Horace

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"Now with his spent and languid flocks
The wearied shepherd seeks the shade,
The river cool, the shaggy rocks,
That overhang the tangled glade,
And by the stream no breeze's gush
Disturbs the universal hush.

"Thou dost devise with sleepless zeal
What course may best the state beseem,
And, fearful for the City's weal,
Weigh'st anxiously each hostile scheme
That may be hatching far away
In Scythia, India, or Cathay.

"Most wisely Jove in thickest night
The issues of the future veils,
And laughs at the self-torturing wight
Who with imagined terrors quails.
The present only is thine own,
Then use it well, ere it has flown.

"All else which may by time be bred
Is like a river of the plain,
Now gliding gently o'er its bed
Along to the Etruscan main,
Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast,
Uprooted trees, and boulders vast,

"And flocks, and houses, all in drear
Confusion tossed from shore to shore,
While mountains far, and forests near
Reverberate the rising roar,
When lashing rains among the hills
To fury wake the quiet rills.

"Lord of himself that man will be,
And happy in his life alway,
Who still at eve can say with free
Contented soul, 'I've lived to-day!
Let Jove to-morrow, if he will,
With blackest clouds the welkin fill,

"'Or flood it all with sunlight pure,
Yet from the past he cannot take
Its influence, for that is sure,
Nor can he mar or bootless make
Whate'er of rapture and delight
The hours have borne us in their flight.'"

The poet here passes, by one of those sudden transitions for which he
is remarkable, into the topic of the fickleness of fortune, which
seems to have no immediate connection with what has gone before,--but
only seems, for this very fickleness is but a fresh reason for making
ourselves, by self-possession and a just estimate of what is essential
to happiness, independent of the accidents of time or chance.

"Fortune, who with malicious glee
Her merciless vocation plies,
Benignly smiling now on me,
Now on another, bids him rise,
And in mere wantonness of whim
Her favours shifts from me to him.

"I laud her whilst by me she holds,
But if she spread her pinions swift,
I wrap me in my virtue's folds,
And, yielding back her every gift,
Take refuge in the life so free
Of bare but honest poverty.

"You will not find me, when the mast
Groans 'neath the stress of southern gales,
To wretched prayers rush off, nor cast
Vows to the great gods, lest my bales
From Tyre or Cyprus sink, to be
Fresh booty for the hungry sea.

"When others then in wild despair
To save their cumbrous wealth essay,
I to the vessel's skiff repair,
And, whilst the Twin Stars light my way,
Safely the breeze my little craft
Shall o'er the Aegean billows waft."

Maecenas was of a melancholy temperament, and liable to great
depression of spirits. Not only was his health at no time robust, but
he was constitutionally prone to fever, which more than once proved
nearly fatal to him. On his first appearance in the theatre after one
of these dangerous attacks, he was received with vehement cheers, and
Horace alludes twice to this incident in his Odes, as if he knew that
it had given especial pleasure to his friend. To mark the event the
poet laid up in his cellar a jar of Sabine wine, and some years
afterwards he invites Maecenas to come and partake of it in this
charming lyric (Odes, I. 20):--

"Our common Sabine wine shall be
The only drink I'll give to thee,
In modest goblets, too;
'Twas stored in crock of Grecian delf,
Dear knight Maecenas, by myself,
That very day when through
The theatre thy plaudits rang,
And sportive echo caught the clang,
And answered from the banks
Of thine own dear paternal stream,
Whilst Vatican renewed the theme
Of homage and of thanks!
Old Caecuban, the very best,
And juice in vats Calenian pressed,
You drink at home, I know:
My cups no choice Falernian fills,
Nor unto them do Formiae's hills
Impart a tempered glow."

About the same time that Maecenas recovered from this fever, Horace
made a narrow escape from being killed by the fall of a tree, and,
what to him was a great aggravation of the disaster, upon his own
beloved farm (Odes, II. 13). He links the two events together as a
marked coincidence in the following Ode (II. 17). His friend had
obviously been a prey to one of his fits of low spirits, and vexing
the kindly soul of the poet by gloomy anticipations of an early death.
Suffering, as Maecenas did, from those terrible attacks of
sleeplessness to which he was subject, and which he tried
ineffectually to soothe by the plash of falling water and the sound of
distant music, [Footnote: Had Horace this in his mind when he wrote
_"Non avium citharoeque cantus somnum reducent_?"--(Odes, III.
1.) "Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre / Shall his lost sleep
restore."] such misgivings were only too natural. The case was too
serious this time for Horace to think of rallying his friend into a
brighter humour. He may have even seen good cause to share his fears;
for his heart is obviously moved to its very depths, and his sympathy
and affection well out in words, the pathos of which is still as fresh
as the day they first came with comfort to the saddened spirits of
Maecenas himself.

"Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears?
Why, oh Maecenas, why?
Before thee lies a train of happy years:
Yes, nor the gods nor I
Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust,
Who art my stay, my glory, and my trust!

"Ah, if untimely Fate should snatch thee hence,
Thee, of my soul a part,
Why should I linger on, with deadened sense,
And ever-aching heart,
A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine?
No, no, one day shall see thy death and mine!

"Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath;
Yes, we shall go, shall go,
Hand link'd in hand, whene'er thou leadest, both
The last sad road below!
Me neither the Chimaera's fiery breath,
Nor Gyges, even could Gyges rise from death,

"With all his hundred hands from thee shall sever;
For in such sort it hath
Pleased the dread Fates, and Justice potent ever,
To interweave our path. [1]
Beneath whatever aspect thou wert born,
Libra, or Scorpion fierce, or Capricorn,

"The blustering tyrant of the western deep,
This well I know, my friend,
Our stars in wondrous wise one orbit keep,
And in one radiance blend.
From thee were Saturn's baleful rays afar
Averted by great Jove's refulgent star,

"And His hand stayed Fate's downward-swooping wing,
When thrice with glad acclaim
The teeming theatre was heard to ring,
And thine the honoured name:
So had the falling timber laid me low,
But Pan in mercy warded off the blow,

"Pan who keeps watch o'er easy souls like mine.
Remember, then, to rear
In gratitude to Jove a votive shrine,
And slaughter many a steer,
Whilst I, as fits, an humbler tribute pay,
And a meek lamb upon his altar lay."

[1]
So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:--
"He was my friend, the truest friend on earth;
A strong and mighty influence joined our birth."

What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen,
did happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas "first deceased;" and
Horace, like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph,

"For a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died."

But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, which
must have been about the year B.C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine.
Maecenas lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, we
may believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when his
pulse was low, and his heart sick and weary.

Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing Books
I. and II., which he gave to the world (B.C. 24). The first of these
Odes, like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. They
had for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately in
circulation several years before. That they should have met with
success was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Rome
must have felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of a
more recent time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which was
their ideal, into their native verse; and a feeling of national pride
must have helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his ear
upon the lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayed
to imitate them in their own tongue,--a mistake as great as for Goethe
or Heine to have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into the
language of Herrick or of Burns. But Horace was preserved from
perseverance in this mistake by his natural good sense, or, as he puts
it himself, with a fair poetic licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome's
great founder Quirinus warning him in a dream, that

"To think of adding to the mighty throng
Of the great paragons of Grecian song,
Were no less mad an act than his who should
Into a forest carry logs of wood."

These exercises may not, however, have been without their value in
enabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into his
native verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if we
except Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was the
last. "Of lyrists," says Quintilian, "Horace is alone, one might say,
worthy to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full of
playful delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as well
as in expression, shows a most happy daring." Time has confirmed the
verdict; and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words of
one of our greatest scholars:--

"Horace's style," says Mr H. A. J. Munro, in the introduction to his
edition of the poet, "is throughout his own, borrowed from none who
preceded him, successfully imitated by none who came after him. The
Virgilian heroic was appropriated by subsequent generations of poets,
and adapted to their purposes with signal success. The hendecasyllable
and scazon of Catullus became part and parcel of the poetic heritage
of Rome, and Martial employs them only less happily than their
matchless creator. But the moulds in which Horace cast his lyrical and
his satirical thoughts were broken at his death. The style neither of
Persius nor of Juvenal has the faintest resemblance to that of their
common master. Statius, whose hendecasyllables are passable enough,
has given us one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode, which recall the bald and
constrained efforts of a modern schoolboy. I am sure he could not have
written any two consecutive stanzas of Horace; and if he could not,
who could?"

Before he published the first two books of his Odes, Horace had fairly
felt his wings, and knew they could carry him gracefully and well. He
no longer hesitates, as he had done while a writer of Satires only (p.
55), to claim the title of poet; but at the same time he throws
himself, in his introductory Ode, with a graceful deference, upon the
judgment of Maecenas. Let that only seal his lyrics with approval, and
he will feel assured of his title to rank with the great sons of
song:--

"Do thou but rank me 'mong
The sacred bards of lyric song,
I'll soar beyond the lists of time,
And strike the stars with head sublime."

In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, the
poet gives way to a burst of joyous anticipation of future fame,
figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the then
known regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book several
years afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which,
unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. In
both he alludes to the lowliness of his birth, speaking of himself in
the former as a child of poor parents--"_pauperum sanguis
parentum_;" in the latter as having risen to eminence from a mean
estate-"_ex humili potens_." These touches of egotism, the
sallies of some brighter hour, are not merely venial; they are
delightful in a man so habitually modest.

"I've reared a monument, my own,
More durable than brass;
Yea, kingly pyramids of stone
In height it doth surpass.

"Rain shall not sap, nor driving blast
Disturb its settled base,
Nor countless ages rolling past
Its symmetry deface.

"I shall not wholly die. Some part,
Nor that a little, shall
Escape the dark Destroyer's dart,
And his grim festival.

"For long as with his Vestals mute
Rome's Pontifex shall climb
The Capitol, my fame shall shoot
Fresh buds through future time.

"Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came
Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde
Of rustic boors to sway, my name
Shall be a household word;

"As one who rose from mean estate,
The first with poet fire
Aeolic song to modulate
To the Italian lyre.

"Then grant, Melpomene, thy son
Thy guerdon proud to wear,
And Delphic laurels, duly won.
Bind thou upon my hair!"

CHAPTER IX.

HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS.--HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE.

No intimate friend of Maecenas was likely to be long a stranger to
Augustus; and it is most improbable that Augustus, who kept up his
love of good literature amid all the distractions of conquest and
empire, should not have early sought the acquaintance of a man of such
conspicuous ability as Horace. But when they first became known to
each other is uncertain. In more than one of the Epodes Horace speaks
of him, but not in terms to imply personal acquaintance. Some years
further on it is different. When Trebatius (Satires, II. 1) is urging
the poet, if write he must, to renounce satire, and to sing of
Caesar's triumphs, from which he would reap gain as well as glory,
Horace replies,--

"Most worthy sir, that's just the thing
I'd like especially to sing;
But at the task my spirits faint,
For 'tis not every one can paint
Battalions, with their bristling wall
Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul,
With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed,
Or Parthian stricken from his steed."

Then why not sing, rejoins Trebatius, his justice and his fortitude,

"Like sage Lucilius, in his lays
To Scipio Africanus' praise?"

The reply is that of a man who had obviously been admitted to personal
contact with the Caesar, and, with instinctive good taste, recoiled
from doing what he knew would be unacceptable to him, unless called
for by some very special occasion:--

"When time and circumstance suggest,
I shall not fail to do my best;
But never words of mine shall touch
Great Caesar's ear, but only such
As are to the occasion due,
And spring from my conviction, too;
For stroke him with an awkward hand,
And he kicks out--you understand?"

an allusion, no doubt, to the impatience entertained by Augustus, to
which Suetonius alludes, of the indiscreet panegyrics of poetasters by
which he was persecuted. The gossips of Rome clearly believed
(Satires, II. 6) that the poet was intimate with Caesar; for he is "so
close to the gods"--that is, on such a footing with Augustus and his
chief advisers--that they assume, as a matter of course, he must have
early tidings of all the most recent political news at first hand.
However this may be, by the time the Odes were published Horace had
overcome any previous scruples, and sang in no measured terms the
praises of him, the back-stroke of whose rebuke he had professed
himself so fearful of provoking.

All Horace's prepossessions must have been against one of the leaders
before whose opposition Brutus, the ideal hero of his youthful
enthusiasm, had succumbed. Neither were the sanguinary proscriptions
and ruthless spoliations by which the triumvirate asserted its power,
and from a large share of the guilt of which Augustus could not shake
himself free, calculated to conciliate his regards. He had much to
forget and to forgive before he could look without aversion upon the
blood-stained avenger of the great Caesar. But in times like those in
which Horace's lot was cast, we do not judge of men or things as we do
when social order is unbroken, when political crime is never condoned,
and the usual standards of moral judgment are rigidly enforced. Horace
probably soon came to see, what is now very apparent, that when Brutus
and his friends struck down Caesar, they dealt a deathblow to what,
but for this event, might have proved to be a well-ordered government.
Liberty was dead long before Caesar aimed at supremacy. It was dead
when individuals like Sulla and Marius had become stronger than the
laws; and the death of Caesar was, therefore, but the prelude to fresh
disasters, and to the ultimate investiture with absolute power of
whoever, among the competitors for it, should come triumphantly out of
what was sure to be a protracted and a sanguinary struggle. In what
state did Horace find Italy after his return from Philippi? Drenched
in the blood of its citizens, desolated by pillage, harassed by daily
fears of internecine conflict at home and of invasion from abroad, its
sovereignty a stake played for by political gamblers. In such a state
of things it was no longer the question, how the old Roman
constitution was to be restored, but how the country itself was to be
saved from ruin. Prestige was with the nephew of the Caesar whose
memory the Roman populace had almost from his death worshipped as
divine; and whose conspicuous ability and address, as well as those of
his friends, naturally attracted to his side the ablest survivors of
the party of Brutus. The very course of events pointed to him as the
future chief of the state. Lepidus, by the sheer weakness and
indecision of his character, soon went to the wall; and the power of
Antony was weakened by his continued absence from Rome, and ultimately
destroyed by the malign influence exerted upon his character by the
fascinations of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The disastrous failure
of his Parthian expedition (B.C. 36), and the tidings that reached
Rome from time to time of the mad extravagance of his private life, of
his abandonment of the character of a Roman citizen, and his
assumption of the barbaric pomp and habits of an oriental despot, made
men look to his great rival as the future head of the state,
especially as they saw that rival devoting all his powers to the task
of reconciling divisions and restoring peace to a country exhausted by
a long series of civil broils, of giving security to life and property
at home, and making Rome once more a name of awe throughout the world.
Was it, then, otherwise than natural that Horace, in common with many
of his friends, should have been not only content to forget the past,
with its bloody and painful records, but should even have attached
himself cordially to the party of Augustus? Whatever the private aims
of the Caesar may have been, his public life showed that he had the
welfare of his country strongly at heart, and the current of events
had made it clear that he at least was alone able to end the strife of
faction by assuming the virtual supremacy of the state.

Pollio, Messalla, Varus, and others of the Brutus party, have not been
denounced as renegades because they arrived at a similar conclusion,
and lent the whole influence of their abilities and their names to the
cause of Augustus. Horace has not been so fortunate; and because he
has expressed,--what was no doubt the prevailing feeling of his
countrymen,--gratitude to Augustus for quelling civil strife, for
bringing glory to the empire, and giving peace, security, and
happiness to his country by the power of his arms and the wisdom of
his administration, the poet has been called a traitor to the nobler
principles of his youth--an obsequious flatterer of a man whom he
ought to have denounced to posterity as a tyrant. _Adroit
esclave_ is the epithet applied to him in this respect by Voltaire,
who idolises him as a moralist and poet. But it carries little weight
in the mouth of the cynic who could fawn with more than courtierly
complaisance on a Frederick or a Catherine, and weave graceful
flatteries for the Pompadour, and who "dearly loved a lord" in his
practice, however he may have sneered at aristocracy in his writings.
But if we put ourselves as far as we can into the poet's place, we
shall come to a much more lenient conclusion. He could no doubt
appreciate thoroughly the advantages of a free republic or of a purely
constitutional government, and would, of course, have preferred either
of these for his country. But while theory pointed in that direction,
facts were all pulling the opposite way. The materials for the
establishment of such a state of things did not exist in a strong
middle class or an equal balance of parties. The choice lay between
the anarchy of a continued strife of selfish factions, and the
concentration of power in the hands of some individual who should be
capable of enforcing law at home and commanding respect abroad. So at
least Horace obviously thought; and surely it is reasonable to suppose
that the man, whose integrity and judgment in all other matters are
indisputable, was more likely than the acutest critic or historian of
modern times can possibly be to form a just estimate of what was the
possible best for his country, under the actual circumstances of the
time.

Had Horace at once become the panegyrist of the Caesar, the sincerity
of his convictions might have, been open to question. But thirteen
years at least had elapsed between the battle of Philippi and the
composition of the Second Ode of the First Book, which is the first
direct acknowledgment by Horace of Augustus as the chief of the state.
This Ode is directly inspired by gratitude for the cessation of civil
strife, and the skilful administration which had brought things to the
point when the whole fighting force of the kingdom, which had so long
been wasted in that strife, could be directed to spreading the glory
of the Roman name, and securing its supremacy throughout its conquered
provinces. The allusions to Augustus in this and others of the earlier
Odes are somewhat cold and formal in their tone. There is a visible
increase in glow and energy in those of a later date, when, as years
went on, the Caesar established fresh claims on the gratitude of Rome
by his firm, sagacious, and moderate policy, by the general prosperity
which grew up under his administration, by the success of his arms, by
the great public works which enhanced the splendour and convenience of
the capital, by the restoration of the laws, and by his zealous
endeavour to stem the tide of immorality which had set in during the
protracted disquietudes of the civil wars. It is true that during this
time Augustus was also establishing the system of Imperialism, which
contained in itself the germs of tyranny, with all its brutal excesses
on the one hand, and its debasing influence upon the subject nation on
the other. But we who have seen into what it developed must remember
that these baneful fruits of the system were of lengthened growth; and
Horace, who saw no farther into the future than the practical
politicians of his time, may be forgiven if he dwelt only upon the
immediate blessings which the government of Augustus effected, and the
peace and security which came with a tenfold welcome after the long
agonies of the civil wars.

The glow and sincerity of feeling of which we have spoken are
conspicuous in the following Ode (IV. 2), addressed to Iulus Antonius,
the son of the triumvir, of whose powers as a poet nothing is known
beyond the implied recognition of them contained in this Ode. The
Sicambri, with two other German tribes, had crossed the Rhine, laid
waste part of the Roman territory in Gaul, and inflicted so serious a
blow on Lollius, the Roman legate, that Augustus himself repaired to
Gaul to retrieve the defeat and resettle the province. This he
accomplished triumphantly (B.C. 17); and we may assume that the Ode
was written while the tidings of his success were still fresh, and the
Romans, who had been greatly agitated by the defeat of Lollius, were
looking eagerly forward to his return. Apart from, its other merits,
the Ode is interesting from the estimate Horace makes in it of his own
powers, and his avowal of the labour which his verses cost him.

"Iulus, he who'd rival Pindar's fame,
On waxen wings doth sweep
The Empyréan steep,
To fall like Icarus, and with his name
Endue the glassy deep.

"Like to a mountain stream, that roars
From bank to bank along,
When Autumn rains are strong,
So deep-mouthed Pindar lifts his voice, and pours
His fierce tumultuous song.

"Worthy Apollo's laurel wreath,
Whether he strike the lyre
To love and young desire,
While bold and lawless numbers grow beneath
His mastering touch of fire;

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