Horace

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"So to evoke the shade and soul
Of dead men, and from these to wring
Responses to their questioning."

They have with them two effigies, one of wax and the other of wool--
the latter the larger of the two, and overbearing the other, which
cowers before it,

"Like one that stands
Beseeching in the hangman's hands.
On Hecate one, Tisiphone
The other calls; and you might see
Serpents and hell-hounds thread the dark,
Whilst, these vile orgies not to mark,
The moon, all bloody red of hue,
Behind the massive tombs withdrew."

The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames their
ghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink in
terror to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of the
beldams make the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling up
his horrors with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of some
terrible climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce.
Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a
simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags.
In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their
incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more
comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can
carry them--Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth,
and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:--

"While you
With laughter long and loud might view
Their herbs, and charmed adders wound
In mystic coils, bestrew the ground."

And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was an
old mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, and
Horace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as
though he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his
former calumnies about her.

"My youth has fled, my rosy hue
Turned to a wan and livid blue;
Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair;
No respite have I from despair.
The days and nights, they wax and wane,
Yet bring me no release from pain;
Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp,
The spasm, which holds me in its grasp."

Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign
magical influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all the
mischief he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name what
penance he will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers will
appease her wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of as
the chaste and good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star,
his lyre is at her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as her
life is pure, but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, the
poet takes care to insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her in
conclusion, thus:--

"Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wont
Among the tombs of paupers hunt
For ashes newly laid in ground,
Love-charms and philtres to compound,
Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands."

Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. The
man who,

"Branding her name with ill renown,
Made her the talk of all the town,"

is not so lightly to be forgiven.

"You'd have a speedy doom? But no,
It shall be lingering, sharp, and slow."

The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types
of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself--his
efforts will be vain:--

"Then comes my hour of triumph, then
I'll goad you till you writhe again;
Then shall you curse the evil hour
You made a mockery of my power."

She then triumphantly reasserts the powers to which she lays claim.
What! I, she exclaims, who can waste life as the waxen image of my
victim melts before my magic fire [Footnote: Thus Hecate in
Middleton's "Witch" assures to the Duchess of Glo'ster "a sudden and
subtle death" to her victim:--]--I, who can bring down the moon from
her sphere, evoke the dead from their ashes, and turn the affections
by my philtres,--

"Shall I my potent art bemoan
As impotent 'gainst thee alone?"

Surely all this is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's
"Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used
Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her
craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons.
His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this
sense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of a
class; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the
8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner-
party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a
certain point,--"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat,
more venomous than that of African vipers, had swept across them."

"His picture made in wax, and gently molten
By a blue fire, kindled with dead men's eyes,
Will waste him by degrees."--

An old delusion. We find it in Theocritus, where a girl, forsaken by
her lover, resorts to the same desperate restorative (Idylls ii. 28)--

"As this image of wax I melt here by aidance demonic,
Myndian Delphis shall so melt with love's passion anon."

Again Ovid (Heroides vi. 91) makes Hypsipyle say of Medea:

"The absent she binds with her spells, and figures of wax she
devises,
And in their agonised spleen fine-pointed needles she thrusts."

CHAPTER III.

INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS.--THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM.

Horace had not been long in Rome, after his return from Greece, before
he had made himself a name. With what he got from the booksellers, or
possibly by the help of friends, he had purchased a patent place in
the Quaestor's department, a sort of clerkship of the Treasury, which
he continued to hold for many years, if not indeed to the close of his
life. The duties were light, but they demanded, and at all events had,
his occasional attention, even after he was otherwise provided for.
Being his own--bought by his own money--it may have gratified his love
of independence to feel that, if the worst came to the worst, he had
his official salary to fall back upon. Among his friends, men of
letters are at this time, as might have been expected, found to be
most conspicuous. Virgil, who had recently been despoiled, like,
himself, of his paternal property, took occasion to bring his name
before Maecenas, the confidential adviser and minister of Octavius, in
whom he had himself found a helpful friend. This was followed up by
the commendation of Varius, already celebrated as a writer of Epic
poetry, and whose tragedy of "Thyestes," if we are to trust
Quintilian, was not unworthy to rank with the best tragedies of
Greece. Maecenas may not at first have been too well disposed towards
a follower of the republican party, who had not been sparing of his
satire against many of the supporters and favourites of Octavius. He
sent for Horace, however (B.C. 39), and any prejudice on this score,
if prejudice there was, was ultimately got over. Maecenas took time to
form his estimate of the man, and it was not till nine months after
their first interview that he sent for Horace again. When he did so,
however, it was to ask him to consider himself for the future among
the number of his friends. This part of Horace's story is told with
admirable brevity and good feeling in the Satire from which we have
already quoted, addressed to Maecenas (B. I. Sat. 6) a few years
afterwards.

"Lucky I will not call myself, as though
Thy friendship I to mere good fortune owe.
No chance it was secured me thy regards,
But Virgil first, that best of men and bards,
And then kind Varius mentioned what I was.
Before you brought, with many a faltering pause,
Dropping some few brief words (for bashfulness
Robbed me of utterance) I did not profess
That I was sprung of lineage old and great,
Or used to canter round my own estate
On Satureian barb, but what and who
I was as plainly told. As usual, you
Brief answer make me. I retire, and then,
Some nine months after, summoning me again,
You bid me 'mongst your friends assume a place:
And proud I feel that thus I won your grace,
Not by an ancestry long known to fame,
But by my life, and heart devoid of blame."

The name of Maecenas is from this time inseparably associated with
that of Horace. From what little is authentically known of him, this
much may be gathered: He was a man of great general accomplishment,
well versed in the literature both of Greece and Rome, devoted to
literature and the society of men of letters, a lover of the fine arts
and of natural history, a connoisseur of gems and precious stones,
fond of living in a grand style, and of surrounding himself with
people who amused him, without being always very particular as to who
or what they were. For the indulgence of all these tastes, his great
wealth was more than sufficient. He reclaimed the Esquiline hill from
being the public nuisance we have already described, laid it out in
gardens, and in the midst of these built himself a sumptuous palace,
where the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore now stands, from which he
commanded a superb view of the country looking towards Tivoli. To this
palace, salubrious from its spacious size and the elevation of its
site, Augustus, when ill, had himself carried from his own modest
mansion; and from its lofty belvedere tower Nero is said to have
enjoyed the spectacle of Rome in flames beneath him. Voluptuary and
dilettante as Maecenas was, he was nevertheless, like most men of a
sombre and melancholy temperament, capable of great exertions; and he
veiled under a cold exterior and reserved manners a habit of acute
observation, a kind heart, and, in matters of public concern, a
resolute will. This latent energy of character, supported as it was by
a subtle knowledge of mankind and a statesmanlike breadth of view,
contributed in no small degree to the ultimate triumph of Octavius
Caesar over his rivals, and to the successful establishment of the
empire in his hands. When the news of Julius Caesar's assassination
reached the young Octavius, then only nineteen, in Apollonia, it has
been said that Maecenas was in attendance upon him as his governor or
tutor. Be this so or not, as soon as Octavius appears in the political
arena as his uncle's avenger, Maecenas is found by his side. In
several most important negotiations he acted as his representative.
Thus (B.C. 40), the year before Horace was introduced to him, he,
along with Cocceius Nerva, negotiated with Antony the peace of
Brundusium, which resulted in Antony's ill-starred marriage with
Caesar's sister Octavia. Two years later he was again associated with
Cocceius in a similar task, on which occasion Horace and Virgil
accompanied him to Brundusium. He appears to have commanded in various
expeditions, both naval and military, but it was at Rome and in
Council that his services were chiefly sought; and he acted as one of
the chief advisers of Augustus down to about five years before his
death, when, either from ill health or some other unknown cause, he
abandoned political life. More than once he was charged by Augustus
with the administration of the civil affairs of Italy during his own
absence, intrusted with his seal, and empowered to open all his
letters addressed to the Senate, and, if necessary, to alter their
contents, so as to adapt them to the condition of affairs at home. His
aim, like that of Vipsanius Agrippa, who was in himself the Nelson and
Wellington of the age, seems to have been to build up a united and
flourishing empire in the person of Augustus. Whether from temperament
or policy, or both, he set his face against the system of cruelty and
extermination which disgraced the triumvirate. When Octavius was one
day condemning man after man to death, Maecenas, after a vain attempt
to reach him on the tribunal, where he sat surrounded by a dense
crowd, wrote upon his tablets, _Surge tandem, Carnifex_!--
"Butcher, break off!" and flung them across the crowd into the lap of
Caesar, who felt the rebuke, and immediately quitted the judgment-
seat. His policy was that of conciliation; and while bent on the
establishment of a monarchy, from what we must fairly assume to have
been a patriotic conviction that this form of government could alone
meet the exigencies of the time, he endeavoured to combine this with a
due regard to individual liberty, and a free expression of individual
opinion.

At the time of Horace's introduction to him, Maecenas was probably at
his best, in the full vigour of his intellect, and alive with the
generous emotions which must have animated a man bent as he was on
securing tranquillity for the state, and healing the strife of
factions, which were threatening it with ruin. His chief relaxation
from the fatigues of public life was, to all appearance, found in the
society of men of letters, and, judging by what Horace says (Satires,
I. 9), the _vie intime_ of his social circle must have been
charming. To be admitted within it was a privilege eagerly coveted,
and with good reason, for not only was this in itself a stamp of
distinction, but his parties were well known as the pleasantest in
Rome:--

"No house more free from all that's base,
In none cabals more out of place.
It hurts me not, if others be
More rich, or better read than me;
Each has his place."

Like many of his contemporaries, who were eminent in political life,
Maecenas devoted himself to active literary work--for he wrote much,
and on a variety of topics. His taste in literature was, however,
better than his execution. His style was diffuse, affected, and
obscure; but Seneca, who tells us this, and gives some examples which
justify the criticism, tells us at the same time that his genius was
massive and masculine (_grande et virile_), and that he would
have been eminent for eloquence, if fortune had not spoiled him.
However vicious his own style may have been, the man who encouraged
three such writers as Virgil, Propertius, and Horace, not to mention
others of great repute, whose works have perished, was clearly a sound
judge of a good style in others.

As years went on, and the cares of public life grew less onerous,
habits of self-indulgence appear to have grown upon Maecenas. It will
probably be well, however, to accept with some reserve what has been
said against him on this head. Then, as now, men of rank and power
were the victims of calumnious gossips and slanderous pamphleteers.
His health became precarious. Incessant sleeplessness spoke of an
overtasked brain and shattered nerves. Life was full of pain; still he
clung to it with a craven-like tenacity. So, at least, Seneca asserts,
quoting in support of his statement some very bad verses by Maecenas,
which may be thus translated:--

"Lame in feet, and lame in fingers,
Crooked in back, with every tooth
Rattling in my head, yet, 'sooth,
I'm content, so life but lingers.
Gnaw my withers, rack my bones,
Life, mere life, for all atones."

In one view these lines may certainly be construed to import the same
sentiment as the speech of the miserable Claudio in "Measure for
Measure,"--

"The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death."

But, on the other hand, they may quite as fairly be regarded as merely
giving expression to the tenet of the Epicurean philosophy, that
however much we may suffer from physical pain or inconvenience, it is
still possible to be happy. "We know what we are; we know not what we
may be!"

Not the least misfortune of Maecenas was his marriage to a woman whom
he could neither live with nor without--separating from and returning
to her so often, that, according to Seneca, he was a thousand times
married, yet never had but one wife. Friends he had many, loyal and
devoted friends, on whose society and sympathy he leant more and more
as the years wore on. He rarely stirred from Rome, loving its smoke,
its thronged and noisy streets, its whirl of human passions, as
Johnson loved Fleet Street, or "the sweet shady side of Pall Mall,"
better than all the verdure of Tivoli, or the soft airs and exquisite
scenery of Baiae. He liked to read of these things, however; and may
have found as keen a pleasure in the scenery of the 'Georgics,' or in
Horace's little landscape-pictures, as most men could have extracted
from the scenes which they describe.

Such was the man, ushered into whose presence, Horace, the reckless
lampooner and satirist, found himself embarrassed, and at a loss for
words. Horace was not of the MacSycophant class, who cannot "keep
their back straight in the presence of a great man;" nor do we think
he had much of the nervous apprehensiveness of the poetic temperament.
Why, then, should he have felt thus abashed? Partly, it may have been,
from natural diffidence at encountering a man to gain whose goodwill
was a matter of no small importance, but whose goodwill, he also knew
by report, was not easily won; and partly, to find himself face to
face with one so conspicuously identified with the cause against which
he had fought, and the men whom he had hitherto had every reason to
detest.

Once admitted by Maecenas to the inner circle of his friends, Horace
made his way there rapidly. Thus we find him, a few months afterwards,
in the spring of B.C. 37, going to Brundusium with Maecenas, who had
been despatched thither on a mission of great public importance
(Satires, I. 6). The first term of the triumvirate of Antony,
Octavius, and Lepidus had expired at the close of the previous year.
No fresh arrangement had been made, and Antony, alarmed at the growing
power of Octavius in Italy, had appeared off Brundusium with a fleet
of 300 sail and a strong body of troops. The Brundusians--on a hint,
probably, from Octavius--forbade his landing, and he had to go on to
Tarentum, where terms were ultimately arranged for a renewal of the
triumvirate. The moment was a critical one, for an open rupture
between Octavius and Antony was imminent, which might well have proved
disastrous to the former, had Antony joined his fleet to that of the
younger Pompey, which, without his aid, had already proved more than a
match for the naval force of Octavius.

To judge by Horace's narrative, all the friends who accompanied
Maecenas on this occasion, except his coadjutor, Cocceius Nerva, who
had three years before been engaged with him on a similar mission to
Brundusium, were men whose thoughts were given more to literature than
to politics. Horace starts from Rome with Heliodorus, a celebrated
rhetorician, and they make their way very leisurely to Anxur
(Terracina), where they are overtaken by Maecenas.

"'Twas fixed that we should meet with dear
Maecenas and Cocceius here,
Who were upon a mission bound,
Of consequence the most profound;
For who so skilled the feuds to close
Of those, once friends, who now were foes?"

This is the only allusion throughout the poem, to the object of the
journey. The previous day, Horace had been baulked of his dinner, the
water being so bad, and his stomach so delicate, that he chose to fast
rather than run the risk of making himself ill with it. And now at
Terracina he found his eyes, which were weak, so troublesome, that he
had to dose them well with a black wash. These are the first
indications we get of habitual delicacy of health, which, if not due
altogether to the fatigues and exposure of his campaign with Brutus,
had probably been increased by them.

"Meanwhile beloved Maecenas came,
Cocceius too, and brought with them
Fonteius Capito, a man
Endowed with every grace that can
A perfect gentleman attend,
And Antony's especial friend."

They push on next day to Formiae, and are amused at Fundi (Fondi) on
the way by the consequential airs of the prefect of the place. It
would seem as if the peacock nature must break out the moment a man
becomes a prefect or a mayor.

"There having rested for the night,
With inexpressible delight
We hail the dawn,--for we that day
At Sinuessa, on our way
With Plotius, [1] Virgil, Varius too,
Have an appointed rendezvous;
Souls all, than whom the earth ne'er saw
More noble, more exempt from flaw,
Nor are there any on its round
To whom I am more firmly bound.
Oh! what embracings, and what mirth!
Nothing, no, nothing, on this earth,
Whilst I have reason, shall I e'er
With a true genial friend compare!"

[1]
Plotius Tucca, himself a poet, and associated by Virgil with Varius
in editing the Aeneid after the poet's death.

Next day they reach Capua, where, so soon as their mules are unpacked,
away

"Maecenas hies, at ball to play;
To sleep myself and Virgil go,
For tennis-practice is, we know,
Injurious, quite beyond all question,
Both to weak eyes and weak digestion."

With these and suchlike details Horace carries us pleasantly on with
his party to Brundusium. They were manifestly in no hurry, for they
took fourteen days, according to Gibbon's careful estimate, to travel
378 Roman miles. That they might have got over the ground much faster,
if necessary, is certain from what is known of other journeys. Caesar
posted 100 miles a-day. Tiberius travelled 200 miles in twenty-four
hours, when he was hastening to close the eyes of his brother Drusus;
and Statius (Sylv. 14, Carm. 3) talks of a man leaving Rome in the
morning, and being at Baiae or Puteoli, 127 miles off, before night.

"Have but the will, be sure you'll find the way.
What shall stop him, who starts at break of day
From sleeping Rome, and on the Lucrine sails
Before the sunshine into twilight pales?"

Just as, according to Sydney Smith, in his famous allusion to the
triumphs of railway travelling, "the early Scotchman scratches himself
in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly
before the setting sun."

Horace treats the expedition to Brundusium entirely as if it had been
a pleasant tour. Gibbon thinks he may have done so purposely, to
convince those who were jealous of his intimacy with the great
statesman, "that his thoughts and occupations on the event were far
from being of a serious or political nature." But it was a rule with
Horace, in all his writings, never to indicate, by the slightest word,
that he knew any of the political secrets which, as the intimate
friend of Maecenas, he could scarcely have failed to know. He hated
babbling of all kinds. A man who reported the private talk of friends,
even on comparatively indifferent topics,--

"The churl, who out of doors will spread
What 'mongst familiar friends is said,"--

(Epistle I. v. 24), was his especial aversion; and he has more than
once said, only not in such formal phrase, what Milton puts into the
mouth of his "Samson Agonistes,"

"To have revealed
Secrets of men, the secrets of a friend,
How heinous had the fact been! how deserving
Contempt, and scorn of all, to be excluded
All friendship, and avoided as a blab,
The mark of fool set on his front!"

Moreover, reticence, the indispensable quality, not of statesmen
merely, but of their intimates, was not so rare a virtue in these days
as in our own; and as none would have expected Horace, in a poem of
this kind, to make any political confidences, he can scarcely be
supposed to have written it with any view to throwing the gossips of
Rome off the scent. The excursion had been a pleasant one, and he
thought its incidents worth noting. Hence the poem. Happily for us,
who get from it most interesting glimpses of some of the familiar
aspects of Roman life and manners, of which we should otherwise have
known nothing. Here, for example, is a sketch of how people fared in
travelling by canal in those days, near Rome. Overcrowding, we see, is
not an evil peculiar to our own days.

"Now 'gan the night with gentle hand
To fold in shadows all the land,
And stars along the sky to scatter,
When there arose a hideous clatter,
Slaves slanging bargemen, bargemen slaves;
'Ho, haul up here! how now, ye knaves,
Inside three hundred people stuff?
Already there are quite enough!'
Collected were the fares at last,
The mule that drew our barge made fast,
But not till a good hour was gone.
Sleep was not to be thought upon,
The cursèd gnats were so provoking,
The bull-frogs set up such a croaking.
A bargeman, too, a drunken lout,
And passenger, sang turn about,
In tones remarkable for strength,
Their absent sweethearts, till at length
The passenger began to doze,
When up the stalwart bargeman rose,
His fastenings from the stone unwound,
And left the mule to graze around;
Then down upon his back he lay,
And snored in a terrific way."

Neither is the following allusion to the Jews and their creed without
its value, especially when followed, as it is, by Horace's avowal,
almost in the words of Lucretius (B. VI. 56), of what was then his
own. Later in life he came to a very different conclusion. When the
travellers reach Egnatia, their ridicule is excited by being shown or
told, it is not very clear which, of incense kindled in the temple
there miraculously without the application of fire.

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