Alinari photo.]
THE ROMAN FORUM.
Of his life in Rome Horace has given us a minute account (Sat. I, vi, 110, etc.). “Waking usually about six, I lie in bed or on my sofa, reading and writing, till nearly ten o’clock; anoint myself, go to the Campus for a game at ball, return home to a light luncheon. Then perhaps I amuse myself at home, perhaps saunter about the town; look in at the Circus and gossip with the fortune-tellers who swarm there when the games are over; walk through the market, inquiring the price of garden stuff and grain. Towards evening I come home to my supper of leeks and pulse and fritters, served by my three slave-boys on a white marble slab, which holds besides two drinking cups and ladle, a saltcellar shaped like a sea-urchin, an oil flask, and a saucer of cheap Campanian ware; and so at last I go to bed, not harassed by the thought that I need rise at day-break.” Sometimes, to his great annoyance, he would be roused early to become sponsor in the law courts for a friend; shivering in the morning cold, pelted by falling hailstones, abused by the crowd through which he had to force his way. Or he would accompany Maecenas on a drive, their talk of matters trivial — the time of day, the early frosts, the merits of popular gladiators. We remember how delightfully Pope has adapted the passage to his own relation with Harley. (Imitation of Sat. II, vi.) Often he dined with Maecenas or his friends, and one such dinner he has described, at the house of a rich, vulgar epicure (Sat. II, viii). The guests were nine in number, including Maecenas, Varius, and Viscus: they lay on couches at maplewood tables arranged in three sides of a square. The first course was a Lucanian wild boar garnished with salads; when that was removed, servants wiped the board with purple napkins. Then a procession of slaves brought in Caecuban and Chian wines, accompanied with cheesecakes, fish, and apples. The second course was a vast lamprey, prawns swimming in its sauce; the third an olio of crane, hare, goose’s liver, blackbirds, and wood-pigeons. A sumptuous meal, but spoiled by the host’s tedious disquisitions on each dish as it appeared. Of social gatherings in their higher aspect, of the feasts of reason which he must have often shared at his patron’s board, we long to know, but Horace is discreet; for him the rose of Harpocrates was suspended over every caenobium, and he would not profane its sacrament. He sat there as an equal, we know; his attitude towards those above him had in it no tinge of servility. That he was, and meant to be, independent they were fairly warned; when Maecenas wished to heap on him further benefits, he refused: “What I have is enough and more than enough,” he said, “nay, should fortune shake her wings and leave me, I know how to resign her gifts” (Od. III, xxix, 53). And if not to Maecenas, so neither to Maecenas’ master, would he sacrifice his freedom. The emperor sought his friendship, writes caressingly to Maecenas of “this most lovable little bit of a man,” wished to make him his secretary, showed no offence at his refusal. His letters use the freedom of an intimate. “Septimius will tell you how highly I regard you. I happened to speak of you in his presence; if you disdain my friendship, I shall not disdain in return.”— “I wish your little book were bigger; you seem to fear lest your books should be bigger than yourself.”— “I am vexed with you, that you have never addressed one of your Epistles to myself; are you afraid that to have appeared as my friend will hurt you with posterity?” Such royal solicitations are a command, and Horace responded by the longest and one amongst the most admired of his Epistles (Ep. II, i). This was his final effort, unless the fragmentary essay on criticism, known as the “Art of Poetry,” belongs to these last years; if that be so, his closing written words were a humorous disparagement of the “homely slighted shepherd’s trade” (A. P. 470-476).
His life was drawing to a close; his friends were falling round him like leaves in wintry weather. Tibullus was dead, and so was Virgil, dearest and whitest-souled of men (Sat. I, v, 41); Maecenas was in failing health and out of favour. Old age had come to himself before its time; love, and wine, and festal crown of flowers had lost their zest:
Soon palls the taste for noise and fray,
When hair is white and leaves are sere.
But he rallies his life-long philosophy to meet the change; patience lightens the inevitable; while each single day is his he will spend and enjoy it in such fashion that he may say at its conclusion, “I have lived” (Od. III, xxix, 41). His health had never been good, undermined, he believed, by the hardships of his campaign with Brutus; all the care of Augustus’ skilful physician, Antonius Musa, failed to prolong his days. He passed away on the 17th of November, B.C. 8, in his fifty-seventh year; was buried on the Esquiline Hill, in a grave near to the sepulchre of Maecenas, who had died only a few days before; fulfilling the promise of an early ode, shaped almost in the words of Moabitish Ruth, that he would not survive his friend.
The self-same day
Shall crush us twain; no idle oath
Has Horace sworn; where’er you go,
We both will travel, travel both
The last dark journey down below.
Od. II, xvii.
THE SATIRES AND EPISTLES
Horace’s poems are of two kinds; of one kind the Satires and Epistles, of another the Odes and Epodes. Their order and dates of publication are shown in the following table:
B.C.
35.
First Book of Satires.
30.
Second Book of Satires, and Epodes.
23.
First three Books of Odes.
20.
First Book of Epistles.
19.
Epistle to Florus.
17.
The Century Hymn.
about 13.
Fourth Book of the Odes.
13.
Epistle to Augustus.
(?) 10.
The Art of Poetry.
Let us examine first the Satires and Epistles. The word “Satire” meant originally a farrago, a medley of various topics in various styles and metres. But all early writings of this kind have perished; and the first extant Latin satirist, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C., devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers who followed him, Horace, Persius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word satire a meaning which it retains to-day. In more than one passage Horace recognizes Lucilius as his master, and imitates him in what is probably the earliest, certainly the coarsest and least artistic of his poems; but maturer judgement, revolting later against the censorious spirit and bad taste of the older writer, led him to abandon his model. For good taste is the characteristic of these poems; they form a comedy of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but “just flicking with uplifted lash,” Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic. “Conversations” we may rather call them; the polished talk of a well-bred, cultured, practised worldling, lightening while they point the moral which he ever keeps in view, by transitions, personalities, ironies, anecdotes; by perfect literary grace, by the underlying sympathy whereby wit is sublimed and softened into humour.
So he tells stories; often trivial, but redeemed by the lightness of his touch, the avoidance of redundancy, the inevitable epithets, the culminating point and finish. He illustrates the extravagance of the day by the spendthrift Clodius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from the ear of beautiful Metella (Sat. II, iii, 239), that he might enjoy drinking at one draught a million sesterces, near a thousand pounds. More than once he returns to castigation of the gluttony, which, though not yet risen to the monstrosity described by Juvenal, was invading the houses of the wealthy. He tells of two brothers— “a precious pair” — who used to breakfast daily upon nightingales: of one Maenius, who ruined himself in
fieldfares (Ep. I, xv, 41). In a paper on the “Art of Dining” he accumulates ironical gastronomic maxims (Sat. II, iv): as that oblong eggs are to be preferred to round; that cabbages should be reared in dry soil; that the forelegs of a doe-hare are choice titbits; that to make a fowl tender you must plunge it alive into boiling wine and water; that oysters are best at the new moon; that prawns and snails give zest to wine; that olive oil should be mixed with pickled tunny roe, chopped herbs, and saffron. If these prescriptions are observed, he says, travestying a fine Lucretian line, the diner-out may draw near to and drink deep from the well-spring of a happy life. By contrast he paints the character of Ofellus, a farmer, whom he had known when a boy on the Apulian hills, and had visited in his old age (Sat. II, ii). Deprived of his estate after Philippi, Ofellus had rented it from its new master, working on as tenant where he had formerly been lord. “How are we worse off now?” says the gallant old fellow to his sons. “When I was rich, we lived on smoked bacon and cabbages, with perhaps a pullet or a kid if a friend dropped in; our dessert of split figs and raisins grown upon the farm. Well, we have just the same to-day. What matter that they called me ‘owner’ then, that a stranger is called owner now? There is no such thing as ‘owner.’ This man turned us out, someone else may turn him out to-morrow; his heir will do so at any rate when he dies. The farm was called mine once, it is called his to-day; it can never ‘belong’ to anyone except the man who works and uses it. So, my boys, keep stout hearts, and be ready to meet adversity bravely when it comes.”
He lashes the legacy-hunters, who, in a time when disinclination to marriage had multiplied the number of childless old men, were becoming a curse to society; gives rules with affected seriousness for angling in a senior’s hoards (Sat. II, v). Be sure you send him game, tell him often how you love him, address him by his first, what we should call his Christian, name — that tickles sensitive ears. If he offers you his will, refuse to read it, but glance sidelong at the line where the names of legatees are written. Praise his bad verses, shoulder a way for him in the streets, entreat him to cover up from cold his dear old head, make up to his housekeeper, flatter him till he bids you stop. Then when he is dead and you find yourself his heir, shed tears, spend money on his funeral, bear your honours meekly — and go on to practise upon someone else. And he throws in a sly story of a testatrix who bequeathed her money on condition that the heir should carry to the grave upon his naked shoulders her body oiled all over; he had stuck to her all her life, and she hoped to shake him off for a moment after death. He enforces the virtue of moderation and contentment from Aesop’s fables, of the frog, of the daw with borrowed plumage, of the lean weasel who squeezed himself into a granary through a tiny hole, and grew so fat that he could not return; from the story of Philippus, who amused himself by enriching a poor man to the ruin of his victim’s peace and happiness (Ep. I, vii, 46); and from the delightful apologue of the City and the Country Mouse (Sat. II, vi). He denounces the folly of miserliness from the example of the ant, provident in amassing store, but restful in fruition of it when amassed; reproves ill-natured judgement of one’s neighbours almost in the words of Prior, bidding us be to their faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind, softening their moral blemishes as lovers and mothers euphemize a dear one’s physical defects. (Sat. I, iii) “You will not listen to me?” he stops now and then to say; “I shall continue to cry on all the same until I rouse you, as the audience in the theatre did the other day” (Sat. II, iii, 60). For it seems that one Fufius, a popular actor, assumed in a tragedy the part of Trojan Ilione, whose cue was to fall asleep upon the stage until roused with a whisper of “Mother awake!” by the ghost of her dead son Deiphilus. Poor Fufius was tipsy, fell asleep in earnest, and was insensible to the ghost’s appeal, until the audience, entering into the fun, unanimously shouted, “Wake up, Mother!” Some of you, I know, he goes on, will listen, even as Polemon did (Sat. II, iii, 254). Returning from a debauch, the young profligate passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lecturing, and burst riotously in. Presently, instead of scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched and moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken his effeminate ornaments, long sleeves, purple leggings, cravat, the garland from his head, the necklace from his throat; came away an altered and converted man. One thinks of a poem by Rossetti, and of something further back than that; for did we not hear the story from sage Mr. Barlow’s lips, in our Sandford and Merton salad days?
In the earlier Satires his personalities are sometimes gross: chatterbox Fabius, scattercash Nomentanus, blear-eyed Crispinus, Hermogenes the fop, Pantolabus the trencherman, Gorgonius the goat-scented, Rufillus the pastille-perfumed, were derisive sobriquets, which, while ministering to the censoriousness of readers by names genuine or well understood, must have bitterly offended the men thus stigmatized or transparently indicated. This he admits regretfully in his later Satires, throwing some blame on a practice of his father, who when cautioning him against vice, always pointed the warning by some example from among their acquaintance. So, leaving personal satire, he turns to other topics; relates divertingly the annoyances of a journey; the mosquitoes, the frogs which croaked all night (Sat. I, v), the bad water and the ill-baked bread. Or he paints the slummy quarter of the city in which the witches held their horrible rites, and describes their cruel orgies as he peeped at them through the trees one night. Or he girds, facetiously and without the bitterness of Persius or Juvenal, at the Jews (Sat. I, v, 100), whose stern exclusiveness of faith was beginning to excite in Rome the horror vigorously expressed by Gallio in M. Anatole France’s recent brilliant work. Or he delineates, on a full canvas and with the modernity which is amongst his most endearing characteristics, the “Bore” of the Augustan age. He starts on a summer morning, light-hearted and thinking of nothing at all, for a pleasant stroll along the Sacred Way (Sat. I, ix).1 A man whom he hardly knew accosts him, ignores a stiff response, clings to him, refuses to be shaken off, sings his own praises as poet, musician, dancer, presses impertinent questions as to the household and habits of Maecenas. Horace’s friend Fuscus meets them; the poet nods and winks, imploring him to interpose a rescue. Cruel Fuscus sees it all, mischievously apologizes, will not help, and the shy, amiable poet walks on with his tormentor, “his ears dropped like those of an overladen ass.” At last one of the bore’s creditors comes up, collars him with threats, hales him to the law courts, while the relieved poet quotes in his joy from the rescue of Hector in the Iliad, “Thus Apollo bore me from the fray.” In this Satire, which was admirably imitated by Swift, it always seems to me that we get Horace at his very best, his dry quaintness and his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent humour, the self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet benignant wit of Thackeray.
* * *
Between the latest of the Satires and the earliest of the Epistles, we have to reckon an interval of something like ten years, during which had been published the Epodes and the majority of the Odes. “Epistles” his editors have agreed to entitle them; but not all of them are genuine Letters. Some are rather dedicated than written to the persons whose names they bear; some are thrown for literary purposes into epistolary form; some again are definitely and personally addressed to friends. “Sermons” he calls them himself as he called the Satires, and their motive is mostly the same; like those, they are Conversations, only with absent correspondents instead of with present interlocutors, real or imagined. He follows in them the old theme, the art of living, the happiness of moderation and contentment; preaching easily as from Rabelais’ easy chair, with all the Frenchman’s wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we feel how the ten years of experience, of thought, of study, have matured his views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil’s poetry, h
ave trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. “The Epistles of Horace,” says Dean Milman, “are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and perhaps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original form of Roman verse.”
Of the three letters to Maecenas, one, like the Ode we have before quoted on p. 28, is a vigorous assertion of independence. The great man, sorely sick and longing for his friend, had written peevishly (Ep. I, vii), “You said you should be absent five days only, and you stay away the whole of August.” “Well — I went away because I was ill, and I remain away because in this ‘undertakers’ month,’ as you call it in Rome, I am afraid of being worse if I go back. When cold weather comes I shall go down to the sea; then, with the first swallow, dear friend, your poet will revisit you. I love you fondly; am grateful to you every hour of my life; but if you want to keep me always by your side, you must restore to me the tender grace of vanished youth; strong lungs, thick black hair, musical voice and ringing laughter; with our common love for pretty Cinara now dead and gone.” A positive sturdy refusal, not without hints that if the patron repents his benefactions or demands sacrifice of freedom in exchange for them, he had better take them back: yet a remonstrance so disarming, infused with such a blend of respect and playfulness, such wealth of witty anecdote and classical allusion, that we imagine the fretfulness of the appeased protector evaporating in admiration as he reads, the answer of affectionate apology and acceptance dictated in his pacified response.
Complete Works of Horace (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics) Page 95