Part 2

Give me again my hollow tree, A crust of bread--and liberty.

(Sat. II, 6, fin.)

SUCCESS

Horace's Sabine farm ranks high among the holy places of the classic world; and through the labours of successive travellers, guided by the scattered indications in his poems, its site is tolerably certain. It was about thirty-two miles from Rome, reached in a couple of hours by pilgrims of the present time; to Horace, who never allowed himself to be hurried, the journey of a full day, or of a leisurely day and a half. Let us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-tailed mule (Sat. I, vi, 104), the heavy saddlebags across its loins stored with scrolls of Plato, of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the comedian, Archilochus the lyric poet. His road lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift waters of the Anio, amid steep hills crowned with small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites of Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A ride of twenty-seven miles would bring him to Tivoli, or Tibur, where he stopped to rest, sometimes to pass the night, possessing very probably a cottage in the little town. No place outside his home appealed to him like this. Nine times he mentions it, nearly always with a caressing epithet. It is green Tibur, dew-fed Tibur, Tibur never arid, leisurely Tibur, breezy Tibur, Tibur sloping to the sun. He bids his friend Varus plant vines in the moist soil of his own Tiburtine patrimony there; prays that when the sands of his life run low, he may there end his days; enumerates, in a noble ode (Od. I, 7), the loveliest spots on earth, preferring before them all the headlong Anio, Tibur's groves, its orchards saturated with shifting streams.

The dark pine waves on Tibur's classic steep, From rock to rock the headlong waters leap, Tossing their foam on high, till leaf and flower Glitter like emeralds in the sparkling shower. Lovely--but lovelier from the charms that glow Where Latium spreads her purple vales below; The olive, smiling on the sunny hill, The golden orchard, and the ductile rill, The spring clear-bubbling in its rocky fount, The mossgrown cave, the Naiad's fabled haunt, And, far as eye can strain, yon shadowy dome, The glory of the earth, Eternal Rome.

No picture of the spot can be more graphic than are these noble lines. They open a Newdigate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, written, says tradition, by its brilliant author in a single night. (R. C. Sewell, Magdalen College, 1825.) Tivoli he had never visited; but those who stand to-day beside the Temple of the Sibyl on the edge of its ravine, who enjoy the fair beauty of the headlong Anio and the lesser Cascatelle, of the ruined Temple of Tiburtus, the Grottos of the Sirens and of Neptune, understand how a poet's genius can, as Shakespeare tells us, shadow forth things unseen, and give them local habitation.

From Tibur, still beside the Anio, we drive for about seven miles, until we reach the ancient Varia, now Vico Varo, mentioned by Horace as the small market town to which his five tenant-farmers were wont to repair for agricultural or municipal business. (Ep. I, xiv, 3.) Here, then, we are in the poet's country, and must be guided by the landmarks in his verse. Just beyond Vico Varo the Anio is joined by the Licenza. This is Horace's Digentia, the stream he calls it whose icy waters freshen him, the stream of which Mandela drinks. (Ep. I, xviii, 104-105.) And there, on its opposite bank, is the modern village Bardela, identified with Mandela by a sepulchral inscription recently dug up. We turn northward, following the stream; the road becomes distressingly steep, recalling a line in which the poet speaks of returning homeward "to his mountain stronghold." (Sat. II, vi, 16.) Soon we reach a village, Roccagiovine, whose central square is named Piazza Vacuna. Vacuna was the ancient name for the goddess Victory; and against the wall is fixed an exhumed tablet telling how the Emperor Vespasian here restored an ancient Temple of Victory. One more echo this name wakes in Horatian ears--he dates a letter to his friend Aristius Fuscus as written "behind the crumbling shrine of Vacuna." (Ep. I, x, 49.) Clearly we are near him now; he would not carry his writing tablets far away from his door. Yet another verification we require. He speaks of a spring just beside his home, cool and fine, medicinal to head and stomach. (Ep. I, xvi, 12.) Here it is, hard by, called to-day Fonte d'Oratini, a survival, we should like to believe, of the name Horatius. Somewhere close at hand must have been the villa, on one side or the other of a small hill now called Monte Rotondo. We may take our Horace from our pocket, and feel, as with our Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, with our Scott at Ashestiel, that we are gazing on the hills, the streams, and valleys, which received the primal outpourings of their muse, and are for ever vocal with its memories.

From M. Rotondo, eastward to the Licenza, and southward to the high ground of Roccogiovine, stretched apparently the poet's not inconsiderable demesne. Part of it he let off to five peasants on the métayage system; the rest he cultivated himself, employing eight slaves superintended by a bailiff. The house, he tells us, was simple, with no marble pillars or gilded cornices (Od. II, xviii), but spacious enough to receive and entertain a guest from town, and to welcome occasionally his neighbours to a cheerful evening meal--"nights and suppers as of gods" (Sat. II, vi, 65), he calls them; where the talk was unfashionably clean and sensible, the fare beans and bacon, garden stuff and chicory and mallows. Around the villa was a garden, not filled with flowers, of which in one of his odes he expresses dislike as unremunerative (Od. II, xv, 6), but laid out in small parallelograms of grass, edged with box and planted with clipped hornbeam. The house was shaded from above by a grove of ilexes and oaks; lower down were orchards of olives, wild plums, cornels, apples. In the richer soil of the valley he grew corn, whose harvests never failed him, and, like Eve in Eden, led the vine to wed her elm. Against this last experiment his bailiff grumbled, saying that the soil would grow spice and pepper as soon as ripen grapes (Ep. I, xiv, 23); but his master persisted, and succeeded. Inviting Maecenas to supper, he offers Sabine wine from his own estate (Od. I, xx, 1); and visitors to-day, drinking the juice of the native grape at the little Roccogiovine inn, will be of opinion with M. de Florac, that "this little wine of the country has a most agreeable smack." Here he sauntered day by day, watched his labourers, working sometimes, like Ruskin at Hincksey, awkwardly to their amusement with his own hands; strayed now and then into the lichened rocks and forest wilds beyond his farm, surprised there one day by a huge wolf, who luckily fled from his presence (Od. I, xxii, 9); or--most enjoyable of all--lay beside spring or river with a book or friend of either sex.

A book of verses underneath the bough, A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness, Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!

So roll to each other across the ages and the continents echoes of the Persian and the Roman bards.

Of the beauty of his home he speaks always modestly; it may not compare with Praeneste, Tarentum, Baiae; its charm he is never weary of extolling. Nowhere, he says, is the air sweeter and more balmy, in summer temperate, warm in winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm, tranquillity, repose, making, as Wordsworth says, the very thought of country life a thought of refuge; and that was what, so long in populous city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was his home, where he could possess his soul, could be self-centred and serene. "This," says Ruskin, "is the true nature of Home; it is the Place of Peace."

He loved the country, yet he was no hermit. When sickened of town life he could apostrophize the country in the beautiful lines which many a jaded Londoner has echoed (Sat. II, vi, 60); but after some months of its placid joys the active social side of him would re-assert itself: the welcoming friends of the great city, its brilliant talk, its rush of busy life, recovered their attractiveness, and for short intervals, in the healthy season of the year, he would return to Rome. There it is less easy to image him than in his rustic home. Nature, if spared by man, remains unaltered; the heights and recesses of the Digentian valley meet our eye to-day scarce changed in twenty centuries, but the busy, crowded Rome of Horace is now only a desolate excavation. We stand upon the "Rock of Triumph," the Capitoline Hill, looking down upon the Forum: it lies like a stonemason's yard: stumps of pillars, fragments of brick or marble, overthrown entablatures, pillars, altars, tangles of staircases and enclosures, interspersed with poppies, wild oats, trefoils, confuse and crowd it:

Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grow Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped On what were chambers; arch crushed, columns strown In fragments; choked up vaults, where the owl peeped, Deeming it midnight.

But patient, daily survey, educated by the restorations of a Lanciani, enables us to piece together these encumbering ruins, until with tolerable clearness we can follow Horace in his walk along the Via Sacra towards Caesar's gardens, and can fairly reconstruct the objects which must have met his view. Everywhere is haunted ground: there is the bronze wolf of the Capitol, "thunder-stricken nurse of Rome," and the Tarpeian rock, from which "the Traitor's leap cured all ambition." There is the mythical gulf of Curtius, and the Mamertine prison where the Catiline conspirators were strangled, with its vault into which Jugurtha, after gracing the triumph of Marius, was hurled to die. Maiden-hair fern grows profusely in the crevices of Juturna's well, hard by the spring where the great twin brethren gave their horses drink after the battle of the Lake Regillus. Half covered with a mass of green acanthus is the base of Vesta's Temple, adjoining the atrium of the Virgins' house surrounded with their portrait statues: their names are engraved on each pedestal, but one is carefully erased, its original having, it is supposed, violated her vestal vow. We pause upon the spot where Caesar's body was burned, and beside the rostra whence Cicero thundered, and Antony spoke his "Friends, Romans, countrymen"; return finally to the Capitoline Museum, nucleus and centre of the ancient mistress of the world, to gaze upon gods, senators, emperors, shining still in undiminished majesty; on the Antinous, the Amazon, the Juno, the Dying Gladiator, and the Grecian masterpiece of Praxiteles.

THE ROMAN FORUM.]

Of his life in Rome Horace has given us a minute account (Sat. I, vi, 110, etc.). "Waking usually about six, I lie in bed or on my sofa, reading and writing, till nearly ten o'clock; anoint myself, go to the Campus for a game at ball, return home to a light luncheon. Then perhaps I amuse myself at home, perhaps saunter about the town; look in at the Circus and gossip with the fortune-tellers who swarm there when the games are over; walk through the market, inquiring the price of garden stuff and grain. Towards evening I come home to my supper of leeks and pulse and fritters, served by my three slave-boys on a white marble slab, which holds besides two drinking cups and ladle, a saltcellar shaped like a sea-urchin, an oil flask, and a saucer of cheap Campanian ware; and so at last I go to bed, not harassed by the thought that I need rise at day-break." Sometimes, to his great annoyance, he would be roused early to become sponsor in the law courts for a friend; shivering in the morning cold, pelted by falling hailstones, abused by the crowd through which he had to force his way. Or he would accompany Maecenas on a drive, their talk of matters trivial--the time of day, the early frosts, the merits of popular gladiators. We remember how delightfully Pope has adapted the passage to his own relation with Harley. (Imitation of Sat. II, vi.) Often he dined with Maecenas or his friends, and one such dinner he has described, at the house of a rich, vulgar epicure (Sat. II, viii). The guests were nine in number, including Maecenas, Varius, and Viscus: they lay on couches at maplewood tables arranged in three sides of a square. The first course was a Lucanian wild boar garnished with salads; when that was removed, servants wiped the board with purple napkins. Then a procession of slaves brought in Caecuban and Chian wines, accompanied with cheesecakes, fish, and apples. The second course was a vast lamprey, prawns swimming in its sauce; the third an olio of crane, hare, goose's liver, blackbirds, and wood-pigeons. A sumptuous meal, but spoiled by the host's tedious disquisitions on each dish as it appeared. Of social gatherings in their higher aspect, of the feasts of reason which he must have often shared at his patron's board, we long to know, but Horace is discreet; for him the rose of Harpocrates was suspended over every caenobium, and he would not profane its sacrament. He sat there as an equal, we know; his attitude towards those above him had in it no tinge of servility. That he was, and meant to be, independent they were fairly warned; when Maecenas wished to heap on him further benefits, he refused: "What I have is enough and more than enough," he said, "nay, should fortune shake her wings and leave me, I know how to resign her gifts" (Od. III, xxix, 53). And if not to Maecenas, so neither to Maecenas' master, would he sacrifice his freedom. The emperor sought his friendship, writes caressingly to Maecenas of "this most lovable little bit of a man," wished to make him his secretary, showed no offence at his refusal. His letters use the freedom of an intimate. "Septimius will tell you how highly I regard you. I happened to speak of you in his presence; if you disdain my friendship, I shall not disdain in return."--"I wish your little book were bigger; you seem to fear lest your books should be bigger than yourself."--"I am vexed with you, that you have never addressed one of your Epistles to myself; are you afraid that to have appeared as my friend will hurt you with posterity?" Such royal solicitations are a command, and Horace responded by the longest and one amongst the most admired of his Epistles (Ep. II, i). This was his final effort, unless the fragmentary essay on criticism, known as the "Art of Poetry," belongs to these last years; if that be so, his closing written words were a humorous disparagement of the "homely slighted shepherd's trade" (A. P. 470-476).

His life was drawing to a close; his friends were falling round him like leaves in wintry weather. Tibullus was dead, and so was Virgil, dearest and whitest-souled of men (Sat. I, v, 41); Maecenas was in failing health and out of favour. Old age had come to himself before its time; love, and wine, and festal crown of flowers had lost their zest:

Soon palls the taste for noise and fray, When hair is white and leaves are sere.

But he rallies his life-long philosophy to meet the change; patience lightens the inevitable; while each single day is his he will spend and enjoy it in such fashion that he may say at its conclusion, "I have lived" (Od. III, xxix, 41). His health had never been good, undermined, he believed, by the hardships of his campaign with Brutus; all the care of Augustus' skilful physician, Antonius Musa, failed to prolong his days. He passed away on the 17th of November, B.C. 8, in his fifty-seventh year; was buried on the Esquiline Hill, in a grave near to the sepulchre of Maecenas, who had died only a few days before; fulfilling the promise of an early ode, shaped almost in the words of Moabitish Ruth, that he would not survive his friend.

The self-same day Shall crush us twain; no idle oath Has Horace sworn; where'er you go, We both will travel, travel both The last dark journey down below.

Od. II, xvii.

THE SATIRES AND EPISTLES

Horace's poems are of two kinds; of one kind the Satires and Epistles, of another the Odes and Epodes. Their order and dates of publication are shown in the following table:

B.C. 35. First Book of Satires. 30. Second Book of Satires, and Epodes. 23. First three Books of Odes. 20. First Book of Epistles. 19. Epistle to Florus. 17. The Century Hymn. about 13. Fourth Book of the Odes. 13. Epistle to Augustus. (?) 10. The Art of Poetry.

Let us examine first the Satires and Epistles. The word "Satire" meant originally a farrago, a medley of various topics in various styles and metres. But all early writings of this kind have perished; and the first extant Latin satirist, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C., devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers who followed him, Horace, Persius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word satire a meaning which it retains to-day. In more than one passage Horace recognizes Lucilius as his master, and imitates him in what is probably the earliest, certainly the coarsest and least artistic of his poems; but maturer judgement, revolting later against the censorious spirit and bad taste of the older writer, led him to abandon his model. For good taste is the characteristic of these poems; they form a comedy of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but "just flicking with uplifted lash," Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic. "Conversations" we may rather call them; the polished talk of a well-bred, cultured, practised worldling, lightening while they point the moral which he ever keeps in view, by transitions, personalities, ironies, anecdotes; by perfect literary grace, by the underlying sympathy whereby wit is sublimed and softened into humour.

So he tells stories; often trivial, but redeemed by the lightness of his touch, the avoidance of redundancy, the inevitable epithets, the culminating point and finish. He illustrates the extravagance of the day by the spendthrift Clodius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from the ear of beautiful Metella (Sat. II, iii, 239), that he might enjoy drinking at one draught a million sesterces, near a thousand pounds. More than once he returns to castigation of the gluttony, which, though not yet risen to the monstrosity described by Juvenal, was invading the houses of the wealthy. He tells of two brothers--"a precious pair"--who used to breakfast daily upon nightingales: of one Maenius, who ruined himself in fieldfares (Ep. I, xv, 41). In a paper on the "Art of Dining" he accumulates ironical gastronomic maxims (Sat. II, iv): as that oblong eggs are to be preferred to round; that cabbages should be reared in dry soil; that the forelegs of a doe-hare are choice titbits; that to make a fowl tender you must plunge it alive into boiling wine and water; that oysters are best at the new moon; that prawns and snails give zest to wine; that olive oil should be mixed with pickled tunny roe, chopped herbs, and saffron. If these prescriptions are observed, he says, travestying a fine Lucretian line, the diner-out may draw near to and drink deep from the well-spring of a happy life. By contrast he paints the character of Ofellus, a farmer, whom he had known when a boy on the Apulian hills, and had visited in his old age (Sat. II, ii). Deprived of his estate after Philippi, Ofellus had rented it from its new master, working on as tenant where he had formerly been lord. "How are we worse off now?" says the gallant old fellow to his sons. "When I was rich, we lived on smoked bacon and cabbages, with perhaps a pullet or a kid if a friend dropped in; our dessert of split figs and raisins grown upon the farm. Well, we have just the same to-day. What matter that they called me 'owner' then, that a stranger is called owner now? There is no such thing as 'owner.' This man turned us out, someone else may turn him out to-morrow; his heir will do so at any rate when he dies. The farm was called mine once, it is called his to-day; it can never 'belong' to anyone except the man who works and uses it. So, my boys, keep stout hearts, and be ready to meet adversity bravely when it comes."

He lashes the legacy-hunters, who, in a time when disinclination to marriage had multiplied the number of childless old men, were becoming a curse to society; gives rules with affected seriousness for angling in a senior's hoards (Sat. II, v). Be sure you send him game, tell him often how you love him, address him by his first, what we should call his Christian, name--that tickles sensitive ears. If he offers you his will, refuse to read it, but glance sidelong at the line where the names of legatees are written. Praise his bad verses, shoulder a way for him in the streets, entreat him to cover up from cold his dear old head, make up to his housekeeper, flatter him till he bids you stop. Then when he is dead and you find yourself his heir, shed tears, spend money on his funeral, bear your honours meekly--and go on to practise upon someone else. And he throws in a sly story of a testatrix who bequeathed her money on condition that the heir should carry to the grave upon his naked shoulders her body oiled all over; he had stuck to her all her life, and she hoped to shake him off for a moment after death. He enforces the virtue of moderation and contentment from Aesop's fables, of the frog, of the daw with borrowed plumage, of the lean weasel who squeezed himself into a granary through a tiny hole, and grew so fat that he could not return; from the story of Philippus, who amused himself by enriching a poor man to the ruin of his victim's peace and happiness (Ep. I, vii, 46); and from the delightful apologue of the City and the Country Mouse (Sat. II, vi). He denounces the folly of miserliness from the example of the ant, provident in amassing store, but restful in fruition of it when amassed; reproves ill-natured judgement of one's neighbours almost in the words of Prior, bidding us be to their faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind, softening their moral blemishes as lovers and mothers euphemize a dear one's physical defects. (Sat. I, iii) "You will not listen to me?" he stops now and then to say; "I shall continue to cry on all the same until I rouse you, as the audience in the theatre did the other day" (Sat. II, iii, 60). For it seems that one Fufius, a popular actor, assumed in a tragedy the part of Trojan Ilione, whose cue was to fall asleep upon the stage until roused with a whisper of "Mother awake!" by the ghost of her dead son Deiphilus. Poor Fufius was tipsy, fell asleep in earnest, and was insensible to the ghost's appeal, until the audience, entering into the fun, unanimously shouted, "Wake up, Mother!" Some of you, I know, he goes on, will listen, even as Polemon did (Sat. II, iii, 254). Returning from a debauch, the young profligate passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lecturing, and burst riotously in. Presently, instead of scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched and moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken his effeminate ornaments, long sleeves, purple leggings, cravat, the garland from his head, the necklace from his throat; came away an altered and converted man. One thinks of a poem by Rossetti, and of something further back than that; for did we not hear the story from sage Mr. Barlow's lips, in our Sandford and Merton salad days?

In the earlier Satires his personalities are sometimes gross: chatterbox Fabius, scattercash Nomentanus, blear-eyed Crispinus, Hermogenes the fop, Pantolabus the trencherman, Gorgonius the goat-scented, Rufillus the pastille-perfumed, were derisive sobriquets, which, while ministering to the censoriousness of readers by names genuine or well understood, must have bitterly offended the men thus stigmatized or transparently indicated. This he admits regretfully in his later Satires, throwing some blame on a practice of his father, who when cautioning him against vice, always pointed the warning by some example from among their acquaintance. So, leaving personal satire, he turns to other topics; relates divertingly the annoyances of a journey; the mosquitoes, the frogs which croaked all night (Sat. I, v), the bad water and the ill-baked bread. Or he paints the slummy quarter of the city in which the witches held their horrible rites, and describes their cruel orgies as he peeped at them through the trees one night. Or he girds, facetiously and without the bitterness of Persius or Juvenal, at the Jews (Sat. I, v, 100), whose stern exclusiveness of faith was beginning to excite in Rome the horror vigorously expressed by Gallio in M. Anatole France's recent brilliant work. Or he delineates, on a full canvas and with the modernity which is amongst his most endearing characteristics, the "Bore" of the Augustan age. He starts on a summer morning, light-hearted and thinking of nothing at all, for a pleasant stroll along the Sacred Way (Sat. I, ix). A man whom he hardly knew accosts him, ignores a stiff response, clings to him, refuses to be shaken off, sings his own praises as poet, musician, dancer, presses impertinent questions as to the household and habits of Maecenas. Horace's friend Fuscus meets them; the poet nods and winks, imploring him to interpose a rescue. Cruel Fuscus sees it all, mischievously apologizes, will not help, and the shy, amiable poet walks on with his tormentor, "his ears dropped like those of an overladen ass." At last one of the bore's creditors comes up, collars him with threats, hales him to the law courts, while the relieved poet quotes in his joy from the rescue of Hector in the Iliad, "Thus Apollo bore me from the fray." In this Satire, which was admirably imitated by Swift, it always seems to me that we get Horace at his very best, his dry quaintness and his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent humour, the self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet benignant wit of Thackeray.