Horace

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"That pest,
The Dog, whom husbandmen detest."

Rupilius, an old hand at slang, replies with a volley of rough
sarcasms, "such as among the vineyards fly," and

"Would make the passer-by
Shout filthy names, but shouting fly"--

a description of vintage slang which is as true to-day as it was then.
The conclusion is curious, as a punning allusion to the hereditary
fame of Brutus as a puller-down of kings, which it must have required
some courage to publish, when Augustus was omnipotent in Rome.

"But Grecian Persius, after he
Had been besprinkled plenteously
With gall Italic, cries, 'By all
The gods above, on thee I call,
Oh Brutus, thou of old renown,
For putting kings completely down,
To save us! Wherefore do you not
Despatch this King here on the spot?
One of the tasks is this, believe,
Which you are destined to achieve!'"

This is just such a squib as a young fellow might be expected to dash
off for the amusement of his brother officers, while the incident
which led to it was yet fresh in their minds. Slight as it is, one
feels sure its preservation by so severe a critic of his own writings
as Horace was due to some charm of association, or possibly to the
fact that in it he had made his first essay in satire. The defeat of
Brutus at Philippi (B.C. 42) brought Horace's military career to a
close. Even before this decisive event, his dream of the re-
establishment of liberty and the old Roman constitution had probably
begun to fade away, under his actual experience of the true aims and
motives of the mass of those whom Brutus and Cassius had hitherto been
leading to victory, and satiating with plunder. Young aristocrats, who
sneered at the freedman's son, were not likely to found any system of
liberty worthy of the name, or to use success for nobler purposes than
those of selfish ambition. Fighting was not Horace's vocation, and
with the death of Brutus and those nobler spirits, who fell at
Philippi rather than survive their hopes of freedom, his motive for
fighting was at an end. To prolong a contest which its leaders had
surrendered in despair was hopeless. He did not, therefore, like
Pompeius Varus and others of his friends, join the party which, for a
time, protracted the struggle under the younger Pompey. But, like his
great leader, he had fought for a principle; nor could he have
regarded otherwise than with horror the men who had overthrown Brutus,
reeking as they were with the blood of a thousand proscriptions, and
reckless as they had shown themselves of every civil right and social
obligation. As little, therefore, was he inclined to follow the
example of others of his distinguished friends and companions in arms,
such as Valerius Messalla and Aelius Lamia, who not merely made their
peace with Antony and Octavius, but cemented it by taking service in
their army.

CHAPTER II.

RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI.--EARLY POEMS.

Availing himself of the amnesty proclaimed by the conquerors, Horace
found his way back to Rome. His father was dead; how long before is
not known. If the little property at Venusia had remained unsold, it
was of course confiscated. When the lands of men, like Virgil, who had
taken no active part in the political conflicts of the day, were being
seized to satisfy the rapacity of a mercenary soldiery, Horace's
paternal acres were not likely to escape. In Rome he found himself
penniless. How to live was the question; and, fortunately for
literature, "chill penury" did not repress, but, on the contrary,
stimulated his "noble rage."

"Bated in spirit, and with pinions clipped,
Of all the means my father left me stripped,
Want stared me in the face, so then and there
I took to scribbling verse in sheer despair."

Despoiled of his means, and smarting with defeat, Horace was just in
the state of mind to strike vigorously at men and manners which he did
not like. Young, ardent, constitutionally hot in temper, eager to
assert, amid the general chaos of morals public and private, the
higher principles of the philosophic schools from which he had so
recently come, irritated by the thousand mortifications to which a man
of cultivated tastes and keenly alive to beauty is exposed in a
luxurious city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yet
scarcely valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to the
besetting temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to write
it in a merciless spirit. As he says of himself (Odes, I. 15),

"In youth's pleasant spring-time,
The shafts of my passion at random I flung,
And, dashing headlong into petulant rhyme,
I recked neither where nor how fiercely I stung."

Youth is always intolerant, and it is so easy to be severe; so
seductive to say brilliant things, whether they be true or not. But
there came a day, and it came soon, when Horace, saw that triumphs
gained in this way were of little value, and when he was anxious that
his friends should join with him in consigning his smart and scurril
lines (_celeres et criminosos Iambos_) to oblivion. The _amende_ for
some early lampoon which he makes in the Ode just quoted, though
ostensibly addressed to a lady who had been its victim, was probably
intended to cover a wider field.

Personal satire is always popular, but the fame it begets is bought
dearly at the cost of lifelong enmities and many after-regrets. That
Horace in his early writings was personal and abusive is very clear,
both from his own language and from a few of the poems of this class
and period which survive. Some of these have no value, except as
showing how badly even Horace could write, and how sedulously the
better feeling and better taste of his riper years led him to avoid
that most worthless form of satire which attacks where rejoinder is
impossible, and irritates the temper but cannot possibly amend the
heart. In others, the lash is applied with no less justice than
vigour, as in the following invective, the fourth of the Epodes:--

"Such hate as nature meant to be
'Twixt lamb and wolf I feel for thee,
Whose hide by Spanish scourge is tanned,
And legs still bear the fetter's brand!
Though of your gold you strut so vain,
Wealth cannot change the knave in grain.
How! see you not, when striding down
The Via Sacra [1]in your gown
Good six ells wide, the passers there
Turn on you with indignant stare?
'This wretch,' such gibes your ear invade,
'By the Triumvirs' [2] scourges flayed,
Till even the crier shirked his toil,
Some thousand acres ploughs of soil
Falernian, and with his nags
Wears out the Appian highway's flags;
Nay, on the foremost seats, despite
Of Otho, sits and apes the knight.
What boots it to despatch a fleet
So large, so heavy, so complete,
Against a gang of rascal knaves,
Thieves, corsairs, buccaneers, and slaves,
If villain of such vulgar breed
Is in the foremost rank to lead?'"

[1]
The Sacred Way, leading to the Capitol, a favourite lounge.

[2]
When a slave was being scourged, under the orders of the
Triumviri Capitales, a public crier stood by, and proclaimed the
nature of his crime.

Modern critics may differ as to whom this bitter infective was aimed
at, but there could have been no doubt on that subject in Rome at the
time. And if, as there is every reason to conclude, it was levelled at
Sextus Menas, the lines, when first shown about among Horace's
friends, must have told with great effect, and they were likely to be
remembered long after the infamous career of this double-dyed traitor
had come to a close. Menas was a freedman of Pompey the Great, and a
trusted officer of his son Sextus. [Footnote: Shakespeare has
introduced him in "Antony and Cleopatra," along with Menecrates and
Varrius, as "friends to Sextus Pompeius."] He had recently (B.C. 38)
carried over with him to Augustus a portion of Pompey's fleet which
was under his command, and betrayed into his hands the islands of
Corsica and Sardinia. For this act of treachery he was loaded with
wealth and honours; and when Augustus, next year, fitted out a naval
expedition against Sextus Pompeius, Menas received a command. It was
probably lucky for Horace that this swaggering upstart, who was not
likely to be scrupulous as to his means of revenge, went over the very
next year to his former master, whom he again abandoned within a year
to sell himself once more to Augustus. That astute politician put it
out of his power to play further tricks with the fleet, by giving him
a command in Pannonia, where he was killed, B.C. 36, at the siege of
Siscia, the modern Sissek.

Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as a
writer of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of his
models Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully--
for bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man--he
showed in other compositions signs of the true poetic spirit, which
afterwards found expression in the consummate grace and finish of his
Odes. To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from
internal evidence, appears to have been written B.C. 40, when the
state of Italy, convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fill
him with despair. Horace had frequent occasion between this period and
the battle of Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed the
long struggle for supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to his
countrymen against the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray,
which might have been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, and
spreading the lustre of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose this
poem written when the tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusian
campaign had arrived in Rome,--the reduction of the town of Perusia by
famine, and the massacre of from two to three hundred prisoners,
almost all of equestrian or senatorial rank,--we can well understand
the feeling under which the poem is written.

TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE.

Another age in civil wars will soon be spent and worn,
And by her native strength our Rome be wrecked and overborne,
That Rome, the Marsians could not crush, who border on our lands,
Nor the shock of threatening Porsena with his Etruscan bands,
Nor Capua's strength that rivalled ours, nor Spartacus the stern,
Nor the faithless Allobrogian, who still for change doth yearn.
Ay, what Gennania's blue-eyed youth quelled not with ruthless sword,
Nor Hannibal by our great sires detested and abhorred,
We shall destroy with impious hands imbrued in brother's gore,
And wild beasts of the wood shall range our native land once more.
A foreign foe, alas! shall tread The City's ashes down,
And his horse's ringing hoofs shall smite her places of renown,
And the bones of great Quirinus, now religiously enshrined,
Shall be flung by sacrilegious hands to the sunshine and the wind.
And if ye all from ills so dire ask how yourselves to free,
Or such at least as would not hold your lives unworthily,
No better counsel can I urge, than that which erst inspired
The stout Phocaeans when from their doomed city they retired,
Their fields, their household gods, their shrines surrendering as a
prey
To the wild boar and the ravening wolf; [1] so we, in our dismay,
Where'er our wandering steps may chance to carry us should go,
Or wheresoe'er across the seas the fitful winds may blow.
How think ye then? If better course none offer, why should we
Not seize the happy auspices, and boldly put to sea?
But let us swear this oath;--"Whene'er, if e'er shall come the time,
Rocks upwards from the deep shall float, return shall not be crime;
Nor we be loath to back our sails, the ports of home to seek,
When the waters of the Po shall lave Matinum's rifted peak.
Or skyey Apenninus down into the sea be rolled,
Or wild unnatural desires such monstrous revel hold,
That in the stag's endearments the tigress shall delight,
And the turtle-dove adulterate with the falcon and the kite,
That unsuspicious herds no more shall tawny lions fear,
And the he-goat, smoothly sleek of skin, through the briny deep
career!"
This having sworn, and what beside may our returning stay,
Straight let us all, this City's doomed inhabitants, away,
Or those that rise above the herd, the few of nobler soul;
The craven and the hopeless here on their ill-starred beds may loll.
Ye who can feel and act like men, this woman's wail give o'er,
And fly to regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore!
The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles,
To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles!
Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with sheaves,
And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all her
leaves;
Where the olive buds and burgeons, to its promise ne'er untrue,
And the russet fig adorns the tree, that graffshoot never knew;
Where honey from the hollow oaks doth ooze, and crystal rills
Come dancing down with tinkling feet from the sky-dividing hills;
There to the pails the she-goats come, without a master's word,
And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd.
There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make,
Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake;
There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any star
With fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar.
Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching rains
By watery Eurus swept along ne'er devastate the plains,
Nor are the swelling seeds burnt up within the thirsty clods,
So kindly blends the seasons there the King of all the Gods.
That shore the Argonautic bark's stout rowers never gained,
Nor the wily she of Colchis with step unchaste profaned;
The sails of Sidon's galleys ne'er were wafted to that strand,
Nor ever rested on its slopes Ulysses' toilworn band:
For Jupiter, when he with brass the Golden Age alloyed,
That blissful region set apart by the good to be enjoyed;
With brass and then with iron he the ages seared, but ye,
Good men and true, to that bright home arise and follow me!

[1]
The story of the Phocaeans is told by Herodotus (Ch. 165). When
their city was attacked by Harpagus, they retired in a body to make
way for the Persians, who took possession of it. They subsequently
returned, and put to the sword the Persian garrison which had been
left in it by Harpagus. "Afterwards, when this was accomplished,
they pronounced terrible imprecations on any who should desert the
fleet; besides this, they sunk a mass of molten iron, and swore
that they would never return to Phocaea until it should appear
again."

This poem, Lord Lytton has truly said, "has the character of youth in
its defects and its beauties. The redundance of its descriptive
passages is in marked contrast to the terseness of description which
Horace studies in his Odes; and there is something declamatory in its
general tone which is at variance with the simpler utterance of
lyrical art. On the other hand, it has all the warmth of genuine
passion, and in sheer vigour of composition Horace has rarely excelled
it."

The idea of the Happy Isles, referred to in the poem, was a familiar
one with the Greek poets. They became in time confounded with the
Elysian fields, in which the spirits of the departed good and great
enjoyed perpetual rest. It is as such that Ulysses mentions them in
Tennyson's noble monologue:--

"It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down,
It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."

These islands were supposed to be in the far west, and were probably
the poetical amplification of some voyager's account of the Canaries
or of Madeira. There has always been a region beyond the boundaries of
civilisation to which the poet's fancy has turned for ideal happiness
and peace. The difference between ancient and modern is, that material
comforts, as in this epode, enter largely into the dream of the
ancient, while independence, beauty, and grandeur are the chief
elements in the modern picture:--

"Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadth of Tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the
crag;
Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree,
Summer Isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea."

To the same class of Horace's early poems, though probably a few years
later in date, belongs the following eulogium of a country life and
its innocent enjoyments (Epode 2), the leading idea of which was
embodied by Pope in the familiar lines, wonderful for finish as the
production of a boy of eleven, beginning

"Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound."

With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of
Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the
country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his
pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction of
over-excitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely
and uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for him
at least, its quietude does not bring peace. It is not, therefore, at
all out of keeping, although critics have taken exception to the poem
on this ground, that Horace makes Alphius rhapsodise on the charms of
a rural life, and having tried them, creep back within the year to his
moneybags and his ten per cent. It was, besides, a favourite doctrine
with him, which he is constantly enforcing in his later works, that
everybody envies his neighbour's pursuits--until he tries them.

ALPHIUS.

Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
Tills the few acres, which his father tilled,
Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;

The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars,
Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas;
He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars,
Nor at a great man's door consents to freeze.

The tender vine-shoots, budding into life,
He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed,
Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife,
And grafting shoots of promise in their stead;

Or in some valley, up among the hills,
Watches his wandering herds of lowing kine,
Or fragrant jars with liquid honey fills,
Or shears his silly sheep in sunny shine;

Or when Autumnus o'er the smiling land
Lifts up his head with rosy apples crowned,
Joyful he plucks the pears, which erst his hand
Graffed on the stem they're weighing to the ground;

Plucks grapes in noble clusters purple-dyed,
A gift for thee, Priapus, and for thee,
Father Sylvanus, where thou dost preside,
Warding his bounds beneath thy sacred tree.

Now he may stretch his careless limbs to rest,
Where some old ilex spreads its sacred roof;
Now in the sunshine lie, as likes him best,
On grassy turf of close elastic woof.

And streams the while glide on with murmurs low,
And birds are singing 'mong the thickets deep,
And fountains babble, sparkling as they flow,
And with their noise invite to gentle sleep.

But when grim winter comes, and o'er his grounds
Scatters its biting snows with angry roar,
He takes the field, and with a cry of hounds
Hunts down into the toils the foaming boar;

Or seeks the thrush, poor starveling, to ensnare,
In filmy net with bait delusive stored,
Entraps the travelled crane, and timorous hare,
Rare dainties these to glad his frugal board.

Who amid joys like these would not forget
The pangs which love to all its victims bears,
The fever of the brain, the ceaseless fret,
And all the heart's lamentings and despairs?

But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside,
The cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,
Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride
Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills,

Who piles the hearth with logs well dried and old
Against the coming of her wearied lord,
And, when at eve the cattle seek the fold,
Drains their full udders of the milky hoard;

And bringing forth from her well-tended store
A jar of wine, the vintage of the year,
Spreads an unpurchased feast,--oh then, not more
Could choicest Lucrine oysters give me cheer,

Or the rich turbot, or the dainty char,
If ever to our bays the winter's blast
Should drive them in its fury from afar;
Nor were to me a welcomer repast

The Afric hen or the Ionic snipe,
Than olives newly gathered from the tree,
That hangs abroad its clusters rich and ripe,
Or sorrel, that doth love the pleasant lea,

Or mallows wholesome for the body's need,
Or lamb foredoomed upon some festal day
In offering to the guardian gods to bleed,
Or kidling which the wolf hath marked for prey.

What joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep,
Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come;
To see the wearied oxen, as they creep,
Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home!

Or, ranged around the bright and blazing hearth,
To see the hinds, a house's surest wealth,
Beguile the evening with their simple mirth,
And all the cheerfulness of rosy health!

Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent
Upon a country life, called in amain
The money he at usury had lent;--
But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again.

In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see that
Horace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaborate
picture of the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Horace had obviously watched
closely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at
a later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of
the most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of
contrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of
their life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city
life of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6),
after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and the
fast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not from
such as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the
seas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and
direful Hannibal," concluding in words which contrast by their
suggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparison
with the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:--

"But they, of rustic warriors wight
The manly offspring, learned to smite
The soil with Sabine spade,
And faggots they had cut, to bear
Home from the forest, whensoe'er
An austere mother bade;

"What time the sun began to change
The shadows through the mountain range,
And took the yoke away
From the o'erwearied oxen, and
His parting car proclaimed at hand
The kindliest hour of day."

Another of Horace's juvenile poems, unique in subject and in treatment
(Epode 5), gives evidence of a picturesque power of the highest kind,
stimulating the imagination, and swaying it with the feelings of pity
and terror in a way to make us regret that he wrote no others in a
similar vein. We find ourselves at midnight in the gardens of the
sorceress Canidia, whither a boy of good family--his rank being
clearly indicated by the reference to his purple _toga_ and
_bulla_--has been carried off from his home. His terrified
exclamations, with which the poem opens, as Canidia and her three
assistants surround him, glaring on him, with looks significant of
their deadly purpose, through lurid flames fed with the usual ghastly
ingredients of a witch's fire, carry us at once into the horrors of
the scene. While one of the hags sprinkles her hell-drops through the
adjoining house, another is casting up earth from a pit, in which the
boy is presently imbedded to the chin, and killed by a frightful
process of slow torture, in order that a love philtre of irresistible
power may be concocted from his liver and spleen. The time, the place,
the actors are brought before us with singular dramatic power.
Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the spells she deemed all-
powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress of skill superior to
her own, gives great reality to the scene; and the curses of the dying
boy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a touch of
beautiful pathos, bring it to an effective close.

The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholars
have run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild and
ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which
the commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the
original of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of
witchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like their
modern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame
Quickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up an
effective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the current
stories of such creatures and their doings presented to his hand? The
popular belief in their power, the picturesque conditions under which
their spells were wrought, the wild passions in which lay the secret
of their hold upon the credulity of their victims, offered to the
Roman poet, just as they did to our own Elizabethan dramatists, a
combination of materials most favourable for poetic treatment. But
that Horace had, as many of his critics contend, a feeling of personal
vanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge, is an assumption
wholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any time or under any
circumstances, to have had any relations of a personal nature with a
woman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have been to use her
and her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not only saw
through the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her miserable
impotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems to be
impossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and not
come to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of a
garden god, set up in the garden which Maecenas had begun to lay out
on the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-
ground of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt of
thieves and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, littered
with skulls and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Sagana
are again introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which they
pour the blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously torn
limb-meal,

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