Horace

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"Why doth he shun
The Campus Martius' sultry glare?
He that once recked of neither dust nor sun,
Why rides he there,

"First of the brave,
Taming the Gallic steed no more?
Why doth he shrink from Tiber's yellow wave?
Why thus abhor

"The wrestlers' oil,
As 'twere from viper's tongue distilled?
Why do his arms no livid bruises soil,
He, once so skilled,

"The disc or dart
Far, far beyond the mark to hurl?
And tell me, tell me, in what nook apart,
Like baby-girl,

"Lurks the poor boy,
Veiling his manhood, as did Thetis' son,
To 'scape war's bloody clang, while fated Troy
Was yet undone?"

In the same class with this poem may be ranked the following ode (I.
27). Just as the poet has made us as familiar with the lovelorn
Sybaris as if we knew him, so does he here transport us into the
middle of a wine-party of young Romans, with that vivid dramatic force
which constitutes one great source of the excellence of his lyrics.

"Hold! hold! 'Tis for Thracian madmen to fight
With wine-cups, that only were made for delight.
'Tis barbarous-brutal! I beg of you all,
Disgrace not our banquet with bloodshed and brawl!

"Sure, Median scimitars strangely accord
With lamps and with wine at the festival board!
'Tis out of all rule! Friends, your places resume,
And let us have order once more in the room!

"If I am to join you in pledging a beaker
Of this stout Falernian, choicest of liquor,
Megilla's fair brother must say, from what eyes
Flew the shaft, sweetly fatal, that causes his sighs.

"How--dumb! Then I drink not a drop. Never blush,
Whoever the fair one may be, man! Tush, tush!
She'll do your taste credit, I'm certain--for yours
Was always select in its little amours.

"Don't be frightened! We're all upon honour, you know,
So out with your tale!--Gracious powers! Is it so?
Poor fellow! Your lot has gone sadly amiss,
When you fell into such a Charybdis as this!

"What witch, what magician, with drinks and with charms,
What god can effect your release from her harms?
So fettered, scarce Pegasus' self, were he near you,
From the fangs of this triple Chimaera would clear you."

In this poem, which has all the effect of an impromptu, we have a
_genre_ picture of Roman life, as vivid as though painted by the
pencil of Couture or Gerôme.

Serenades were as common an expedient among the Roman gallants of the
days of Augustus as among their modern successors. In the fine climate
of Greece, Italy, and Spain, they were a natural growth, and involved
no great strain upon a wooer's endurance. They assume a very different
aspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his Lydia
Languish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like a
dripping statue," presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace
(Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asteriè, during the absence of her
husband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes of a
certain Enipeus:--

"At nightfall shut your doors, nor then.
Look down into the street again,
When quavering fifes complain;"

using almost the words of Shylock to his daughter Jessica:--

"Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
_And the vile squeaking of the wrynecked fife_,
Clamber not you up to the casement then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street."

The name given to such a serenade, adopted probably, with the
serenades themselves, from Greece, was _paraclausithyron_--
literally, an out-of-door lament. Here is a specimen of what they were
(Odes, III. 10), in which, under the guise of imitating their form,
Horace quietly makes a mock of the absurdity of the practice. His
serenader has none of the insensibility to the elements of the lover
in the Scotch song:--

"Wi' the sleet in my hair, I'd gang ten miles and mair,
For a word o' that sweet lip o' thine, o' thine,
For ae glance o' thy dark e'e divine."

Neither is there in his pleading the tone of earnest entreaty which
marks the wooer, in a similar plight, of Burns's "Let me in this ae
nicht"--

"Thou hear'st the winter wind and weet,
Nae star blinks through the driving sleet;
Tak pity on my weary feet,
And shield me frae the rain, jo."

There can be no mistake as to the seriousness of this appeal. Horace's
is a mere _jeu-d'esprit_:--

"Though your drink were Tanais, chillest of rivers,
And your lot with some conjugal savage were cast,
You would pity, sweet Lycè, the poor soul that shivers
Out here at your door in the merciless blast.

"Only hark how the doorway goes straining and creaking,
And the piercing wind pipes through the trees that surround
The court of your villa, while Hack frost is streaking
With ice the crisp snow that lies thick on the ground!

"In your pride--Venus hates it--no longer envelop ye,
Or haply you'll find yourself laid on the shelf;
You never were made for a prudish Penelope,
'Tis not in the blood of your sires or yourself.

"Though nor gifts nor entreaties can win a soft answer,
Nor the violet pale of my love-ravaged cheek,
To your husband's intrigue with a Greek ballet-dancer,
Though you still are blind, and forgiving and meek;

"Yet be not as cruel--forgive my upbraiding--
As snakes, nor as hard as the toughest of oak;
To stand out here, drenched to the skin, serenading
All night may in time prove too much of a joke."

It is not often that Horace's poetry is vitiated by bad taste.
Strangely enough, almost the only instances of it occur where he is
writing of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce
(Book IV. 13). Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites of
his, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay of
their charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of the
prevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man
"so singularly susceptible," as Lord Lytton has truly described him,
"to amiable, graceful, gentle, and noble impressions of man and of
life," could write of a woman whom he had once loved in a strain like
this:--

"The gods have heard, the gods have heard my prayer;
Yes, Lyce! you are growing old, and still
You struggle to look fair;
You drink, and dance, and trill
Your songs to youthful love, in accents weak
With wine, and age, and passion. Youthful Love!
He dwells in Chia's cheek,
And hears her harp-strings move.
Rude boy, he flies like lightning o'er the heath
Past withered trees like you; you're wrinkled now;
The white has left your teeth,
And settled on your brow.
Your Coan silks, your jewels bright as stars--
Ah no! they bring not back the days of old,
In public calendars
By flying time enrolled.
Where now that beauty? Where those movements? Where
That colour? What of her, of her is left,
Who, breathing Love's own air,
Me of myself bereft,
Who reigned in Cinara's stead, a fair, fair face,
Queen of sweet arts? But Fate to Cinara gave
A life of little space;
And now she cheats the grave
Of Lyce, spared to raven's length of days,
That youth may see, with laughter and disgust,
A firebrand, once ablaze,
Now smouldering in grey dust."

What had this wretched Lyce done that Horace should have prayed the
gods to strip her of her charms, and to degrade her from a haughty
beauty into a maudlin hag, disgusting and ridiculous? Why cast such
very merciless stones at one who, by his own avowal, had erewhile
witched his very soul from him? Why rejoice to see this once beautiful
creature the scoff of all the heartless young fops of Rome? If she had
injured him, what of that? Was it so very strange that a woman
trained, like all the class to which she belonged, to be the plaything
of man's caprice, should have been fickle, mercenary, or even
heartless? Poor Lyce might at least have claimed his silence, if he
could not do, what Thackeray says every honest fellow should do,
"think well of the woman he has once thought well of, and remember her
with kindness and tenderness, as a man remembers a place where he has
been very happy."

Horace's better self comes out in his playful appeal to his friend
Xanthias (Odes, II. 4) not to be ashamed of having fallen in love with
his handmaiden Phyllis. That she is a slave is a matter of no account.
A girl of such admirable qualities must surely come of a good stock,
and is well worth any man's love. Did not Achilles succumb to Briseis,
Ajax to Tecmessa, Agamemnon himself to Cassandra? Moreover,

"For aught that you know, the fair Phyllis may be
The shoot of some highly respectable stem;
Nay, she counts, never doubt it, some kings in her tree,
And laments the lost acres once lorded by them.
Never think that a creature so exquisite grew
In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known,
Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true,
Had a mother 'twould shame thee to take for thine own."

Here we have the true Horace; and after all these fascinating but
doubtful Lydés, Neaeras, and Pyrrhas, it is pleasant to come across a
young beauty like this Phyllis, _sic fidelem, sic lucro aversam_.
She, at least, is a fresh and fragrant violet among the languorous
hothouse splendours of the Horatian garden.

Domestic love, which plays so large a part in modern poetry, is a
theme rarely touched on in Roman verse. Hence we know but little of
the Romans in their homes--for such a topic used to be thought beneath
the dignity of history--and especially little of the women, who
presided over what have been called "the tender and temperate honours
of the hearth." The ladies who flourish in the poetry and also in the
history of those times, however conspicuous for beauty or attraction,
are not generally of the kind that make home happy. Such matrons as we
chiefly read of there would in the present day he apt to figure in the
divorce court. Nor is the explanation of this difficult. The
prevalence of marriage for mere wealth or connection, and the facility
of divorce, which made the marriage-tie almost a farce among the upper
classes, had resulted, as it could not fail to do, in a great
debasement of morals. A lady did not lose caste either by being
divorced, or by seeking divorce, from husband after husband. And as
wives in the higher ranks often held the purse-strings, they made
themselves pretty frequently more dreaded than beloved by their lords,
through being tyrannical, if not unchaste, or both. So at least Horace
plainly indicates (Odes, III. 24), when contrasting the vices of Rome
with the simpler virtues of some of the nations that were under its
sway. In those happier lands, he says, "_Nec dotata regit virum
conjux, nec nitido fidit adultero_"--

"No dowried dame her spouse
O'erbears, nor trusts the sleek seducer's vows."

But it would be as wrong to infer from this that the taint was
universal, as it would be to gauge our own social morality by the
erratic matrons and fast young ladies with whom satirical essayists
delight to point their periods. The human heart is stronger than the
corruptions of luxury, even among the luxurious and the rich; and the
life of struggle and privation which is the life of the mass of every
nation would have been intolerable but for the security and peace of
well-ordered and happy households. Sweet honest love, cemented by
years of sympathy and mutual endurance, was then, as ever, the salt of
human life. Many a monumental inscription, steeped in the tenderest
pathos, assures us of the fact. What, for example, must have been the
home of the man who wrote on his wife's tomb, "She never caused me a
pang but when she died!" And Catullus, mere man of pleasure as he was,
must have had strongly in his heart the thought of what a tender and
pure-souled woman had been in his friend's home, when he wrote his
exquisite lines to Calvus on the death of Quinctilia:--

"Calvus, if those now silent in the tomb
Can feel the touch of pleasure in our tears
For those we loved, that perished in their bloom,
And the departed friends of former years--
Oh, then, full surely thy Quinctilia's woe
For the untimely fate, that bids thee part,
Will fade before the bliss she feels to know
How very dear she is unto thy heart!"

Horace, the bachelor, revered the marriage-tie, and did his best, by
his verses, to forward the policy of Augustus in his effort to arrest
the decay of morals by enforcing the duty of marriage, which the well-
to-do Romans of that day were inclined to shirk whenever they could.
Nay, the charm of constancy and conjugal sympathy inspired a few of
his very finest lines (Odes, I. l3)--"_Felices ter et amplius, quos
irrupta tenet copula_," &c.,--the feeling of which is better
preserved in Moore's well-known paraphrase than is possible in mere
translation:--

"There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two that are linked in one heavenly tie,
With heart never changing, and brow never cold,
Love on through all ills, and love on till they die!
One hour of a passion so sacred is worth
Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss;
And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth,
It is this, it is this!"

To leave the _placens uxor_--"the winsome wife"--behind, is one
of the saddest regrets, Horace tells his friend Posthumus (Odes, II.
14), which death can baring. Still Horace only sang the praises of
marriage, contenting himself with painting the Eden within which, for
reasons unknown to us, he never sought to enter. He was well up in
life, probably, before these sager views dawned upon him. Was it then
too late to reduce his precepts to practice, or was he unable to
overcome his dread of the _dotata conjux_, and thought his
comfort would be safer in the hands of some less exacting fair, such
as the Phyllis to whom the following Ode, one of his latest (IV. 11),
is addressed?--

"I have laid in a cask of Albanian wine,
Which nine mellow summers have ripened and more;
In my garden, dear Phyllis, thy brows to entwine,
Grows the brightest of parsley in plentiful store.
There is ivy to gleam on thy dark glossy hair;
My plate, newly burnished, enlivens my rooms;
And the altar, athirst for its victim, is there,
Enwreathed with chaste vervain and choicest of blooms.

"Every hand in the household is busily toiling,
And hither and thither boys bustle and girls;
Whilst, up from the hearth-fires careering and coiling,
The smoke round the rafter-beams languidly curls.
Let the joys of the revel be parted between us!
'Tis the Ides of young April, the day which divides
The month, dearest Phyllis, of ocean-sprung Venus,
A day to me dearer than any besides.

"And well may I prize it, and hail its returning--
My own natal-day not more hallowed nor dear;
For Maecenas, my friend, dates from this happy morning
The life which has swelled to a lustrous career.
You sigh for young Telephus: better forget him!
His rank is not yours, and the gaudier charms
Of a girl that's both wealthy and wanton benet him,
And hold him the fondest of slaves in her arms.

"Remember fond Phaëthon's fiery sequel,
And heavenward-aspiring Bellerophon's fate;
And pine not for one who would ne'er be your equal,
But level your hopes to a lowlier mate.
So, come, my own Phyllis, my heart's latest treasure--
For ne'er for another this bosom shall long--
And I'll teach, while your loved voice re-echoes the measure,
How to charm away care with the magic of song."

This is very pretty and picturesque; and Maecenas was sure to be
charmed with it as a birthday Ode, for such it certainly was, whether
there was any real Phyllis in the case or not. Most probably there was
not,--the allusion to Telephus, the lady-killer, is so very like many
other allusions of the same kind in other Odes, which are plainly mere
exercises of fancy, and the protestation that the lady is the very,
very last of his loves, so precisely what all middle-aged gentlemen
think it right to say, whose "_jeunesse_," like the poet's, has
teen notoriously "_orageuse_."

It was probably not within the circle of his city friends that Horace
saw the women for whom he entertained the deepest respect, but by the
hearth-fire in the farmhouse, "the homely house, that harbours quiet
rest," with which he was no less familiar, where people lived in a
simple and natural way, and where, if anywhere, good wives and mothers
were certain to be found. It was manifestly by some woman of this
class that the following poem (Odes, III. 23) was inspired:--

"If thou, at each new moon, thine upturned palms,
My rustic Phidyle, to heaven shalt lift,
The Lares soothe with steam of fragrant balms,
A sow, and fruits new-plucked, thy simple gift,

"Nor venomed blast shall nip thy fertile vine,
Nor mildew blight thy harvest in the ear;
Nor shall thy flocks, sweet nurslings, peak and pine,
When apple-bearing Autumn chills the year.

"The victim marked for sacrifice, that feeds
On snow-capped Algidus, in leafy lane
Of oak and ilex, or on Alba's meads,
With its rich blood the pontiff's axe may stain;

"Thy little gods for humbler tribute call
Than blood of many victims; twine for them
Of rosemary a simple coronal,
And the lush myrtle's frail and fragrant stem.

"The costliest sacrifice that wealth can make
From the incensed Penates less commands
A soft response, than doth the poorest cake,
If on the altar laid with spotless hands."

When this was written, Horace had got far beyond the Epicurean creed
of his youth. He had come to believe in the active intervention of a
Supreme Disposer of events in the government of the world,--
"_insignem attenuans, obscura promens_" (Odes, I. 34):--

"The mighty ones of earth o'erthrowing,
Advancing the obscure;"--

and to whose "pure eyes and perfect witness" a blameless life and a
conscience void of offence were not indifferent.

CHAPTER VII.

HORACE'S POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS.--HIS PRAISES OF CONTENTMENT.

If it be merely the poet, and not the lover, who speaks in most of
Horace's love verses, there can never be any doubt that the poems to
his friends come direct from his heart. They glow with feeling. To
whatever chord they are attuned, sad, or solemn, or joyous, they are
always delightful; consummate in their grace of expression, while they
have all the warmth and easy flow of spontaneous emotion. Take, for
example, the following (Odes, II. 7). Pompeius Varus, a fellow-student
with Horace at Athens, and a brother in arms under Brutus, who, after
the defeat of Philippi, had joined the party of the younger Pompey,
has returned to Rome, profiting probably by the general amnesty
granted by Octavius to his adversaries after the battle of Actium. How
his heart must have leapt at such a welcome from his poet-friend as
this!--

"Dear comrade in the days when thou and I
With Brutus took the field, his perils bore,
Who hath restored thee, freely as of yore,
To thy home gods, and loved Italian sky,

"Pompey, who wert the first my heart to share,
With whom full oft I've sped the lingering day,
Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay,
With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair?

"With thee I shared Philippi's headlong flight,
My shield behind me left, which was not well,
When all that brave array was broke, and fell
In the vile dust full many a towering wight.

"But me, poor trembler, swift Mercurius bore,
Wrapped in a cloud, through all the hostile din,
Whilst war's tumultuous eddies, closing in,
Swept thee away into the strife once more.

"Then pay to Jove the feasts that are his fee,
And stretch at ease these war-worn limbs of thine
Beneath my laurel's shade; nor spare the wine
Which I have treasured through long years for thee.

"Pour till it touch the shining goblet's rim,
Care-drowning Massic; let rich ointments flow
From amplest conchs! No measure we shall know!
What! shall we wreaths of oozy parsley trim,

"Or simple myrtle? Whom will Venus[1] send
To rule our revel? Wild my draughts shall be
As Thracian Bacchanals', for 'tis sweet to me
To lose my wits, when I regain my friend."

[1]
Venus was the highest cast of the dice. The meaning here is, Who
shall be the master of our feast?--that office falling to the
member of the wine-party who threw sixes.

When Horace penned the playful allusion here made to having left his
shield on the field of battle (_parmula non bene relicta_), he
could never have thought that his commentators--professed admirers,
too--would extract from it an admission of personal cowardice. As if
any man, much more a Roman to Romans, would make such a confession!
Horace could obviously afford to put in this way the fact of his
having given up a desperate cause, for this very reason, that he had
done his duty on the field of Philippi, and that it was known he had
done it. Commentators will be so cruelly prosaic! The poet was quite
as serious in saying that Mercury carried him out of the _melée_
in a cloud, like one of Homer's heroes, as that he had left his shield
discreditably (_non bene_) on the battle-field. But it requires a
poetic sympathy, which in classical editors is rare, to understand
that, as Lessing and others have urged, the very way he speaks of his
own retreat was by implication a compliment, not ungraceful, to his
friend, who had continued the struggle against the triumvirate, and
come home at last, war-worn and weary, to find the more politic
comrade of his youth one of the celebrities of Rome, and on the best
of terms with the very men against whom they had once fought side by
side.

Not less beautiful is the following Ode to Septimius, another of the
poet's old companions in arms (Odes, II. 6). His speaking of himself
in it as "with war and travel worn" has puzzled the commentators, as
it is plain from the rest of the poem that it must have been written
long after his campaigning days were past. But the fatigues of those
days may have left their traces for many years; and the difficulty is
at once got over if we suppose the poem to have been written under
some little depression from languid health due to this cause.
Tarentum, where his friend lived, and whose praises are so warmly
sung, was a favourite resort of the poet's. He used to ride there on his
mule, very possibly to visit Septimius, before he had his own Sabine
villa; and all his love for that villa never chilled his admiration for
Tibur, with its "silvan shades, and orchards moist with wimpling rills,"--
the "_Tiburni lucus, et uda mobilibus pomaria rivis_,"-and its milder
climate, so genial to his sun-loving temperament:--

"Septimius, thou who wouldst, I know,
With me to distant Gades go,
And visit the Cantabrian fell,
Whom all our triumphs cannot quell,
And even the sands barbarian brave,
Where ceaseless seethes the Moorish wave;

"May Tibur, that delightful haunt,
Reared by an Argive emigrant,
The tranquil haven be, I pray,
For my old age to wear away;
Oh, may it be the final bourne
To one with war and travel worn!

"But should the cruel fates decree
That this, my friend, shall never be,
Then to Galaesus, river sweet
To skin-clad flocks, will I retreat,
And those rich meads, where sway of yore
Laconian Phalanthus bore.

"In all the world no spot there is,
That wears for me a smile like this,
The honey of whose thymy fields
May vie with what Hymettus yields,
Where berries clustering every slope
May with Venafrum's greenest cope.

"There Jove accords a lengthened spring,
And winters wanting winter's sting,
And sunny Aulon's[1] broad incline
Such mettle puts into the vine,
Its clusters need not envy those
Which fiery Falernum grows.

"Thyself and me that spot invites,
Those pleasant fields, those sunny heights;
And there, to life's last moments true,
Wilt thou with some fond tears bedew--
The last sad tribute love can lend--
The ashes of thy poet-friend."

[1]
Galaesus (Galaso), a river; Aulon, a hill near Tarentum.

Septimius was himself a poet, or thought himself one, who,

"Holding vulgar ponds and runnels cheap,
At Pindar's fount drank valiantly and deep,"

as Horace says of him in an Epistle (I. 3) to Julius Florus; adding,
with a sly touch of humour, which throws more than a doubt on the
poetic powers of their common friend,--

"Thinks he of me? And does he still aspire
To marry Theban strains to Latium's lyre,
Thanks to the favouring muse? Or haply rage
And mouth in bombast for the tragic stage?"

When this was written Septimius was in Armenia along with Florus, on
the staff of Tiberius Claudius Nero, the future emperor. For this
appointment he was probably indebted to Horace, who applied for it, at
his request, in the following Epistle to Tiberius (I. 9), which
Addison ('Spectator,' 493) cites as a fine specimen of what a letter
of introduction should be. Horace was, on principle, wisely chary of
giving such introductions.

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