Complete Works of Horace (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics)

by Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus

  In another inimitable letter (Ep. I, 9), as brief as this is long, he recommends his friend Septimius to Tiberius Claudius Nero, stepson of Augustus, a young man of reserved unpleasant manners, and difficult to approach. The suasive grace with which it disclaims presumption, yet pleads his own merits as a petitioner and his friend’s as a candidate for favour, with its dignified deference, implied not fulsome, to the young prince’s rank, have caused it to be compared with that masterpiece of delicate solicitation, St. Paul’s Epistle to Philemon. It is cited by Steele in the “Spectator” as a model of epistolary tact (“Spectator,” No. 493); we cannot improve upon his translation:

  “Septimius, who waits on you with this, is clearly well acquainted with the place you are pleased to allow me in your friendship. For when he beseeches me to recommend him to your notice in such a manner as to be received by you, who are delicate in the choice of your friends and domestics, he knows our intimacy and understands my ability to serve him better than I do myself. I have defended myself against his ambition to be yours as long as I possibly could; but fearing the imputation of hiding my influence with you out of mean and selfish considerations, I am at last prevailed upon to give you this trouble. Thus, to avoid the appearance of a greater fault, I have put on this confidence. If you can forgive such transgression of modesty in behalf of a friend, receive this gentleman into your interests and friendship, and take it from me that he is a brave and honest man.”

  An epistle written and sent about the same time, possibly by the same bearer, shows Horace in an amiable light as kindly Mentor to the young Telemachi of rank who were serving on Tiberius’ staff (Ep. I, iii). “Tell me, Florus, whereabouts you are just now, in snowy Thrace or genial Asia? which of you poets is writing the exploits of Augustus? how does Titius get on with his Latin rendering of Pindar? my dear friend Celsus, what is he at work upon? his own ideas, I hope, not cribs from library books. And you? are you abandoning all other allurements for the charms of divine philosophy? Tell me, too, if you have made up your quarrel with Munatius. To break the tie of brotherhood is a crime: please, please be friends with him again, and bring him with you when next you come to see me. I am fattening a calf to feast you both.” Here is a dinner invitation (Ep. I, v.): “If you can put up with deal tables and a mess of greens served in a common dish, with wine five years old and not at all bad, come and sup with me, Torquatus, at sunset. We have swept up the hearth and cleaned the furniture; you may see your face reflected in cup and platter. We will have a long summer evening of talk, and you can sleep afterwards as late as you like, for to morrow is Augustus’ birthday, and there will be no business in the courts. I told you the wine is good, and there is nothing like good drink. It unlocks reticence, unloads hearts, encourages the shy, makes the tongue-tied eloquent and the poor opulent. I have chosen my company well: there will be no blab to repeat our conversation out of doors. Butra and Septimius are coming, and I hope Sabinus. Just send a line to say whom you would like to have besides. Bring friends if you choose, but the weather is hot, and we must not overcrowd the rooms.” It all sounds delightful, except perhaps the mess of greens; but a good Italian cook can make vegetables tempting down to the present day. I think we should all have loved to be there, as at the neat repast of Attic taste with wine, which tempted virtuous Laurence to sup with Milton. So should we like to know what called forth this pretty piece of moralizing, addressed to the poet Tibullus (Ep. I, iv). He was handsome, prosperous, popular, yet melancholy. Horace affectionately reproves him. “Dear Albius,” he says, using the intimate fore-name, “Dear Albius, tell me what you are about in your pretty villa: writing delicate verses, strolling in your forest glades, with thoughts and fancies I am sure all that a good man’s should be? What can you want besides the beauty, wealth, full purse, and seemly household which the gods have given you? Dear friend, I tell you what you want, contentment with the present hour. Try and imagine that each day which dawns upon you is your last; then each succeeding day will come unexpected and delightful. I practise what I preach: come and take a look at me; you will find me contented, sleek, and plump, ‘the fattest little pig in Epicurus’ sty.’” And he impresses the same lesson on another friend, Bullatius, who was for some reason restless at home and sought relief in travel. “What ails you to scamper over Asia or voyage among the Isles of Greece? Sick men travel for health, but you are well. Sad men travel for change, but change diverts not sadness, yachts and chaises bring no happiness; their skies they change, but not their souls who cross the sea. Enjoy the to-day, dear friend, which God has given you, the place where God has placed you: a Little Pedlington is cheerful if the mind be free from care” (Ep. I, xi).

  His great friend Fuscus twits him, as Will Honeycomb twitted Mr. Spectator, with his passion for a country life (Ep. I, x). “You are a Stoic,” Horace says, “your creed is to live according to Nature. Do you expect to find her in the town or in the country? whether of the two yields more peaceful nights and sweeter sleep? is a marble floor more refreshing to the eyes than a green meadow? water poured through leaden pipes purer than the crystal spring? Even amid your Corinthian columns you plant trees and shrubs; though you drive out Nature she will silently return and supplant your fond caprices. Do interpose a little ease and recreation amid the money-grubbing which confines you to the town. Money should be the servant, not the queen, the captive, not the conqueror. If you want to see a happy man, come to me in the country. I have only one thing wanting to perfect happiness, my desire for your society.” Two longer letters are written to his young friend Lollius (Ep. I, ii, xviii). The first is a study of Homer, which he has been reading in the country. In the “Iliad” he is disgusted by the reckless selfishness of the leaders; in the hero of the “Odyssey” he sees a model of patient, wise endurance, and impresses the example on his friend. It is curious that the great poet of one age, reading the greater poet of another, should fasten his attention, not on the poetry, but on the ethics of his predecessor. The remaining letter is called out by Lollius’ appointment as confidential secretary to some man of great consequence; an office such as Horace himself declined when offered by Augustus. The post, he says, is full of difficulty, and endangering to self-respect: the servility it exacts will be intolerable to a man so truthful, frank, and independent as his friend. Let him decline it; or, if committed, get out of it as soon as possible.

  Epistles there are without a moral purpose, called forth by some special occasion. He sends his “Odes” by one Asella for presentation to Augustus, punning on the name, as representing an Ass laden with manuscripts (Ep. I, xiii). The fancy was carried out by Pope in his frontispiece to the “Dunciad.” Then his doctor tells him to forsake Baiae as a winter health resort, and he writes to one Vala, who lives in southern Italy, inquiring as to the watering places lower down the coast (Ep. I, xv). He must have a place where the bread is good and the water pure; the wine generous and mellow; in the market wild boars and hares, sea-urchins and fine fish. He can live simply at home, but is sick now and wants cherishing, that he may come back fat as one of the Phaeacians — luxurious subjects, we remember, of King Alcinous in the “Odyssey,”

  Good food we love, and music, and the dance,

  Garments oft changed, warm baths, and restful beds.

  Odyssey, viii, 248.

  Julius Florus, poet and orator, presses him to write more lyrics (Ep. II, ii). For many reasons, no, he answers. I no longer want money. I am getting old. Lyrics are out of fashion. No one can write in Rome. I have become fastidious. His sketch of the ideal poet is believed to portray the writings of his friend Virgil. It is nobly paraphrased by Pope:

  But how severely with themselves proceed

  The men, who write such verse as we can read!

  Their own strict judges, not a word they spare,

  That wants or force, or light, or weight, or care;

  Pour the full tide of eloquence along,

  Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong;

  Prune the luxur
iant, the uncouth refine,

  But show no mercy to an empty line;

  Then polish all with so much life and ease,

  You think ’tis nature, and a knack to please;

  But ease in writing flows from art, not chance,

  As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

  The “Epistle to Augustus” (Ep. II, i) was written (page 28) at the Emperor’s request. After some conventional compliments it passes to a criticism of Latin poetry past and present; comparing, like Swift’s “Battle of the Books,” the merits of the contemporary and of the older masters. There is a foolish mania just now, he says, for admiring our older poets, not because they are good, but because they are old. The origin and development of Roman poetry made it certain that perfection must come late. He assumes that Augustus champions the moderns, and compliments him on the discernment which preferred a Virgil and a Varius (and so, by implication, a Horace) to the Plautuses and Terences of the past.

  The “Art of Poetry” is thought to be an unfinished work. Unmethodical and without proportion, it may have been either compiled clumsily after the poet’s death, or put together carelessly by himself amid the indolence which grows sometimes upon old age. It declares the essentials of poetry to be unity of conception and ingenuity of diction, urges that mechanical correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling, gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the chorus, of metre. For matter such as this a Horace was not needed, but the felicity of its handling has made it to many Horatian students the most popular of his conversational works. It abounds in passages of finished beauty; such as his comparison of verbal novelties imported into a literature with the changing forest leaves; his four ages of humanity — the childish, the adolescent, the manly, the senile — borrowed from Aristotle, expanded by Shakespeare, and taken up by Keats; his comparison of Poetry to Painting; his delineation of an honest critic. Brief phrases which have become classical abound. The “purple patch” sewn on to a sober narrative; the wine jar turning to a pitcher as the potter’s wheel revolves; the injunction to keep a book ten years before you publish it; the near kinship of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome of a mountain’s labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon the stage; the occasional nod of Homer; — are commonplace citations so crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered scientist imports them into his treatises, sometimes with curious effect.

  Alinari photo.]

  [Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

  AUGUSTUS.

  If for a full appreciation of these minor beauties a knowledge of the Latin text is necessary, the more abounding charm of both Satires and Epistles is accessible to the Latinless reader. For the bursts of poetry are brief and rare, issuing from amid what Horace often reminds us are essentially plain prose essays in conversational form, their hexametral garb an unpoetical accident. Two versions present themselves to the unclassical student. The first is Conington’s scholarly rendering, hampered sometimes rather than adorned by its metrical shape; the other is the more recent construe of Dean Wickham, clear, flowing, readable, stamping with the translator’s high authority many a disputed passage. Both set temptingly before English readers the Rome of Horace’s day, and promote them to an intimacy with his own mind, character, history. Preferable to both, no doubt, are the “Imitations” of Pope, which do not aim at literal transference, but work, as does his yet more famous Homer, by melting down the original, and pouring the fused mass into an English mould. Their background is Twit’nam and the Mall instead of Tibur and the Forum; their Maecenas St. John, their Trebatius Fortescue, their Numicius Murray. Where Horace appeals to Ennius and Attius, they cite Shakespeare and Cowley; while the forgotten wits, worthies, courtiers, spendthrifts of Horatian Rome reappear as Lord Hervey or Lady Mary, as Shippen, Chartres, Oldfield, Darteneuf; and Horace’s delicate flattery of a Roman Emperor is travestied with diabolical cleverness into bitter mockery of an English king. In these easy and polished metamorphoses we have Pope at his very best; like Horace, an epitome of his time, bearing the same relation, as patriot, scholar, worldling, epicurean, poet, satirist, to the London of Queen Anne, which Horace bore to the Augustan capital; and so reproducing in an English garb something at any rate of the exotic flavour of his original. In an age when Pope is undeservedly and disastrously neglected, I shall do well to present some few Horatian samples from the king-poet of his century; by whose wit and finish, unsurpassed if not unequalled in our literature, the taste of my own contemporaries was formed; and to whom a public which decries or ignores him pays homage every day, by quoting from him unconsciously oftener than from anyone except Shakespeare.

  Here is a specimen from the Satires, heightening our interest in Horace’s picture by its adaptation to familiar English characters. Great Scipio and Laelius, says Horace (Sat. II, i, 72), could unbend their dignity to trifle and even to romp with Lucilius. Says Pope of his own Twickenham home:

  Know, all the distant din that world can keep

  Rolls o’er my Grotto, and but sooths my sleep.

  There my retreat the best Companions grace,

  Chiefs out of war, and Statesmen out of place.

  There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl

  The feast of reason and the flow of soul:

  And he, whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines,

  Now forms my Quincunx and now ranks my vines,

  Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain,

  Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.

  That Naevius is no longer read (Ep. II, i, 53) affects us slightly, for of Naevius we know nothing; Pope substitutes a writer known and admired still:

  Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,

  His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;

  Forget his Epic, nay, Pindaric art,

  But still I love the language of his heart.

  Horace tells how the old rough Saturnian measure gave way to later elegance (Ep. II, i, 157). Pope aptly introduces these fine resonant lines:

  Waller’s was smooth; but Dryden taught to join

  The varying verse, the full resounding line,

  The long majestic march, and energy divine.

  Horace claims for poetry that it lifts the mind from the coarse and sensual to the imaginative and pure (Ep. II, i, 128). Pope illustrates by a delightful compliment to moral Addison, with just one little flick of the lash to show that he remembered their old quarrel:

  In our own day (excuse some courtly stains),

  No whiter page than Addison’s remains.

  He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth,

  And sets the passions on the side of Truth;

  Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art,

  And pours each human virtue in the heart.

  Horace, speaking of an old comic poet, Livius (Ep. II, i, 69), whom he had been compelled to read at school, is indignant that a single neat line or happy phrase should preserve an otherwise contemptible composition. This is Pope’s expansion:

  But, for the wits of either Charles’ days,

  The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,

  Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more,

  Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o’er,

  One simile, that solitary shines

  In the dry desert of a thousand lines,

  Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page,

  Has sanctified whole poems for an age.

  Horace paints the University don as he had seen him emerging from his studious seclusion to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative, moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 81). Pope carries him to Oxford:

  The man, who, stretched in Isis’ calm retreat,

  To books and study gives seven years complete;

  See, strowed with learned dust, his nightcap on,

  He walks, an object new beneath the sun.

  The boys flock round him, and the people stare;

  So stiff, so mute! some
statue you would swear,

  Stept from its pedestal to take the air.

  Finally, Horace extols the poet as distinct from the mere versifier (Ep. II, i, 210). Pope’s rendering ought to dispel the plea of an unfeelingness sometimes lightly urged against him:

  Let me for once presume to instruct the times

  To know the Poet from the Man of Rhymes:

  ’Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains,

  Can make me feel each passion that he feigns,

  Enrage, compose, with more than magic art,

  With pity and with terror tear my heart;

  And snatch me o’er the earth or through the air,

  To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.

  If only he had handled more! but of the forty-one Conversations Pope imitated only seven. And so to assimilate those remaining we must descend from the heights of poetry to the cool sequestered vale of literal masquerade. To a lady wintering in Rome who consulted me lately as to guide-books, I ventured to recommend Hawthorne’s “Transformation,” Marion Crawford’s “Ave Roma,” and Dean Wickham’s translation of the Satires and Epistles.