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

by Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus

  Ah, Postumus, they fleet away

  Our years, nor piety one hour

  Can win from wrinkles, and decay,

  And death’s indomitable power;

  Not though three hundred steers you heap

  Each day, to glut the tearless eyes

  Of Him, who guards in moated keep

  Tityos, and Geryon’s triple size:

  All, all, alas! that watery bound

  Who eat the fruits that Nature yields,

  Must traverse, be we monarchs crowned,

  Or humblest tillers of the fields.

  (II, xiv.)

  The antipathy is not confined to heathenism; we distrust the Christian who professes to ignore it; many of us felt drawn by a brotherhood of humanity to the late scholarly Pope, when we learned that, as death looked him in the face, he clung to Pagan Horace as a truthful and sympathetic oracle. “And we all go to-day to this singer of the ancient world for guidance in the deceptions of life, and for steadfastness in the face of death.”

  Alinari photo.]

  [Capitol Museum, Rome.

  VIRGIL.

  4. Personal. Something, but not very much, we learn of Horace’s intimates from this class of Odes. Closest to him in affection and oftenest addressed is Maecenas. The opening Ode pays homage to him in words closely imitated by Allan Ramsay in addressing the chief of his clan:

  Dalhousie of an auld descent,

  My chief, my stoup, my ornament;

  and at the end of the volume the poet repeats his dedication (III, xxix). Twice he invites his patron to a feast; to drink wine bottled on the day some years before when entering the theatre after an illness he was received with cheers by the assembled multitude (I, xx); again on March 1st, kept as the festal anniversary of his own escape from a falling tree (III, viii). To a querulous letter from his friend written when sick and dreading death, he sends the tender consolation and remonstrance of which we spoke before (p. 29). In a very different tone he sings the praises of Licymnia (II, xii), supposed to be Terentia, Maecenas’ newly-wedded wife, sweet voiced, witty, loving, of whom her husband was at the time passionately enamoured. He recounts finally, with that delicate respectful gratitude which never lapses into servility, his lifelong obligation, lauding gratefully the still removed place which his friend’s bounty has bestowed:

  A clear fresh stream, a little field, o’ergrown

  With shady trees, a crop that ne’er deceives.

  (III, xvi, 29.)

  Not less tenderly affectionate is the exquisite Ode to Virgil on the death of Quinctilius.

  By many a good man wept Quinctilius dies,

  By none than you, my Virgil, trulier wept;

  (I, xxiv.)

  or to his devoted young friend Septimius (p. 39) (II, vi), who would travel with him to the ends of the world, to Moorish or Cantabrian wilds. Not so far afield need they go; but when age steals on they will journey to Tarentum, sweetest spot on earth:

  That spot, those happy heights, desire

  Our sojourn; there, when life shall end,

  Your tear shall dew my yet warm pyre,

  Your bard and friend.

  To the great general Agrippa (I, vi), rival of Maecenas in the good graces of Augustus, he sends a tribute complimentary, yet somewhat stiffly and officially conceived; lines much more cordial to the high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17), whose statue stands to-day amid the pale immortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic banter to Tibullus, “jilted by a fickle Glycera,” and “droning piteous elegies” (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet find out that though fallen into obscurity she is in truth high-born and noble, and will present him with a patrician mother-in-law.

  For aught that you know now, fair Phyllis may be

  The shoot of some highly respectable stem;

  Nay, she counts, I’ll be sworn, a few kings in her tree,

  And laments the lost acres once lorded by them.

  Never think that a creature so exquisite grew

  In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known,

  Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true,

  Had a mother ’twould shame thee to take for thine own.

  Several of his correspondents we can only name; the poet Valgius, the tragedians Pollio and Fuscus; Sallust, grandson of the historian; Pompeius, his old comrade in the Brutus wars; Lollius, defeated in battle and returning home in disgrace. Nor need we labour to identify a host of others; Iccius, Grosphus, Dellius; who figure as mere dedicatory names; nor persons mentioned casually, such as Telephus of the rosy neck and clustering hair (I, xiii; III, xix), whom Bulwer Lytton, with fine memories of his own ambrosial petted youth, calls a “typical beautyman and lady-killer.” The Horatian personages, remarks Dean Milman, would contain almost every famous name of the Augustan age.

  5. Amatory. “Speak’st thou of nothing but ladies?” says Feste the Jester to poor Malvolio. He might have said the same to Horace; for of the Odes in the first three Books one third part is addressed to or concerned with women. How many of the pretty female names which musicalize his love songs, in syllables that breathe of the sweet south and melt like kisses in the utterance, are representative of real girls, we cannot guess; with none of them except perhaps one, who died young, does he seem to have been really in love. He was forty years old when most of his amorous Odes were written; an age at which, as George Eliot has reminded us, the baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than immersion. Something he must have known of love, or he could not write as he has done; but it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather than the impassioned self-surrender of a lover; of a gay bachelor, with roving critical eye, heart whole yet fancy free, too practised a judge of beauty to become its slave. Without emotion, without reverence, but with keen relishing appreciation, he versifies Pyrrha’s golden curls, and Lycoris’ low forehead — feminine beauties both to a Roman eye — and Phyllis’ tapering arms and shapely ankles, and Chia’s dimpled cheek, and the tangles of Neaera’s hair, and the gadabout baggage Lyde, and Glycera’s dazzling complexion that blinds the gazer’s eye (I, v, xix, xxxiii; II, iv, 21; III, xiv, 21). They are all inconstant good-for-noughts, he knows; but so are men, and so is he; keep up the pleasant give-and-take, the quarrels and the reconciliations. All the youths of Rome are in love with a beautiful Ninon D’Enclos named Barine — Matthew Arnold declared this to be the finest of all the Odes (II, viii) — she perjures herself with every one in turn. But it seems to answer; she shines forth lovelier than ever. Venus and the nymphs only laugh, and her lovers, young and old, continue to hug their chains.

  New captives fill the nets you weave;

  New slaves are bred; and those before,

  Though oft they threaten, never leave

  Your perjured door.

  Sometimes he plays the monitor. Asterie’s husband is laid up in Greece by contrary winds: he is faithful to his wife, though his hostess tempts him: let the wife be on her guard against her handsome neighbour Enipeus (III, vii). His own charmers are sometimes obdurate: Chloe and Lyde run away from him like fawns (I, xxiii): that is because they are young; he can wait till they are older; they will come to him then of themselves: “they always come,” says Disraeli in “Henrietta Temple.” He has quarrelled with an old flame (I, xvi), whom he had affronted by some libellous verses. He entreats her pardon; was young and angry when he wrote; will burn the offending lines, or fling them into the sea:

  Come, let me change my sour for sweet,

  And smile complacent as before;

  Hear me my palinode repeat,

  And give me back your heart once more.

  He professes bitter jealousy of a handsome stripling whose beauty Lydia praises (I, xiii). She is wasting he
r admiration; she will find him unfaithful; Horace knows him well:

  Oh, trebly blest, and blest for ever,

  Are they, whom true affection binds,

  In whom no doubts nor janglings sever

  The union of their constant minds;

  But life in blended current flows,

  Serene and sunny to the close.

  If anyone now reads “Lalla Rookh,” he will recall an exquisite rendering of these lines from the lips of veiled Nourmahal:

  There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,

  When two, that are linked in one heavenly tie,

  With heart never changing and brow never cold,

  Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.

  One hour of a passion so sacred is worth

  Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss;

  And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth,

  It is this, it is this!

  But, perhaps, if a jury of scholars could be polled as to the most enchanting amongst all Horace’s lovesongs, the highest vote would be cast in favour of the famous “Reconciliation” of the roving poet with this or with some other Lydia (III, ix). The pair of former lovers, mutually faithless, exchange defiant experience of their several infidelities; then, the old affection reviving through the contact of their altercation, agree to discard their intervening paramours, and return to their first allegiance.

  He.

  Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind,

  And I, and I alone, might lie

  Upon thy snowy breast reclined,

  Not Persia’s king so blest as I.

  She.

  Whilst I to thee was all in all,

  Nor Chloe might with Lydia vie,

  Renowned in ode or madrigal,

  Not Roman Ilia famed as I.

  He.

  I now am Thracian Chloe’s slave,

  With hand and voice that charms the air,

  For whom even death itself I’d brave,

  So fate the darling girl would spare.

  She.

  I dote on Calais; and I

  Am all his passion, all his care,

  For whom a double death I’d die,

  So fate the darling boy would spare.

  He.

  What if our ancient love return,

  And bind us with a closer tie,

  If I the fair-haired Chloe spurn,

  And, as of old, for Lydia sigh?

  She.

  Though lovelier than yon star is he,

  Thou fickle as an April sky,

  More churlish too than Adria’s sea,

  With thee I’d live, with thee I’d die.

  The austere Scaliger used to say that he would rather have written this ode than be King of Spain and the Indies: Milton’s Eve expresses her devotion to Adam in an apostrophe paraphrased from its closing lines.

  Observe, too, how we find in all the Odes as we read them, not only a gallery of historical pictures, nor only an unconscious revelation of the poet’s self, of, that is, the least subjective among poets, ever, as says Sir Stephen De Vere, looking outward, never looking in; but they incidentally paint for us in vivid and familiarizing tints the intimate daily life of that far-off ancient queen of cities. We walk with them the streets of Rome. We watch the connoisseurs gazing into the curiosity shops and fingering the bronzes or the silver statuettes; the naughty boys jeering the solemn Stoic as he walks along, staid, superior, absent; the good boys coming home from school with well-thumbed lesson books; the lovers in the cookshops or restaurants shooting apple pips from between finger and thumb, rejoicing in the good omen if they strike the ceiling; the stores of Sulpicius the wine merchant and of Sosius the bookseller; the great white Latian ox, exactly such as you see to-day, driven towards the market, with a bunch of hay upon his horns to warn pedestrians that he is dangerous; the coarse drawings in chalk or colours on the wall advertising some famous gladiator; at dusk the whispering lovers in the Campus, or the romping hide-and-seek of lads and lasses at the corners of the streets or squares, just as you may watch them to-day on spring or winter evenings amongst the lower arches of the Colosseum; — it is a microcosm, a cameo, of that old-world life. Horace knew, and feared not to say, that in his poems, in his Odes especially, he bequeathed a deathless legacy to mankind, while setting up a lasting monument to himself. One thing he could not know, that when near two thousand years had passed, a race of which he had barely heard by name as dwelling “quite beyond the confines of the world,” would cherish his name and read his writings with a grateful appreciation even surpassing that of his contemporary Romans.

  A few Odes remain, too casual to be classified; rejoicings over the vanishing of winter and the return of spring (I, iv); praises of the Tibur streams, of Tarentum (II, vi) which he loved only less than Tibur, of the Lucretilis Groves (I, xvii) which overhung his Sabine valley, of the Bandusian spring beside which he played in boyhood. We have the Pindaric or historic Odes, with tales of Troy, of the Danaid brides, of Regulus, of Europa (III, iii, v, xi, xvii); the dramatic address to Archytas (I, xxviii), which soothed the last moments of Mark Pattison; the fine epilogue which ends the book, composed in the serenity of gained renown;

  And now ’tis done: more durable than brass

  My monument shall be, and raise its head

  O’er royal pyramids: it shall not dread

  Corroding rain or angry Boreas,

  Nor the long lapse of immemorial time.

  I shall not wholly die; large residue

  Shall ‘scape the Queen of funerals. Ever new

  My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb

  With silent maids the Capitolian height.

  “Born,” men will say, “where Aufidus is loved,

  Where Danaus scant of streams beneath him bowed

  The rustic tribes, from dimness he waxed bright,

  First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay

  To notes of Italy.” Put glory on,

  My own Melpomene, by genius won,

  And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.

  SWAN SONG

  When a well-graced actor has left the stage amid trumpeted farewells from an admiring but regretful audience, we somewhat resent his occasional later reappearance. So, when a poet’s last word has been spoken, and spoken emotionally, an Afterword is apt to offend: and we may wish that the fine poem just quoted had been reserved as finish to the volume yet to come, which lacks a closing note, or even that the volume itself had not been published. The fourth Book of the Odes was written nearly ten years after the other three, and Horace wrote it not as Poet but as Laureate. His Secular Hymn appeared in B.C. 17, when he was forty-eight years old; and after it Augustus pressed him to celebrate the victories of his two stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, over the tribes of the Eastern Alps. If he wrote unwillingly, his hand had not lost its cunning. The sentiment is paler and more artificial, but the old condensation and felicity remain. He begins with rather sad reluctance. He is old; the one woman whom he loved is dead; his lyric raptures and his love campaignings are at an end; he is tired of flattering hopes, of noisy revels, of flower garlands fresh with dew. Or are they war songs, not love songs, that are wanted? There he is more helpless still. It needs a Pindar worthily to extol a Caesar: he is no Pindar; and so we have an ode in honour of the Theban bard. And yet, as chosen lyrist of the Roman race, he cannot altogether refuse the call. Melpomene, who from his cradle marked him for her own, can still shed on him if she will the power to charm, can inspire in him “music of the swan.” So, slowly, the wasting lyric fire revives; we get the martial odes to conquering Drusus and to Lollius, the panegyrics on Augustus and Tiberius, all breathing proud consciousness that “the Muse opens the good man’s grave and lifts him to the gods”; that immortality can be won only by the poet’s pen, and that it is in his own power to confer it.

  Becchetti photo.]

  THE FORUM RESTORED AS IN A.D. 80.

  (Reproduced by special perm
ission.)

  The remaining poems are in the old spirit, but are somewhat mournful echoes of the past. They remind us of the robin’s winter song— “Hark to him weeping,” say the country folk, as they listen to the music which retains the sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls the gushes of the summer strains. There is still an ode to Venus; its prayer not now “come to bless thy worshipper”; but “leave an old heart made callous by fifty years, and seek some younger votary.” There is an ode to Spring. Spring brought down from heaven his earliest Muse; it came to him charged with youthful ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message is that change and death attend all human hopes and cares. Like an army defeated, the snow has retreated; the Graces and the Nymphs can dance unclad in the soft warm air. But summer will thrust out spring, autumn summer, then dull winter will come again; will come to the year, will come to you and me. Not birth nor eloquence nor virtue can save from Minos’ judgement seat; like Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, like all the great ones of the earth, we shall soon be nameless shades and a poor pinch of dust. More of the old buoyant glee comes back in a festal invitation to one Virgilius, not the poet. There is a ring of Tom Moore in Sir Theodore Martin’s rendering of it.

  * * * * *

  On the young grass reclined, near the murmur of fountains,

  The shepherds are piping the song of the plains,

  And the god who loves Arcady’s purple-hued mountains,

  The god of the flocks, is entranced by their strains.

  * * * * *

  To the winds with base lucre and pale melancholy!

  In the flames of the pyre these, alas! will be vain;

  Mix your sage ruminations with glimpses of folly,

  ’Tis delightful at times to be somewhat insane!

  There follows a savage assault on one Lyce, an ancient beauty who had lost her youthful charms, but kept up her youthful airs: