, Horace seems to have published no important work for several years ; for the Carmen Seculare cannot be called a work of high inspiration, nor, even to so slow and careful a writer as Horace, could it have involved much labour. He had the fastidiousness which shrank from giving to the world anything that was not wanted and anything that was not perfectly finished, and apparently also the dislike to fresh exertion, which is the accompaniment of such fastidiousness. He had produced his sketches and comments on society in his Satires ; he had represented the more idealised aspect of his age and expressed its deeper and livelier feelings in the three books of his Odes ; and he had summed up his maturer wisdom and reflexion on life in his moral Epistles. He may have felt that he had no new message to give to the world, till he received a command which could not be disregarded, to celebrate in lyrical poetry the victories gained by the stepson of the Emperor over the Alpine tribes of the Tyrol and the Grisons. This fresh call upon his powers proved to him that the fountain of his inspira- tion was not yet dry, and that he retained the old mastery over his art in which he had no rival or successor. A year or two later, apparently, he was again called upon to revert to his more familiar style, and to include Augustus among those to whom his Epistles were addressed. Suetonius mentions 104 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH. iv that the Emperor, 'after reading certain of his discourses (sermones), complained that no mention was made of him in them.' He quotes the words of his letter : ' irasci me tibi scito, quod non in plerisque eiusmodi scriptis mecum potissimum loquaris.' The last words seem to imply that the ' sermones ' are not the Satires, but the Epistles; and it is unlikely that Augustus, who so highly valued the writings of Horace ' scripta eius usque adeo probavit mansuraque perpetua opinatus est ' should not have become acquainted with the Satires 'till more than twenty years after their first appearance. But it is a ques- tion whether the Epistles referred to are those of the first book, or the two to Julius Florus and the Pisos. The word ' plerisque ' seems clearly to show that he is speaking of more than two ; but it is quite possible that these two may have been included among those which were read by Augustus and provoked his remonstrance. The evidence seems insufficient to determine with certainty whether the Epistles to Julius Florus and the Pisos were written at an earlier or later date than the Epistle to Augustus; and the opinions of the best recent critics and commentators are divided on the subject. All that can be said with anything like confidence is that they have a very close literary connexion with one another just as the moral Epistles have with many of the Odes of the second and third books and so may, with probability, be assigned to nearly the same period of their author's life. In this new undertaking in a style which he had made peculiarly his own, Horace, more definitely than either in his Satires or in the first book of the Epistles, assumes the position of a literary critic and censor. The Epistle to Augustus is ' a defence of poetry/ and especially a vindication of the poets of hi* own time against the criticism that ranked the older poets above them. It affords him also the opportunity of celebrating the Emperor as a great ruler in more sober language than he has sometimes used on the same subject in the Odes, and of combining with his praises as a ruler a deserved eulogy on him as a patron of literature. In respect of its length and the CH. iv] THE EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS 105 systematic treatment of its materials, it holds a place inter- mediate between the earlier Epistles and the Ars Poetica. The criticism of the old poets, contained in this Epistle, is sometimes censured as too depreciatory. The recognition of the merits of the old tragic poets in the line Nam spiral tragicum satis et feliciter audet, though probably just, seems cold when contrasted with the patriotic partiality of Cicero, who speaks of their works as if they were as well worth reading as those of Sophocles or Euripides. The disparaging tone used in regard to Ennius and Plautus is disappointing when compared with the enthusiasm of Lucretius and the calmer admiration expressed by Ovid for the former 'ingenio maximus ' or with Varro's praises of the style of Plautus. But we have to remember that Cicero's training and temperament inclined him to exaggerate, both in praise and blame, and that he had a national and personal pride in asserting the claims of Roman literature in answer to the exclusive pretentions of contemporary Greeks. Lucretius was a poet of exceptionally enthusiastic temperament; and Ovid wrote after the controversy was settled, when it was easy for a man of his candid nature to do justice to the rude genius of the father of Roman poetry, without disparagement of the art and genius of recent writers. Varro was probably regarded by the critics with whom Horace was at issue as their master. There were always two tendencies, supplementing and correct- ing one another, in Roman literature. There was the imitative tendency, which aimed at making Roman literature as nearly as possible a reproduction of the form and spirit of Greek litera- ture. To this Rome owed her culture. This tendency cul- minated in the comedy of Terence, the artistic expression of the culture of the Scipionic circle. The national self-conscious- ness, gathering strength from the great part which Rome was playing in the world, also demanded an expression for itself; and was more anxious that that expression should be strong and genuine, than that it should conform to the canons of 106 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH. iv literary criticism. In Lucilius the national consciousness was exceptionally strong, and his culture was shown more in his knowledge of and insight into human nature, than in apprecia- tion of literary form ; and he, accordingly, made the course of the national literature return into its old and rougher channel. The nature of Lucretius was earnest and impassioned even more than it was artistic ; he recognised in the genius of Ennius a force and power akin to his own, and felt a generous admiration for the pioneer who had first made smooth the rough places, ' avia Pieridum loca,' which he was himself traversing. But Horace was one who both in his life and art deliberately restrained enthusiasm, or at least made it subordinate to a cool judgment. He had the temper of a critic as well as the inspiration of a poet; and as he allowed no illusion about himself or others to disturb his judgment on life, so he allowed no patriotic illusion to disturb his literary judgment. He saw that fervour of feeling and a great spirit, which were the gifts of the old writers, were not enough to produce immortal works like those produced by the genius of Greece. He may moreover have had a defective sympathy with the vigorous vitality and irregular force of the old writers. These were not the gifts of himself or of the greatest among his contemporaries. The work which had to be done in his time could not be done by these powers alone. That work was to find, at last, the mastery of form, rhythm, and style, the proportion and moderation of workmanship, which would secure for the efforts of Roman genius as sure a passport to immortality as had been secured for the masterpieces of Greek literature. He saw that these qualities were not natural to the Romans, but were the birth- right of the Greeks, the difference between whose artistic and speculative genius and the practical and didactic tendency of Rome he sums up admirably in the passage (Ep. ii. i. 93-107) Ut primum positis nugari Graecia bell is, &c. These endowments could be acquired only by incessant study of Greek models and diligent labour in working after them. CH. iv] VALUE OF THE OLDER LATIN POETRY 107 He reviews the history of Roman literature from its origin in the rude Fescennine verses of the harvest home, and shows how it failed first owing to the coarseness inherent in the Italian temperament, and, after its second rise under the influence of the Greek theatre, owing to the rapid and careless composition of the writers; and again, in his own day, owing to the un- educated taste of the audiences. He then solicits the patronage of the Emperor for the writers of his own time, who wrote to be read, and not for the stage; and points to two representatives of the new literature, Virgil and Varius, who united Greek perfection of workmanship to a Roman spirit, as men who had both deserved and received the imperial favour. He imputes the failure of others to receive similar recognition to the sensitive vanity of the literary temperament. He concludes by pleading his own inability to celebrate adequately the great qualities of the Emperor and the great works accomplished in his reign. Although there is much justice in the strictures on the careless workmanship of the older dramatic writers, and though Horace was right in calling attention to the cause of the failure of the Roman drama to maintain its ancient popularity, yet in this Epistle he shows himself a better critic of human nature than of particular writers. Here, as in the following Epistle, and in the nineteenth of Book i, he probes to the quick the besetting weaknesses and restless sensitiveness of the literary temperament. The lines Cum laedimur, unum Si quis amicorum est ausus reprehendere versum ; Cum loca iam recitata revolvimus irrevocati ; Cum lamentamur non apparere labores Nostros et tenui deducta poemata filo : Cum speramus eo rem venturam ut, simul atque Carmina rescieris nos fingere, commodus ultro Arcessas et egere vetes et scribere cogas, are as true for other times as for the Augustan age. But in this Epistle he does full justice also to the good qualities of the poetic character, the guileless simplicity, untainted by avarice 108 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH iv or worldly ambition, which usually accompanies it, and calls attention to the good service which poetry renders to the State, from its humanising influence on the education of youth Mox etiam pectus praeceptis format amicis, Asperitatis et invidiae corrector et irae from its power of presenting the past so as to act on the heart and the imagination of each new generation, its consoling influence in poverty and sickness, and the religious function it performs in prayers and hymns to the Gods. We see in this defence of poetry how far removed the view of Horace is, notwithstanding the supreme importance he attaches to art, from the view of ' art for the sake of art,' so often expressed in recent times. The second Epistle of this book is also largely occupied both with literary criticism and criticism of the literary character. It is difficult to determine whether it was written some years before the Epistle to Augustus or shortly after it. It seems certain that it was written either after Horace had permanently ceased to write lyrical poetry, or while his lyrical faculty was in abeyance J . These conditions would apply to any time between the publication of the three books of Odes, and the composition of the fourth with the exception of the short interval given to the Carmen Seculare or to any time between the publication of the fourth book and his death. On the one hand, the undoubted allusion to Propertius (91-101) seems to favour the earlier date; for we know that Propertius was alive and writing his Elegies in the year 16 B.C., and there is good reason for supposing that he did not long survive that date. But when we remember that Pope's famous lines on ' Atticus ' were not given to the world till long after the death of Addison, we may suppose that Horace, in the same way, may have written this record of his uncongenial relations with the ' Roman Calli- 1 Ep. ii. 2. 102-5 : Multa fero, at placem genus irritabile vatnm, Cum scribo et supplcx populi sufiragia capto, Idem, finitis studiis et mente recepta, Obturem patulas impune legentibus aures. CH. iv] THE EPISTLE TO FLORUS 109 machus' after the death of the latter; or that having it already written 'membranis intus positis,' he may have adapted it to an Epistle written some years afterwards. There is an apparent want of continuity in the way in which the passage is introduced Frater erat Romae consult! rhetor which seems to support the latter supposition; nor is its connexion with the lines which follow Ridentur mala qui componunt carmina very close. On the other hand, the tone in which Florus is addressed produces the impression that he was a considerably older and maturer man than when the third Epistle of Book i. was addressed to him. In that Epistle Horace is writing to one who was still a young man, in the spirit almost of a tutor to a pupil. In this latter Epistle he writes to him as an equal. In the earlier Epistle Florus is one of a number of young men, in all of whom Horace is interested, accompanying Tiberius on his first important diplomatic mission. In this he has become the confidential friend of the ' worthy and distinguished Nero.' The long apology which Horace makes for not having written to his correspondent since his departure from Rome, would have been quite uncalled for, if Florus was still engaged on the same mission as that referred to in the earlier Epistle. The words ' dixi me pigrum proficiscenti tibi ' imply that Florus had in the meantime been back in Rome, and had again gone out on a new expedition with his old chief, of whom he had now become the attached friend. Further, this Epistle is nearly twice as long as the longest in Book i, and is not much shorter than the Epistle to Augustus. A sufficient motive for its composition might be the desire to extend that work to the dimensions of a moderately sized volume by the addition of another contribution to literary criticism, which now occupied much of his attention; while the mere desire to apologise for not having written sooner can hardly be regarded as a sufficient motive for its composition. 110 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH. iv The poem has an autobiographical, a critical, and an ethical interest. We learn from it the motive to which he attributes his first essay in literature paupertas impulit audax Ut versus facerem and the disinclination to resume his poetic task, which grew upon him in later years. This disinclination appears in marked contrast not only to the passionate delight which Lucretius, and the serener joy which Virgil found in this self-appointed task, but also to the pleasure which Horace himself derived from successful creation Grata carpentis thyma per laborem Plurimum. As he grew older he felt the decay of his creative power, along with the decay of some of those sensibilities which fed it Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes ; Eripuere iocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum ; Tendunt extorquere poemata. He urges the impossibility of writing lyrical poetry amid the distractions of Roman life, and the rivalries and mutual flatteries of the literary cliques at Rome. But though his creative faculty had died out or was in abeyance, his critical faculty, matured by his creative experience, was still able to serve as a whetstone to the genius of others. He dwells especially on the need of a rigid self-criticism on the part of the poet, and of his sparing no pains in pruning all luxuriance, making smooth all roughness, bright all dullness, and strong all weakness of expression, so as to produce the impression of ease, spontaneity, and variety Ludentis speciem dabit et torquebitur, ut qui Nunc Satyrum, nunc agrestem Cyclopa movetur. The lines from 109 to 125 are not only as admirable practical advice on the cultivation of style as any ever given, but explain the secret of Horace's own ' ease in writing.' CH. iv] THE ARS POETIC A III In the last sixty lines of the poem he returns once more to the ethical teaching of the first book, and gives the final results of his silent meditations and self-colloquies Quocirca mecum loquor haec tacitusque recorder on the true philosophy of life. It is characteristic that here in his latest Epistle, as in his earliest Satire, he regards the passion to become rich as the dominant disturbing element in life ; and repeats, at considerable length, his somewhat conventional reasoning on the subject. But near the conclusion he rises from this trite discussion into a higher and purer strain than he has previously attained in his teaching on the conduct of life and the culture of character Caret tibi pectus inani Ambitione? Caret mortis formidine et ira? Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, Nocturnes lemures portentaque Thessala rides? Natales grate numeras ? Ignoscis amicis ? Lenior et melior fis accedente senecta? He concludes in the solemn spirit of Lucretius' tempered somewhat by his own irony Vivere si recte nescis, decede peritis. Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti ; Tempus abire tibi est, ne potum largius aequo Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius aetas. The last twelve lines of this Epistle are profoundly inter- esting, as the final message on the meaning of human life left by Horace to his generation. They are interesting as showing the refining of his nature, and the growth in gentleness and kindli- ness of the writer who began his literary career in angry criticism. They confirm also the impression produced by many of the Odes of the deep-seated melancholy underlying the outward geniality of his philosophy of life. In the ' Ars Poetica ' Horace assumes the office of a literary critic more formally than either in the .Epistle to Augustus or in that to Florus. The epistolary has developed into the didactic form ; or rather there is a kind of compromise between 112 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH. iv them. Three-fifths of the poem are almost purely didactic ; the style in that part of the poem is more compact, sententious, and impersonal, than in any of the other Epistles ; the irony and the conversational manner of his other Epistles are alike absent. This purely didactic part seems to be a resume of Greek criticism on the drama, ultimately, perhaps, based on the doctrines of Aristotle ; but, according to Porphyrion, really made up of selections from an Alexandrian critic, Neoptolemus of Parium. It contains general precepts applicable to all artistic creation, particularly to poetry as representative of action : and many technical directions, specially applicable to tragedy, are given. Attention is also drawn to the style suitable to the satyric drama. Though much of the illustration of this part of the poem is probably due to Horace himself, yet in the general principles which he lays down, he seems to be a mere exponent of the canons of Greek criticism. How far, besides being an exponent, he is also a translator, can only be con- jectured, but certain phrases such as ' dominantia nomina,' and ' communia ' in the phrase ' difficile est proprie communia dicere,' look like translations ; and the arrangement of the materials suggests the notion of a composition based on selections from a continuous work rather than of an organic whole, growing out of a definite conception of his subject and a definite plan of exposition. Perhaps we should not be wrong in referring the general principles applicable to all poetry, such as those on the paramount importance of the choice and conception of the subject, and on the dependence of the method of treatment on that conception Cui lecta potenter erit res, Nee facundia deseret hunc, nee lucidus ordo as well as the technical precepts on the functions of the chorus, the division of the play into five acts, &c., to the Greek original ; while the directions as to expression, where he reverts again to the old controversy on the relative merits of the new and old poets, may be regarded as Horace's own contribution to criticism, based on his own practice and that of the best of his CH. iv] THE ARS POETICA 113 contemporaries. In any case we have in the first part of the poem not indeed a methodical treatise on the art of poetry, nor a perfectly planned and articulated didactic poem, but a series of sound principles, on the conception of a dramatic action, the evolution of a plot, the consistent presentation of character, propriety and variety of style, regularity and variety of metrical effect, which might serve as a guide to those who were endeavouring to substitute for the old tragedy of Ennius and Accius a more legitimate drama, not servilely following, but more nearly conforming to the great models of the Attic stage. If the Roman drama was to rise to as high a degree of perfection as Roman epic and lyric poetry had attained in the Augustan age and to enable it to attain that degree of perfection is the motive of the poem it could only do so on the same conditions as those on which epic and lyric poetry had been perfected, by a thorough comprehension of and rigorous adherence to the methods of the Greek masters. In the Epistle to Augustus, Horace, while seeming to despair of a revival of the acted drama on the Roman stage, and while disclaiming for himself all thought of dramatic writing, yet assigns the very highest place in literature to the successful dramatist Ille per extentum fnnem mihi posse videtur Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit, Irritat, mnlcet, falsis terroribus implet, Ut magus, et modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis. The occasion of the young Piso following or aspiring to follow the fashion set by Pollio and Varius, prompts Horace to embody in a treatise written primarily for his guidance, the results of his reading and of his own reflexion on dramatic criticism ; and he proceeds in the remainder of the poem, more in his own familiar, sometimes ironical, style, to offer advice which seems as much intended to dissuade him from as to encourage him in his task. He glides almost insensibly from the earlier to the latter part of his subject. Starting from a reference to the careless workmanship of Roman poets in their use of Greek i 114 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH. IV metres, and the careless criticism of their audiences, he proceeds to show in his own language and from his own observation what goes to the making of a poet, and what constitutes good and bad taste Unde parentur opes, quid alat formetque poetam, Quid deceat quid non, quo virtus quo ferat error. It is in keeping with all the serious convictions of his later years that he bases all good writing on a true criticism of life in its ethical relations Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons and that he ranks first in these relations the duties of patriotism and friendship Qui didicit patriae quid debeat et quid amicis. The poet's aim should be to combine pleasure with instruction. A few minor faults may be excused in a long poem, yet poetry is the one accomplishment in which mediocrity is intolerable. You are not called upon to be a poet, he says to Piso, and you have too much sense to undertake anything against the grain of your natural capacity Tu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva. Yet if you do write submit your work to experienced critics, and ' keep it back for nine years ' before publishing it. Poetry in days of old was purely a divine gift. It was by ' the sacred poet, the revealer of the will of the Gods,' that the elements of civilisation were introduced Sic honor et nomen divinis vatibus atque Carminibus venit. Next Homer and Tyrtaeus roused men by their verse to battles ; then oracles were uttered in verse ; finally lyrical poetry and the drama came as the solace of men resting from their labours. Genius, the divine gift, is thus the first condition of poetic success ; but mere genius, without art, is ineffective ego nee studium sine divite vena, Nee rude quid possit video ingenium. CH.IV] EDUCATION OF THE POET 115 Yet though success in every other accomplishment is sought by discipline, labour, and self-denial, men appear to think that they can write without taking any trouble. If any one read his poems to Quintilius, he frankly pointed out the faults, and urged correction of them. If the author defended his faults, he left him in his self-satisfaction and took no more interest in him. An honest critic will put a mark against lines that are lifeless, harsh, unpolished or obscure ; and will insist on the pruning of all unnecessary ornament. He will become an Aristarchus, and will not fear giving offence to his friend. Sensible men do not like to have anything to do with poets who cannot submit to criticism. They let them go their own course and come to grief in their own way. The bad poet scares away the educated and uneducated alike by his persecution. If he does secure a listener, he sticks to him like a leech and bores him to death by his recitations tenet occiditque legendo Non missura cutem, nisi plena cruoris, hirudo. The work as a whole is hardly to be judged either as a systematic didactic poem, or as a familiar epistle. The one form imper- ceptibly passes into the other. It has sometimes been supposed that the work was left unfinished and published posthumously. There is no evidence to establish this conclusion. In point of execution the work is as finished as any in Latin literature. It is the maturest specimen of that style which Horace uses in serious discussion and exposition, but more compact and sententious than in the other literary Epistles. The doctrines themselves and their expression bear the mark of having been long weighed and considered. The expression of them has an authoritative, almost oracular character. The difficulty in tracing a connected line of argument or one definite aim in the poem, may be attributed rather to his love of conciseness and his preference of a familiar to a more formal style of exposiiion than to any want of completeness in working out his plan. Horace was not a systematic reasoner like Lucretius. It was a principle of art with him to avoid or make the most sparing I 2 Il6 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC [CH. iv use of those formulae, so largely used by Lucretius and after him by Virgil, by which the transitions from one line of thought to another are clearly marked. He may have begun the poem with the intention of writing a systematic didactic poem on tragedy. For this he found an example in the old national literature the ' Didascalica ' of Accius and for some of his materials and method he may have had recourse to an Alexandrian model, as Virgil had to more than one in the composition of his didactic poem. But before completing more than half his task, he falls back, without ceasing to be didactic, into the more familiar attitude of one offering friendly advice, not based on books but on his own experience, to a particular person in whom he is interested. He knows perfectly well that genius and insight >cannot be communicated by instruction. What can be done is to impress the necessity of avoiding the besetting sin of Roman authors, careless composition, and contentment with a low standard of good writing. This he had already urged in the Satires and in the Epistle to Augustus. Perfection of workmanship is what he inculcates by precept and example. If a man has neither genius nor taste, there is no call on him to write and become one of the nuisances of society. It is not so much by conformity to technical rules though they have a negative value in the way of restraining extravagant conception and execution as by having a high standard of accomplishment and sparing no pains to attain it, that the Roman drama may be raised to as high a pitch of perfection as other branches of literature. Genius is the indispensable condition of success; but genius is ineffective without culture, especially ethical culture, and without discipline, especially discipline in correcting errors, pruning redundancies, and remedying defects of style. In the Epistles dealing with literary criticism there is a limitation of view, combined with a justice and sobriety of judgment, similar to the limitation and the justice of the criticisms on human life contained in the ethical Epistles. The ethical criticisms appear more trite and conventional, because the world has risen further above the age of Horace in the CH.IV] LITERARY DISCIPLINE 117 domain of action than of literature. Yet though Horace is dealing with the ancient drama and its relation to human life, and though he speaks of Sophocles and Aeschylus, there is nothing to indicate a true insight into their greatness. It is with the external conditions, not with the spiritual and ethical meaning of the Greek drama that he deals. Where his criticism is most admirable and valuable is in those passages in which he inculcates the necessity of careful writing, as in that passage of Ep. ii. 2. 109 At qui legitimum cupiet fecisse poema in which he shows how much an author can do to perfect his work by severe self-criticism and infinite pains in using all the resources of language Vehemens et liquidus puroque simillimus amni Fundet opes Latiumque beabit divite lingua ; Luxuriantia compescet, nimis aspera sano Levabit cultu, virtute carentia toilet, Ludentis speciem dabit et torquebitur, ut qui Nunc Satyrum, nunc agrestem Cyclopa movetur. In much the same spirit he describes the functions of a true critic in the Ars Poetica, 1. 445 Vir bonus et prndens versus reprehendet inertes, Culpabit duros, incomptis allinet atrum Transverse calamo signum, ambitiosa recidet Ornamenta, parum claris lucem dare coget, Arguet ambigue dictum, mutanda notabit. These Epistles contain also much admirable criticism on human life, as in the account given in the Ars Poetica, 11. 161- 174, of the characteristics of the various ages Imberbis iuvenis tandem custode remoto, &c. Where the criticism is most searching is in the truth of insight into the literary character both in its worth and its weakness. The style of these Epistles is more terse and compact than in the ethical Epistles. Occasionally it rises into genuine poetry, as in a passage which recalls the Vitaque mancipio nulli datur omnibus usu Il8 HORACE AS A LITERARY CRITIC of Lucretius, and Wordsworth's 'waves that own no curbing hand ' Sic quia perpetuns nnlli datur usus, et heres Heredem alterius velut unda snpervenit nndam. If the personal impression is less distinctly stamped upon them than on the ethical Epistles, it is of the same kind. There is the same stamp of sincerity, of good sense and good manners, of self-respect without self-assertion, and of considerate regard for the feelings of others. CHAPTER V. HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET. The Epodes. THE place of Horace among the great lyrical poets of the world is due to the four books of Odes, the fruit of his happiest years and maturest faculty. He anticipates immortality on the ground of having been the first Aeolium carmen ad Italos Deduxisse modes. But he asserts another claim to consideration in the words Parios ego primus iambos Ostendi Latio. Before becoming the Alcaeus of Rome, he made his first essay in lyrical poetry by imitating the metres and the manner and spirit of Archilochus. The realism and critical bent of his mind which attracted him to Lucilius, attracted him also to the old Greek poet, ' for whom rage had forged the weapon of the iambus.' Archilochus was not only the inventor of a new metre which a great destiny awaited, but the first poet who treated of the familiar matter of the day in the ordinary dialect of the day. He was the first also to make his verse the vehicle of his personal animosities; and he anticipated Lucilius, with whom he seems to have been a favourite, in the frankness of his personal confessions. It is probable that Horace became familiar with his writings during the time of his studies at Athens. The angry mood in which he returned to Rome after Philippi, and the ' recklessness of poverty ' which first impelled 120 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET [CH. v him to write verses, naturally led him to make the old Parian poet his model. The popularity of the lampoons of Catullus, Calvus. and Bibaculus, assured him readers prepared to welcome verses written in a similar spirit, and in a metre only slightly different from that employed by the older writers. The ' Italum acetum,' the ebullitions of which had to be repressed by law four centuries previously, and which had found its chief outlet in the invective of the Forum and law-courts, had from the time of Naevius learned to concentrate itself in short and pithy epigrams, for which party-feeling and the scandals of private life supplied the material If the state of public affairs no longer permitted lampoons te be written, as they had been between the years 60 and 50 B. c., on the masters of the Roman world, yet private scandals and animosities were sufficiently rife : and the position of Horace at that time, as a poor adventurer with a keen appetite for pleasure, a quick temper and a taste intolerant of uncongenial people, made him familiar with both. He was at that time of life when personal love and dislike the ' odi et amo ' the original source of the lyrical poetry which springs out of private life, are strongest : and his love seems at this stage to have been more violent than fortunate, and not always distinguishable from his animosities. In claiming to have been the first to introduce the Parian ' iambi ' into Latin literature, he seems to forget the prior claim of Catullus and his contemporaries. The spirit of Archilochus is probably more truly represented in the iambics on Caesar and Mamurra, than in any verses of Horace. But Horace was the first to introduce, not the continuous iambics, but the firaioi; i.e. the couplets in which the shorter verse is a kind of echo of the longer, of which several specimens are found among the fragments of Archilochus. To these poems Horace gives the name ' iambi.' Whether the title ' Epodon ' was attached by himself to the volume containing them, or by some grammarian to a later edition, is uncertain. In the first ten poems the couplet is composed of an iambic trimeter followed by a dimeter. This combination is found again in a poem of CH. v] THE EPODES 121 the Catalepton attributed, probably untruly, to Virgil. It is employed also by Martial in a long poem which reproduces the idyllic character of the second Epode. In the eleventh Epode the first line is iambic, the second a hybrid between iambic and elegiac verse. In those from the twelfth to the sixteenth the couplet is formed by an hexameter, followed by an iambic trimeter or dimeter, or by the hybrid combination mentioned above. The seventeenth alone is in continuous iambics. Horace also used some varieties of the Archilochian couplets in some of his Odes, while he was still making experiments in metre, till he discovered that the stanza of four lines gave the true outlet to the deeper vein of his lyrical genius. The composition of the Epodes was spread over the ten years that elapsed between the return of Horace to Rome and the battle of Actium, and nearly coincides with the time occupied by the composition of the Satires. The genuine spirit of satire is stronger in them than in most of the pieces written in the manner of Lucilius. They are more directly personal. They are in no sense didactic or reflective. Those of them in which the pure Archilochian spirit predominates are written, not from a desire to reform society, but from the impulse to give vent to personal feelings of dislike, disgust, or resentment. The passionate element in Horace's temperament, which he had learned to moderate before he came to the com- position of the Odes, finds a free outlet in the Epodes. Two of these, the eleventh and the fifteenth, seem to be no idle play of fancy, but, like some of the utterances of Catullus, con- fessions into which he is hurried by violent gusts of passion. While the Odes present idealised pictures of the life of pleasure in the Augustan age, some of the Epodes throw an unpleasant light on the repellent aspects of the realism of that life, and are as unpleasant reading as anything in ancient literature. The reaction from the life of pleasure produces for a time in Horace, as perhaps also in Lucretius, a feeling of disgust, which finds expression in one or two pieces, as alien as anything well can be from his genial mood and good taste when, as soon happens, 122 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET [CH. V he is restored to his better and happier self. The poems of which Canidia is the subject, though not free from coarseness, are of a different stamp and are written with dramatic power and imaginative insight. In their union of humour and horror, and their grotesque combination of elements from the natural and supernatural world, though not conceived with equal vividness of fancy, they remind us of the witch scene in Burns's great poem. The lampoons directed against the male objects of his dislike, the fourth, sixth, and tenth, may have been prompted by a more respectable motive than personal animosity. Of these, the first is launched against a notorious person who had risen by a career of villany to wealth and importance ; the second is a reprisal on a scurrilous writer who assailed in- offensive people ; the third is a irpoirf^nTiKov invoking the horrors of a stormy passage across the Ionian Gulf on one who pro- voked even the mild spirit of Virgil to retaliate, and whose name in consequence, coupled with that of his associate Bavins, has been handed down as typical of an envious and spiteful poetaster. It seems a not unlikely conjecture that this poem may have suggested the irpcmtnirri<6v addressed to the ship which is to bear Virgil to the shores of Attica, and that that poem, instead of being the latest, may be one of the earliest in order of composition of the Odes in the first three books l . These poems seem to be vigorous exercises of the Archi- lochian ' stilus,' used, not against obscure and inoffensive people, but against the enemies of society, who constantly reappear and excite the strongest feelings of moral and literary antipathy. It is in these poems, not in the regular Satires, that Horace shows the spirit attributed to Lucilius in the lines of Persius secuit Lucilius nrbem Te Lupe, te Muci, et genuinura fregit in illis. (i. 114.) With the subsiding of his warmer passions, and the growth of his lyrical and contemplative faculty, the Archilochian spirit passed almost entirely out of his nature and his writings. 1 Cf. infra, p. 142. CH. v] POLITICAL EPODES 123 There are some of the Epodes in which the spirit of indigna- tion or disgust is combined with patriotic sentiment and serious political feeling. Of the earlier in date, the sixteenth is more of a dirge than a satire, and is an expression of despair over the ruin caused by the prolongation of the civil wars, and of a longing to find a new home among the fortunate isles of the Atlantic. There is a close parallel between the sentiment of this poem the vague vision of a golden age and a land un- visited by the adventurous mariner and that of the fourth Eclogue. The only difference is that Horace seems to express the feelings of the losing side before the peace of Brundisium ; Virgil those of the winning side after its conclusion. This is the earliest manifestation of the political vein in Horace ; in the vagueness of its idealising sentiment it is in marked contrast to the strong hold on reality characteristic of his later art. The only other poem of his pervaded by a similar vagueness of sentiment is the third Ode of Book i, addressed to the ship which is to bear Virgil to Attica, in which the old religious dread of the sea is the leading motive. In both poems may probably be traced the early influence of Horace's intercourse with Virgil, before he discovered the essential diversity of their genius, and consequently the different spheres marked out for each. The seventh Epode may probably have been written about the same time, and seems to be prompted by dread of a premature outbreak between the forces of Antony and Octavian, such as was generally apprehended during and immediately after the Perusian war, or perhaps by the renewal of the war with Sextus Pompeius after the short-lived peace of Misenum, B.C. 39. The fourteenth Ode of Book i. was probably written coincidently with this Epode. In neither of these poems, nor in the sixteenth Epode, is there indication of partisanship, which would certainly have appeared before the final conflict with Antony. On the other hand the words Parumne campis atque Neptuno super Fusum est Latini sanguinis seem still more appropriate if written after the naval battles in 124 HORACE AS A LYRICAL POET [CH. v the Sicilian Straits. The expression of alarm and dismay on the part of Horace might thus be referred to the same time as the concluding episode of Georgic i, before war between Caesar and Antony was actually declared. The mood ex- pressed is simple weariness of the wars, and indignation against their guilt and madness. This was a state of feeling through which the remnant of the defeated party must have passed before they became finally reconciled to the rule of Caesar. That stage, or at least the recognition of the truth that the cause of Caesar in the war against Antony and Cleopatra is the cause of Rome, is reached before the Epodes are concluded. The first Epode is called forth by anxiety for the safety of Maecenas, who was preparing to join Caesar on the expedition which ended in the battle of Actium. The contrast between the light Liburnian galleys of the Caesarians and the 'alta navium propugnacula ' can only apply to this battle, and not to those fought on the shores of Sicily with Sextus Pompeius. Horace expressed his desire to accompany him, and according to one interpretation of the ninth Epode, which seems to give the feelings and impressions of an eye-witness, it is not im- possible that he may have been present within view of the battle. If the usual interpretation of that poem is correct, and if the victor of Actium is celebrated as a greater general than Marius and the younger Scipio, Horace is not only reconciled to the supremacy of Caesar, but has, all at once, become his extrava- gant eulogist, and has fallen into the mistake, never afterwards repeated, of flattering him for qualities which he did not possess. Caesar had already proved himself a great statesman and a great ruler of men, but neither at Philippi nor in the battles in the Sicilian Straits had he shown military capacity; and the victory of Actium, like the final success over Sextus Pompeius, was due to Agrippa. But the interpretation of Pliiss renders the poem more striking and more intelligible. He regards it not as a song of triumph, like the one written a year later, after the capture of Alexandria, but as an Archilochian invective CH. v] CLEOPATRA. EPOD. 9 125 against the foreign queen who had vowed the destruction of the Capitol. In the lines Io triumphe, nee lugnrthino parem Bello reportasti ducem, Neque Africano, cni super Carthaginem Virtus sepulcrum condidit no comparison is intended between Caesar and the victors in the Jugurthine and the third Punic Wars, but between Cleopatra and the two generals, Jugurtha and Hasdrubal, who were brought back captives after those wars. Cleopatra combines the cruelty and treachery of Jugurtha with the cowardice of Hasdrubal. This general of the Carthaginians, after boasting that he would find his tomb in the ruins of Carthage, made ignominious terms with Scipio for his own safety, and had to bear the scornful reproaches of his- wife, who sacrificed herself and her children among the ruins l . That the parallel between Cleopatra and Jugurtha was recognised is shown by the lines of Propertius, iv. 6. 65-66, Di melius ! quantus mulier foret una triumphus, Ductus erat per quas ante lugurtha vias. That the threats of Cleopatra roused the bitterest sense of indignity is shown in the thirty-seventh Ode of Book i, dum Capitolio Regina dementes ruinas Funus et imperio parabat and in Propertius, Hi. n. 45-46 Foedaque Tarpeio conopia tendere saxo, lura dare et statuas inter et arma Mari. In the grandeur of the pentameter there is surely a reminiscence of Marius as the conqueror of Juguriha. 1 Polybius, xxxix. frag. 3, ed. Dindorf. (Scipio speaks) o5r<5y tarw 'Aer8pov/3as o Vftaarl iro\\Si>v avrw irportivonivtuv v