The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  Addison turned them into:

  The man resolved and steady to his trust,

  Inflexible to ill and obstinately just,

  May the rude rabble’s insolence despise,

  Their senseless clamours and tumultuous cries.

  The tyrant’s fierceness he beguiles,

  And with superior greatness smiles.

  Byron made out of them:

  The man of firm and noble soul

  No factious clamours can control.

  No threat’ning tyrant’s darkling brow

  Can swerve him from his just intent.

  Gales to curb the Adriatic main,

  Would awe his fixed, determined mind in vain.

  And as Gladstone tried his hand on them, they became:

  The just man in his purpose strong

  No madding crowd can bend to wrong.

  The forceful tyrant’s brow and word,

  Rude Auster, fickle Adria’s lord,

  His firm-set spirit cannot move,

  Nor the great hand of thund’ring Jove.

  Present indications are, therefore, that he will remain a closed book except to the Latinists. What one of his admirers soon after his death called his “curious felicity” can never be transferred to another tongue, and he had no glimpse of new truth to show, no revelation of what lies hidden in men’s hearts until the poet speaks it for them.

  The idea of the poet as an impassioned, inspired creature, compact of emotion and imagination, must be revised. Horace cannot be fitted into the category. Passion and common sense are not compatible. Passion stands higher—or lower; the two do not operate on the same level. The lover, no matter how averse by nature to follies, is allied to the lunatic for the time being. Horace is a passionless poet always. It is true that his poems are continually decorated with the pretty names of ladies he declares he has succumbed to: Phyllis and Lyce and Cinara, Leuconoe and Pyrrha and Chloe, Glycera and Neaera and Lalage, and many another—of whom some, the number drives one to conclude, had existence only in his verse—but it is more than doubtful whether any woman ever cost him a pang. All the indications are that he was never what we call in love. To our notions a lover, and certainly a poet-lover, must waste, at least a little, in despair and Horace never did, not even a very, very little. He had an exceedingly pleasant time with all of them. His idea of love was that it should add to life’s enjoyment and nothing is clearer than that he made it do so. He must have had a wonderful skill in detaching himself from one lovely lady to pass on to another, for there is never a hint at any of the usual accompaniments of such behavior, tears, reproaches, a broken heart or two. In fact they are incredible face to face with Horace. In his presence they would instantly have seemed quite absurd and rather ill-mannered. The anguished maiden would have found herself laughing long before the moment of parting came and she would be left in the end with some excellent advice about her next move. And Horace would lie on a grassy bank by a murmuring river with another fair creature to weave rosy garlands for him and fill his cup with golden wine.

  The present writer, warned by the sad results of eminent men’s efforts, does not venture to turn into English even a single one of the odes to illustrate this attitude toward the great passion, but a very fair idea of the spirit of Horace’s love poetry can be had from the sixteenth century lover-poets of England. Those of the seventeenth century are apt to mingle religion with love, than which nothing could be more foreign to Horace, but those of a hundred years earlier reproduce his attitude and often consciously. He influenced them enormously and the reason was that fundamentally they looked at life and love as he did. To be sure, the comparison holds good only within strict limits. The grace and charm of Horace’s verse cannot be matched by the best of them, but they felt about love the way he did and what they produced is far more like him than any translation. He might indeed have written every word of Lyly’s Cupid and my Campaspe played. Marlowe’s Passionate Shepherd to his Love is precisely passion as Horace saw it:

  Come live with me and be my Love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove

  That hills and valleys, dales and fields

  Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

  Drayton often follows him:

  But see how patient I am grown

  In all this coil about thee;

  Come, nice thing, let my heart alone,

  I cannot live without thee.

  Daniel is only Horace’s echo when he writes:

  And sport, Sweet Maid, in season of these years,

  And learn to gather flowers before they wither—

  But indeed if Shakespeare’s sonnets are excepted and a very few other poems, all sixteenth century love poetry is made after Horace’s receipt:

  Let now the chimneys blaze

  And cups o’erflow with wine;

  Let well-tuned words amaze

  With harmony divine.

  Now yellow waxen lights

  Shall wait on honey love—

  That is Horace’s lover’s paradise and he himself could have described it no more exactly.

  Common sense is perhaps not necessarily destructive to the imagination, but on most of the soaring flights your truly inspired poet essays it would prove a dragging weight. Horace never soared at all. He was the least inspired of poets and he was contentedly aware that he was. He admired Virgil exceedingly and other lofty epic and tragic poets of the day whose names alone have come down to us, but for himself he wanted only the pleasant ways of earth. He esteemed—more, one feels sure, than he loved—the mighty Greek masters, and he bade young writers turn their pages all the day long and the night, but he never swerved from what his cool head showed him was his own little path, serenely sure those heights were not for him: “Like a river rushing from the mountain, on sweeps Pindar, deep-mouthed, tremendous . . . [or] a mighty wind lifts him aloft into the region of the clouds. I am like the bee that busy works in the sweet wild thyme around the groves and banks of wide-watered Tibur. Even so small and toiling hard like her I build my songs.”

  This attitude toward his work is typical of him. Never was there a poet of fewer pretensions, and yet with all his gay self-depreciation he knew his powers and that he had “raised a monument more lasting than brass and higher than the crumbling magnificence of pyramids,” and that he would be read—the words in their unintentional understatement are almost ironical—“as long as pontifex and vestal virgin climbed to the Capitol.”

  A few times this consciousness of his genius overcomes the habit of his genuine modesty, but only once or twice. With more pretentiousness and greater self-assurance he would not have been the completely delightful person he was. His genius must be taken on faith by all who cannot read him in the original, but anyone who cares to run through the poorest translation will perceive something of his delightfulness. No misdirected efforts on the part of a translator can quite prevent that from coming through.

  To begin with, he was that charming contradiction, a man who enjoyed luxury and yet was completely independent of it. The choice bouquet of an old wine was never wasted upon his palate nor the extraordinary recherché dishes of the day which would seem to have been an epicure’s paradise. Horace knew all about the superiority of a chicken drowned in wine to one killed in the usual way, of game caught in mild weather rather than cold, of fruit plucked while the moon was on the wane, and precisely when in the composition of a fish sauce Greek wine should be used. But this exquisiteness amused him far more than it pleased him and he liked best “My own pot of leeks and pease with a thin bit of bread and only three slaves [!] to serve me. A white stone table where two bowls stand with the mixing vessel [the wine was mixed with water, often sea water, to give a tang like Apollinaris], a pitcher and a platter of common earthenware. Thence care-free to sleep and lie abed till ten, with no business to send me early abroad. . . . So I live more sweetly than the greatest of the earth.”

  This sort of thing, repeated again and again, has not a touch
of affectation. It is not the luxury-sated, blasé man about town, sentimentalizing over what nothing would induce him to try. It is the very reverse of this, the freedom given by a mind which can find securely the source of pleasure within and needs no outside stimulus—except, to be sure, a cup of wine or, rather, many cups. On this point Horace would have admitted no opposition. He had the most positive convictions on wine’s virtue as well as its delights. “No songs can please nor yet live long which are written by those who drink water”; “Plant no tree before the sacred vine, O Varus. To the dry all things are hard by God’s ordainment”; “O jar of wine born when I was born, worthy to be brought forth on a glad day, come out now to us, O gentle spur of the spirit, without you harsh and hard to move.” It is the subject of his most impassioned verse.

  Still, any vino del paese was good enough for him, so he always protested, and when Maecenas gave him a country place—Horace’s Sabine Farm, the most famous farm in literature, his more than pleasure, his unalloyed delight, in plainest country living overflows in poem after poem: “This was among my prayers: a portion of land, not so big, a garden and near the house a spring of never-failing water, and a little wood beyond. The gods have done more and better. It is well. I ask no more.” But he can never have done writing about it: “Not ivory nor gold in fretted ceilings shine in my house, not marble from Hymettus. . . . Nothing beyond what I have do I ask, blessed in my one, my only Sabine farm.” It was his “corner of earth that smiled at him before all others.” He prays to “the lord of the curved lyre”: “What does his poet ask of Apollo enshrined? Not rich grain lands in fertile Sardinia, not gold nor ivory of India. Olives are my fare and tender herbs from field and garden. O Son of Latona, give me to enjoy what is mine—and with unweakened mind an old age not uncomely or deprived of poetry.” “There are those who have not,” he wrote. “There is one who does not care to have.”

  This attitude of moderation was his by nature; it was also in accordance with his reasoned convictions. He was not a man who lived carelessly on the surface. That was his way only in his love affairs. He was a serious observer of life. Temperamentally he was inclined to be happy and he wanted happiness intensely, but by a necessity of his nature he could find it only if he thought things through. He had to have some secure basis to build upon; he could not and would not feel himself the sport of a blind chance he had no defense against. That way lay unreasoning misery for him and he refused to acquiesce miserably in an existence that was not reasonable. He insisted upon finding sense in the way things are, and so a possibility of living serenely through life’s cares and troubles, difficulties and dangers. It was the impulse which plays a great part in religion. It is true that Horace was far from what we think of as a religious nature. Strange thoughts that transcend our wonted themes and into glory peep were never for a moment his. He knew nothing about mystic heights as a man any more than he did as a poet, but he had a religion, although it was constructed by common sense alone and adapted to satisfy only its sober demands.

  Of formal religion in Rome at that time there was little left, and nothing at all that could make a rational appeal. The emperor was almost at the point of being the one true effective god. But Greek thought had found its way to Rome. There had come seekers for truth in the Platonic fashion, not from lovely visions of deities incarnate in woodland, river and sea, but from what men found within themselves. Out of these philosophies Horace took what suited him and he laid a foundation he could build his life upon.

  Happiness and misery, he said to himself, are inside emotions, not outside facts; essentially, then, they are under my control. I can do nothing about what fate sends me, but I can do everything about the way I take what is sent. I can so order my own spirit that no matter how outrageous fortune is I can keep my balance within unmoved. “Do you know, friend, what I feel, for what I pray? Not to waver to and fro, hanging upon the hope of the dubious hour. God may give this or that—life—wealth. I will my own self make my spirit undisturbed.”

  There lies the whole secret of life. The only important matter is what we are. “The fool,” he writes, “finds fault with a place. The fault is not there but in the mind, and that can never escape from itself.” It is his underlying thought, expressed in countless ways; “They change their sky, but not their mind, who run across the sea. The thing you seek is here, in every meanest village, if a balanced and serene temper does not fail you.” Always he urges, “Prepare what will make you a friend to your own self.”

  And the receipt to secure this even balance, this equanimity—a word made up from the two Latin words Horace uses to express the idea—is to live within careful limits, to contract one’s desires, to forgo mountain tops and perilous ecstasies, and choose forever and always safety first. This is Horace’s creed of “golden mediocrity,” which he who practices will be secure alike from the envy threatening great palaces and—since he will never take a risk—from the danger of helpless, sordid poverty. For life’s voyage shorten sail, no matter what the wind. “Even,” he writes, “the wise man is a fool if he seeks virtue itself beyond what is enough.”

  So, in perfect poise, undistracted by hope or fear, a man can fully live where every one of us must, whether we will or not and no matter how hard we let the future press upon us, in this very present, passing moment. “He is master of himself and happy who as the day ends can say, I have lived—tomorrow come cloud, come sunshine. Not Jove himself can blot out one single deed that lies behind, nor can he ever bring to naught or make undone what once the flying hour has borne away.” The only sure thing in life is death, “pale death, which knocks with equal hand at poor men’s hovels and the towers of kings,” and “life’s brief space forbids long hope.” Then “Believe that each dawn brings your last day to you,” and “Why not beneath a tall plane tree or this pine here recline at ease, roses to wreathe the hair and perfumes of Araby to give sweet scents. Boy, be swift to quench the fire of the wine-cup with water from the stream gliding by, and fetch us Lyde. Bid her make haste with her ivory lyre.” Horace had noted well Catullus’ words to Lesbia and he could echo them from his heart: “The swift moons can repair their losses in the sky. We, when we are gone where the great dead have passed, are dust and shadow. Who knows if the gods will add tomorrow to today.”

  That is Horace’s philosophy and, in general, the religion of the man of the world. It is a sad religion, for all its emphasis upon Lyde and her lyre and the pleasant river bank. He who embraces it sincerely will always be able to command a merry spirit for others, but his own self melancholy will claim. There is no combination more attractive. The underlying sadness tempers the gaiety to something gentle and infinitely endearing. It is genuinely gay; any appeal for pity, however subtle, would be ruinous, but always it suggests a spirit that is gallant to look at darkness undismayed, but deeply, sorrowfully regretful that fate has so ordained. This is the innermost secret of Horace’s never-failing charm, the reason, more than all his felicities of words and measures, why the generations since have loved him as his own did. One of his devoted admirers wrote soon after his death: “Admit him and he plays around your heart”—plays always, but always close to the heart.

  And yet, deplorable contradiction, never was poet such an inveterate preacher. Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away. Horace was not aware of this fact; no Roman was. The Roman idea was that the more a man preached, provided he did it with due regard to metrical considerations, the greater poet he was. Morality in rolling hexameters was poetry’s highest achievement, along with patriotism, of course. How far preaching came natural to Horace, how far Rome thrust it upon him, no one now can know. As a Roman who was a poet he must press his poetry into the service of the state and urge citizens on to their duty. One does not really resent his doing so in the Satires and Epistles. He writes them avowedly as a teacher and often he teaches very pleasantly and wisely. But in his odes it is enraging in the midst of lovely poetr
y to come upon this sort of thing: “The centuries, fertile in vice, have debased marriage and the race and the home. Derived from this source ruin has overflowed country and people. The grown girl delights to be taught the movements of the voluptuous dance.” Or, “Now few acres are left for the plough by the great mass of regal buildings. . . . Not thus was it ordered when Romulus ruled or unshaven Cato or by the maxims of the ancients. Their private list of possessions was short, the common wealth was great.” Or, “Force devoid of intelligence falls by its own weight,” and so on, with all the excellent results force under wise control can produce. A great deal about how the world is running down until by now there is little hope left for it: “Our parents, worse than our grandparents, gave birth to us who are worse than they, and we shall in our turn bear offspring still more evil.”

  It would be hard to find in the whole of Greek literature as much preaching as Horace does all by himself. Euripides saw war as completely evil and he wrote the greatest anti-war piece of literature there is, the Trojan Women, but from first to last he never mounts the pulpit. He never denounces war at all; he only shows what it is. The preacher, full-fledged, arrived in literature with the Romans. Even Plautus, so averse to it by nature, had now and then to assume the office. Terence took eagerly to it and so did Cicero. But Horace, in proportion to the rest of his writing, more than they all. There was a mighty moulding force at work to make this singer of lovely songs, this gay and humorous spirit, this mind of serene detachment, into the earnest denouncer of vice and exhorter to virtue. Rome was back of Horace. And yet, though one may wish a kinder fate had placed him in Athens in her prime, there is a warm and winning quality in his eagerness to do his bit in helping Augustus turn the empire back to the good old ways and create again a plain-living, high-acting Rome. We look with awe upon the great Greek tragedians who seem hardly aware of mere mortality. Horace plays around our heart. The Greek poets are our masters; the Latin poets are our own familiar friends.