HORACE AND HIS INFLUENCE

by

GRANT SHOWERMAN

 * * * * * *

Our Debt to Greece and Rome

Editors

George Depue Hadzsits, Ph. D. University of Pennsylvania

David Moore Robinson, Ph. D. , Ll. D. The Johns Hopkins University

[Illustration]

Contributors to the "Our Debt toGreece and Rome Fund, " WhoseGenerosity Has Made Possiblethe Library

Our Debt to Greece and Rome

 Philadelphia

 DR. ASTLEY P. C. ASHHURST WILLIAM L. AUSTIN JOHN C. BELL HENRY H. BONNELL JASPER YEATES BRINTON GEORGE BURNHAM, JR. JOHN CADWALADER MISS CLARA COMEGYS MISS MARY E. CONVERSE ARTHUR G. DICKSON WILLIAM M. ELKINS H. H. FURNESS, JR. WILLIAM P. GEST JOHN GRIBBEL SAMUEL F. HOUSTON CHARLES EDWARD INGERSOLL JOHN STORY JENKS ALBA B. JOHNSON MISS NINA LEA HORATIO G. LLOYD GEORGE MCFADDEN MRS. JOHN MARKOE JULES E. MASTBAUM J. VAUGHAN MERRICK EFFINGHAM B. MORRIS WILLIAM R. MURPHY JOHN S. NEWBOLD S. DAVIS PAGE (memorial) OWEN J. ROBERTS JOSEPH G. ROSENGARTEN WILLIAM C. SPROUL JOHN B. STETSON, JR. DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE (memorial) GEORGE D. WIDENER MRS. JAMES D. WINSOR OWEN WISTER The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Liberal Studies. 

 Boston

 ORIC BATES (memorial) FREDERICK P. FISH WILLIAM AMORY GARDNER JOSEPH CLARK HOPPIN

 Chicago

 HERBERT W. WOLFF

 Cincinnati

 CHARLES PHELPS TAFT

 Cleveland

 SAMUEL MATHER

 Detroit

 JOHN W. ANDERSON DEXTER M. FERRY, JR. 

 Doylestown, Pennsylvania

 "A LOVER OF GREECE AND ROME"

 New York

 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN WILLARD V. KING THOMAS W. LAMONT DWIGHT W. MORROW MRS. D. W. MORROW _Senatori Societatis Philosophiae_, [Greek: PhBK], _gratias maximas agimus_ ELIHU ROOT MORTIMER L. SCHIFF WILLIAM SLOANE GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM And one contributor, who has asked to have his name withheld: _Maecenas atavis edite regibus, _ _O et praesidium et dulce decus meum. _

 Washington

 The Greek Embassy at Washington, for the Greek Government. 

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HORACE AND HIS INFLUENCE

by

GRANT SHOWERMAN

Professor of ClassicsThe University of Wisconsin

George G. Harrap & Co. , Ltd. London Calcutta Sydney

The Plimpton Press Norwood Massachusetts

1922

ToHOWARD LESLIE SMITHLOVER OF LETTERS

SABINE HILLS

 O_n Sabine hills when melt the snows_, S_till level-full His river flows_; E_ach April now His valley fills_ W_ith cyclamen and daffodils_; A_nd summers wither with the rose_. 

 S_wift-waning moons the cycle close_: B_irth, --toil, --mirth, --death; life onward goes_ T_hrough harvest heat or winter chills_ O_n Sabine hills_. 

 Y_et One breaks not His long repose_, N_or hither comes when Zephyr blows_; I_n vain the spring's first swallow trills_; N_ever again that Presence thrills_; O_ne charm no circling season knows_ O_n Sabine hills_. 

 GEORGE MEASON WHICHER

EDITORS' PREFACE

The volume on Horace and His Influence by Doctor Showerman is the secondto appear in the Series, known as "Our Debt to Greece and Rome. "

Doctor Showerman has told the story of this influence in what seems tous the most effective manner possible, by revealing the spiritualqualities of Horace and the reasons for their appeal to many generationsof men. These were the crown of the personality and work of the ancientpoet, and admiration of them has through successive ages always been atoken of aspiration and of a striving for better things. 

The purpose of the volumes in this Series will be to show the influenceof virtually all of the great forces of the Greek and Romancivilizations upon subsequent life and thought and the extent to whichthese are interwoven into the fabric of our own life of to-day. Therebywe shall all know more clearly the nature of our inheritance from thepast and shall comprehend more steadily the currents of our own life, their direction and their value. This is, we take it, of considerableimportance for life as a whole, whether for correct thinking or for trueidealism. 

The supremacy of Horace within the limits that he set for himself is nofortuity, and the miracle of his achievement will always remain aninspiration for some. But it is not as a distant ideal for a few, but asa living and vital force for all, that we should approach him; and toassist in this is the aim of our little volume. 

The significance of Horace to the twentieth century will gain in clarityfrom an understanding of his meaning to other days. We shall discoverthat the eternal verity of his message, whether in ethics or in art, comes to _us_ with a very particular challenge, warning and cry. 

CONTENTS

 CHAPTER PAGE

 CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FUND ii SABINE HILLS vii EDITORS' PREFACE ix INTRODUCTION: THE DYNAMISM OF THE FEW xiii

 I. HORACE INTERPRETED The Appeal of Horace 3 1. Horace the Person 6 2. Horace the Poet 9 3. Horace the Interpreter of His Times Horace the Duality 23 i. The Interpreter of Italian Landscape 25 ii. The Interpreter of Italian Living 28 iii. The Interpreter of Roman Religion 31 iv. The Interpreter of the Popular Wisdom 35 Horace and Hellenism 38 4. Horace the Philosopher of Life Horace the Spectator and Essayist 39 i. The Vanity of Human Wishes 44 ii. The Pleasures of this World 49 iii. Life and Morality 54 iv. Life and Purpose 59 v. The Sources of Happiness 62 II. HORACE THROUGH THE AGES Introductory 69 1. Horace the Prophet 70 2. Horace and Ancient Rome 75 3. Horace and the Middle Age 87 4. Horace and Modern Times The Rebirth of Horace 104 i. In Italy 106 ii. In France 114 iii. In Germany 115 iv. In Spain 118 v. In England 121 vi. In the Schools 126 III. HORACE THE DYNAMIC The Cultivated Few 127 1. Horace and the Literary Ideal 131 2. Horace and Literary Creation i. The Translator's Ideal 136 ii. Creation 143 3. Horace in the Living of Men 152 IV. CONCLUSION 168 NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 171

INTRODUCTION: THE DYNAMISMOF THE FEW

To those who stand in the midst of times and attempt to grasp theirmeaning, civilization often seems hopelessly complicated. The myriad andmysterious interthreading of motive and action, of cause and effect, presents to the near vision no semblance of a pattern, and the whole webis so confused and meaningless that the mind grows to doubt the presenceof design, and becomes skeptical of the necessity, or even theimportance, of any single strand. 

Yet civilization is on the whole a simple and easily understoodphenomenon. This is true most apparently of that part of the humanfamily of which Europe and the Americas form the principal portion, andwhose influences have made themselves felt also in remote continents. Ifto us it is less apparently true of the world outside our westerncivilization, the reason lies in the fact that we are not in possessionof equal facilities for the exercise of judgment. 

We are all members one of another, and the body which we form is aconsistent and more or less unchanging whole. There are certainelemental facts which underlie human society wherever it has advanced toa stage deserving the name of civilization. There is the intellectualimpulse, with the restraining influence of reason upon the relations ofmen. There is the active desire to be in right relation with theunknown, which we call religion. There is the attempt at thebeautification of life, which we call art. There is the institution ofproperty. There is the institution of marriage. There is the demand forthe purity of woman. There is the insistence upon certain decencies andcertain conformities which constitute what is known as morality. Thereis the exchange of material conveniences called commerce, with itsnecessary adjunct, the sanctity of obligation. In a word, there are theuniversal and eternal verities. 

Farther, if what we may call the constitution of civilization is thusdefinite, its physical limits are even more clearly defined. Civilization is a matter of centers. The world is not large, and itsgovernment rests upon the shoulders of the few. The metropolis is theindex of capacity for good and ill in a national civilization. Itsculture is representative of the common life of town and country. 

It follows that the history of civilization is a history of the famousgathering-places of men. The story of human progress in the West is thestory of Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Cnossus, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, and of medieval, Renaissance, and modern capitals. History is astream, in the remoter antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia confinedwithin narrow and comparatively definite banks, gathering in volume andswiftness as it flows through Hellenic lands, and at last expanding intothe broad and deep basin of Rome, whence its current, dividing, leadsaway in various channels to other ample basins, perhaps in the course oftime to reunite at some great meeting of waters in the New World. To oneafloat in the swirl of contradictory eddies, it may be difficult tojudge of the whence and whither of the troubled current, but the ascentof the stream and the exploration of the sources of literature and thearts, of morals, politics, and religion, of commerce and mechanics, ison the whole no difficult adventure. 

Finally, civilization is not only a matter of local habitation, but amatter of individual men. The great city is both determined by, anddetermines, its environment; the great man is the product, and in turnthe producer, of the culture of his nation. The human race is gregariousand sequacious, rather than individual and adventurous. Progress dependsupon the initiative of spirited and gifted men, rather than upon thetardy movement of the mass, upon idea rather than force, upon spiritrather than matter. 

I preface my essay with these reflections because there may be readersat first thought skeptical of even modest statements regarding Horace asa force in the history of our culture and a contributor to our lifetoday. It is only when the continuity of history and the essentialsimplicity and constancy of civilization are understood that the directand vital connection between past and present is seen, and the mind isno longer startled and incredulous when the historian records that theAcropolis has had more to do with the career of architecture than anyother group of buildings in the world, or that the most potent influencein the history of prose is the Latin of Cicero, or that poeticexpression is more choice and many men appreciably saner and happierbecause of a Roman poet dead now one thousand nine hundred and thirtyyears. 

HORACE AND HISINFLUENCE

I. HORACE INTERPRETED

THE APPEAL OF HORACE

In estimating the effect of Horace upon his own and later times, we musttake into account two aspects of his work. These are, the forms in whichhe expressed himself, and the substance of which they are the garment. We shall find him distinguished in both; but in the substance of hismessage we shall find him distinguished by a quality which sets himapart from other poets ancient and modern. 

This distinctive quality lies neither in the originality nor in thenovelty of the Horatian message, which, as a matter of fact, issurprisingly familiar, and perhaps even commonplace. It lies rather inthe appealing manner and mood of its communication. It is a messageliving and vibrant. 

The reason for this is that in Horace we have, above all, a person. Nopoet speaks from the page with greater directness, no poet establishesso easily and so completely the personal relation with the reader, nopoet is remembered so much as if he were a friend in the flesh. In thisrespect, Horace among poets is a parallel to Thackeray in the field ofthe novel. What the letters of Cicero are to the intrigue and turmoil ofpolitics, war, and the minor joys and sorrows of private and social lifein the last days of the Republic, the lyrics and "Conversations" ofHorace are to the mood of the philosophic mind of the early Empire. Bothare lights which afford us a clear view of interiors otherwise butfaintly illuminated. They are priceless interpreters of their times. Inmodern times, we make environment interpret the poet. We understand aTennyson, a Milton, or even a Shakespeare, from our knowledge of theworld in which he lived. In the case of antiquity, the process isreversed. We reconstruct the times of Caesar and Augustus from fortunateacquaintance with two of the most representative men who ever possessedthe gift of literary genius. 

It is because Horace's appeal depends so largely upon his qualities as aperson that our interpretation of him must center about his personaltraits. We shall re-present to the imagination his personal appearance. We shall account for the personal qualities which contributed to thepoetic gift that set him apart as the interpreter of the age to his ownand succeeding generations. We shall observe the natural sympathy withmen and things by reason of which he reflects with peculiar faithfulnessthe life of city and country. We shall become acquainted with thethoughts and the moods of a mind and heart that were nicely sensitive tosight and sound and personal contact. We shall hear what the poet has tosay of himself not only as a member of the human family, but as the userof the pen. 

This interpretation of Horace as person and poet will be best attemptedfrom his own work, and best expressed in his own phrase. The pages whichfollow are a manner of Horatian mosaic. They contain little not said orsuggested by the poet himself. 

1. HORACE THE PERSON

Horace was of slight stature among even a slight-statured race. At theperiod when we like him best, when he was growing mellower and betterwith advancing years, his black hair was more than evenly mingled withgrey. The naturally dark and probably not too finely-textured skin offace and expansive forehead was deepened by the friendly breezes of bothcity and country to the vigorous golden brown of the Italian. Featureand eye held the mirror up to a spirit quick to anger but plenteous ingood-nature. Altogether, Horace was a short, rotund man, smiling butserious, of nothing very remarkable either in appearance or in manner, and with a look of the plain citizen. Of all the ancients who have leftno material likeness, he is the least difficult to know in person. 

We see him in a carriage or at the shows with Maecenas, the Emperor'sfastidious counsellor. We have charming glimpses of him enjoying incompany the hospitable shade of huge pine and white poplar on the grassyterrace of some rose-perfumed Italian garden with noisy fountain andhurrying stream. He loiters, with eyes bent on the pavement, along thewinding Sacred Way that leads to the Forum, or on his way home strugglesagainst the crowd as it pushes its way down town amid the dust and dinof the busy city. He shrugs his shoulders in good-humored despair as thesirocco brings lassitude and irritation from beyond the Mediterranean, or he sits huddled up in some village by the sea, shivering with thewinds from the Alps, reading, and waiting for the first swallow toherald the spring. 

We see him at a mild game of tennis in the broad grounds of the CampusMartius. We see him of an evening vagabonding among the nameless commonfolk of Rome, engaging in small talk with dealers in small merchandise. He may look in upon a party of carousing friends, with banter that isnot without reproof. We find him lionized in the homes of the first menof the city in peace and war, where he mystifies the not toointellectual fair guests with graceful and provokingly passionlessgallantry. He sits at ease with greater enjoyment under the opaque vineand trellis of his own garden. He appears in the midst of his householdas it bustles with preparation for the birthday feast of a friend, or hewelcomes at a less formal board and with more unrestrained joy thebeloved comrade-in-arms of Philippi, prolonging the genial intercourse

 "T_ill Phoebus the red East unbars_ A_nd puts to rout the trembling stars_. "

Or we see him bestride an indifferent nag, cantering down the AppianWay, with its border of tombs, toward the towering dark-green summits ofthe Alban Mount, twenty miles away, or climbing the winding white roadto Tivoli where it reclines on the nearest slope of the Sabines, andpursuing the way beyond it along the banks of headlong Anio where itrushes from the mountains to join the Tiber. We see him finally arrivedat his Sabine farm, the gift of Maecenas, standing in tunic-sleeves athis doorway in the morning sun, and contemplating with thankful heartvalley and hill-side opposite, and the cold stream of Digentia in thevalley-bottom below. We see him rambling about the wooded uplands of hislittle estate, and resting in the shade of a decaying rustic temple toindite a letter to the friend whose not being present is all that keepshim from perfect happiness. He participates with the near-by villagersin the joys of the rural holiday. He mingles homely philosophy andfiction with country neighbors before his own hearth in the bigliving-room of the farm-house. 

Horace's place is not among the dim and uncertain figures of a hoaryantiquity. Only give him modern shoes, an Italian cloak, and awalking-stick, instead of sandals and toga, and he may be seen on thestreets of Rome today. Nor is he less modern in character and bearingthan in appearance. We discern in his composition the same strange andseemingly contradictory blend of the grave and gay, the lively andsevere, the constant and the mercurial, the austere and the trivial, thedignified and the careless, that is so baffling to the observer ofItalian character and conduct today. 

2. HORACE THE POET

To understand how Horace came to be a great poet as well as an engagingperson, it is necessary to look beneath this somewhat commonplaceexterior, and to discern the spiritual man. 

The foundations of literature are laid in life. For the production ofgreat poetry two conditions are necessary. There must be, first, an agepregnant with the celestial fires of deep emotion. Second, there must bein its midst one of the rare men whom we call inspired. He must be ofsuch sensitive spiritual fiber as to vibrate to every breeze of thenational passion, of such spiritual capacity as to assimilate the commonthoughts and moods of the time, of such fine perception and of suchsureness of command over word, phrase, and rhythm, as to give crowningexpression to what his soul has made its own. 

For abundance of stirring and fertilizing experience, history presentsfew equals of the times when Horace lived. His lifetime fell in an agewhich was in continual travail with great and uncertain movement. Neverhas Fortune taken greater delight in her bitter and insolent game, neverdisplayed a greater pertinacity in the derision of men. In the periodfrom Horace's birth at Venusia in southeastern Italy, on December 8, B. C. 65, to November 27, B. C. 8, when

 "M_ourned of men and Muses nine_, T_hey laid him on the Esquiline_, "

there occurred the series of great events, to men in their midstincomprehensible, bewildering, and disheartening, which after timescould readily interpret as the inevitable change from the ancient anddecaying Republic to the better knit if less free life of the Empire. 

We are at an immense distance, and the differences have long since beencomposed. The menacing murmur of trumpets is no longer audible, and theseas are no longer red with blood. The picture is old, and faded, anddarkened, and leaves us cold, until we illuminate it with the light ofimagination. Then first we see, or rather feel, the magnitude of thetime: its hatreds and its selfishness; its differences of opinion, sometimes honest and sometimes disingenuous, but always maintained withthe heat of passion; its divisions of friends and families; itslawlessness and violence; its terrifying uncertainties and adventurousplunges; its tragedies of confiscation, murder, fire, proscription, feud, insurrection, riot, war; the dramatic exits of the leading actorsin the great play, --of Catiline at Pistoria, of Crassus in the easterndeserts, of Clodius at Bovillae within sight of the gates of Rome, ofPompey in Egypt, of Cato in Africa, of Caesar, Servius Sulpicius, Marcellus, Trebonius and Dolabella, Hirtius and Pansa, Decimus Brutus, the Ciceros, Marcus Brutus and Cassius, Sextus the son of Pompey, Antonyand Cleopatra, --as one after another

 "S_trutted and fretted his hour upon the stage_, A_nd then was heard no more_. "

It is in relief against a background such as this that Horace's worksshould be read, --the _Satires_, published in 35 and 30, which the poethimself calls _Sermones_, "Conversations, " "Talks, " or _Causeries_; thecollection of lyrics called _Epodes_, in 29; three books of _Odes_ in23; a book of _Epistles_, or further _Causeries_, in 20; the _SecularHymn_ in 17; a second book of _Epistles_ in 14; a fourth book of _Odes_in 13; and a final _Epistle_, _On the Art of Poetry_, at a later anduncertain date. 

It is above all against such a background that Horace's invocation toFortune should be read:

 G_oddess, at lovely Antium is thy shrine_: R_eady art thou to raise with grace divine_ O_ur mortal frame from lowliest dust of earth_, O_r turn triumph to funeral for thy mirth_;

or that other expression of the inscrutable uncertainty of the humanlot:

 F_ortune, whose joy is e'er our woe and shame_, W_ith hard persistence plays her mocking game_; B_estowing favors all inconstantly_, K_indly to others now, and now to me_. W_ith me, I praise her; if her wings she lift_ T_o leave me, I resign her every gift_, A_nd, cloaked about in my own virtue's pride_, W_ed honest poverty, the dowerless bride_. 

Horace is not here the idle singer of an empty day. His utterance may bea universal, but in the light of history it is no commonplace. It is theeloquent record of the life of Rome in an age which for intensity isunparalleled in the annals of the ancient world. 

And yet men may live a longer span of years than fell to the lot ofHorace, and in times no less pregnant with event, and still fail to comeinto really close contact with life. Horace's experience wascomprehensive, and touched the life of his generation at many points. Hewas born in a little country town in a province distant from thecapital. His father, at one time a slave, and always of humble calling, was a man of independent spirit, robust sense, and excellent character, whose constant and intimate companionship left everlasting gratitude inthe heart of the son. He provided for the little Horace's education atfirst among the sons of the "great" centurions who constituted thesociety of the garrison-town of Venusia, afterwards ambitiously took himto Rome to acquire even the accomplishments usual among the sons ofsenators, and finally sent him to Athens, garner of wisdom of the ages, where the learning of the past was constantly made to live again bymasters with the quick Athenian spirit of telling or hearing new things. 

The intellectual experience of Horace's younger days was thus of thebroadest character. Into it there entered and were blended the shrewdpractical understanding of the Italian provincial; the ornamentalaccomplishments of the upper classes; the inspiration of Rome's history, with the long line of heroic figures that appear in the twelfth _Ode_ ofthe first book like a gallery of magnificent portraits; first-handknowledge of prominent men of action and letters; unceasing discussionof questions of the day which could be avoided by none; and, finally, humanizing contact on their own soil with Greek philosophy and poetry, Greek monuments and history, and teachers of racial as well asintellectual descent from the greatest people of the past. 

But Horace's experience assumed still greater proportions. He passedfrom the university of Athens to the larger university of life. The newsof Caesar's death at the hands of the "Liberators, " which reached him asa student there at the age of twenty-one, and the arrival of Brutus somemonths after, stirred his young blood. As an officer in the army ofBrutus, he underwent the hardships of the long campaign, enriching lifewith new friendships formed in circumstances that have always tightenedthe friendly bond. He saw the disastrous day of Philippi, narrowlyescaped death by shipwreck, and on his return to Italy and Rome foundhimself without father or fortune. 

Nor was the return to Rome the end of his education. In the intervalwhich followed, Horace's mind, always of philosophic bent, was no doubtbusy with reflection upon the disparity between the ideals of theliberators and the practical results of their actions, upon thedifference between the disorganized, anarchical Rome of the civil warand the gradually knitting Rome of Augustus, and upon the futility ofpresuming to judge the righteousness either of motives or means in aworld where men, to say nothing of understanding each other, could notunderstand themselves. In the end, he accepted what was not to beavoided. He went farther than acquiescence. The growing conviction amongthoughtful men that Augustus was the hope of Rome found lodgment also inhis mind. He gravitated from negative to positive. His value as aneducated man was recognized, and he found himself at twenty-four inpossession of the always coveted boon of the young Italian, a place inthe government employ. A clerkship in the treasury gave him salary, safety, respectability, a considerable dignity, and a degree of leisure. 

Of the leisure he made wise use. Still in the afterglow of his Athenianexperience, he began to write. He attracted the attention of a limitedcircle of associates. The personal qualities which made him a favoritewith the leaders of the Republican army again served him well. He wonthe recognition and the favor of men who had the ear of the ruling few. In about 33, when he was thirty-two years old, Maecenas, theappreciative counsellor, prompted by Augustus, the politic ruler, whorecognized the value of talent in every field for his plans ofreconstruction, made him independent of money-getting, and gave himcurrency among the foremost literary men of the city. He triumphed overthe social prejudice against the son of a freedman, disarmed thejealousy of literary rivals, and was assured of fame as well as favor. 

Nor was even this the end of Horace's experience with the world ofaction. It may be that his actual participation in affairs did ceasewith Maecenas's gift of the Sabine farm, and it is true that he neverpretended to live on their own ground the life of the high-born andrich, but he nevertheless associated on sympathetic terms with menthrough whom he felt all the activities and ideals of the class mostrepresentative of the national life, and past experiences and naturaladaptability enabled him to assimilate their thoughts and emotions. 

Thanks to the glowing personal nature of Horace's works, we know whomany of these friends and patrons were who so enlarged his vision anddeepened his inspiration. Almost without exception his poems areaddressed or dedicated to men with whom he was on terms of more thanordinary friendship. They were rare men, --fit audience, though few; menof experience in affairs at home and in the field, men of natural tasteand real cultivation, of broad and sane outlook, of warm heart and deepsympathies. There was Virgil, whom he calls the half of his own being. There was Plotius, and there was Varius, bird of Maeonian song, whom heranks with the singer of the _Aeneid_ himself as the most luminouslypure of souls on earth. There was Quintilius, whose death was bewailedby many good men;--when would incorruptible Faith and Truth find hisequal? There was Maecenas, well-bred and worldly-wise, the pillar andornament of his fortunes. There was Septimius, the hoped-for companionof his mellow old age in the little corner of earth that smiled on himbeyond all others. There was Iccius, procurator of Agrippa's estates inSicily, sharing Horace's delight in philosophy. There was Agrippahimself, son-in-law of Augustus, grave hero of battles and diplomacy. There was elderly Trebatius, sometime friend of Cicero and Caesar, withdry legal humor early seasoned in the wilds of Gaul. There were Pompeiusand Corvinus, old-soldier friends with whom he exchanged reminiscencesof the hard campaign. There was Messalla, a fellow-student at Athens, and Pollio, soldier, orator, and poet. There were Julius Florus andother members of the ambitious literary cohort in the train of Tiberius. There was Aristius Fuscus, the watch of whose wit was ever wound andready to strike. There was Augustus himself, busy administrator of aworld, who still found time for letters. 

It is through the medium of personalities like these that Horace'smessage was delivered to the world of his time and to later generations. How far the finished elegance of his expression is due to theirdiscriminating taste, and how much of the breadth and sanity of hiscontent is due to their vigor of character and cosmopolitan culture, wemay only conjecture. Literature is not the product of a singleindividual. The responsive and stimulating audience is hardly lessneedful than the poet's inspiration. 

Such were the variety and abundance of Horace's experience. It was largeand human. He had touched life high and low, bond and free, public andprivate, military and civil, provincial and urban, Hellenic, Asiatic, and Italian, urban and rustic, ideal and practical, at the culturedcourt and among the ignorant, but not always unwise, common people. 

And yet, numbers of men possessed of experience as abundant have diedwithout being poets, or even wise men. Their experience was held insolution, so to speak, and failed to precipitate. Horace's experiencedid precipitate. Nature gave him the warm and responsive soul by reasonof which he became a part of all he met. Unlike most of his associatesamong the upper classes to which he rose, his sympathies could includethe freedman, the peasant, and the common soldier. Unlike most of themultitude from which he sprang, he could extend his sympathies to thecareworn rich and the troubled statesman. He had learned from his ownlot and from observation that no life was wholly happy, that the caresof the so-called fortunate were only different from, not less real than, those of the ordinary man, that every human heart had its chamberfurnished for the entertainment of Black Care, and that the chamber wasnever without its guest. 

But not even the precipitate of experience called wisdom will alone makethe poet. Horace was again endowed by nature with another and rarer andequally necessary gift, --the sense of artistic expression. It would bewaste of time to debate how much he owed to native genius, how much tohis own laborious patience, and how much to the good fortune of generoushuman contact. He is surely to be classed among examples of what forwant of a better term we call inspiration. The poet _is_ born. We mayaccount for the inspiration of Horace by supposing him of Greek descent(as if Italy had never begotten poets of her own), but the mysteryremains. In the case of any poet, after everything has been said of theusual influences, there is always something left to be accounted foronly on the ground of genius. It was the possession of this that setHorace apart from other men of similar experience. 

The poet, however, is not the mere accident of birth. Horace is aware ofa power not himself that makes for poetic righteousness, and realizesthe mystery of inspiration. The Muse cast upon him at birth her placidglance. He expects glory neither on the field nor in the course, butlooks to song for his triumphs. To Apollo, "L_ord of the enchanting shell_, P_arent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs_, "

who can give power of song even unto the mute, he owes all his power andall his fame. It is the gift of Heaven that he is pointed out by thefinger of the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, that hebreathes the divine fire and pleases men. But he is as perfectlyappreciative of the fact that poets are born and also made, and condemnsthe folly of depending upon inspiration unsupported by effort. He callshimself the bee of Matinum, industriously flitting with honeyed thighabout the banks of humid Tibur. What nature begins, cultivation mustdevelop. Neither training without the rich vein of native endowment, nornatural talent without cultivation, will suffice; both must be friendlyconspirators in the process of forming the poet. Wisdom is the beginningand source of writing well. He who would run with success the race thatis set before him must endure from boyhood the hardships of heat andcold, and abstain from women and wine. The gift of God must be madeperfect by the use of the file, by long waiting, and by consciousintellectual discipline. 

3. HORACE THE INTERPRETEROF HIS TIMES

HORACE THE DUALITY

Varied as were Horace's experiences, they were mainly of two kinds, andthere are two Horaces who reflect them. There is a more natural Horace, simple and direct, of ordinary Italian manners and ideals, and a lessnatural Horace, finished in the culture of Greece and theartificialities of life in the capital. They might be called theunconventional and the conventional Horace. 

This duality is only the reflection of the two-fold experience of Horaceas the provincial village boy and as the successful literary man of thecity. The impressions received from Venusia and its simple population ofhard-working, plain-speaking folk, from the roaring Aufidus and thelandscape of Apulia, from the freedman father's common-sense instructionas he walked about in affectionate companionship with his son, neverfaded from Horace's mind. The ways of the city were superimposed uponthe ways of the country, but never displaced nor even covered them. Theywere a garment put on and off, sometimes partly hiding, but never forlong, the original cloak of simplicity. It is not necessary to think itswearer insincere when, constrained by social circumstance, he put it on. As in most dualities not consciously assumed, both Horaces were genuine. When Davus the slave reproaches his master for longing, while at Rome, to be back in the country, and for praising the attractions of the city, while in the country, it is not mere discontent or inconsistency inHorace which he is attacking. Horace loved both city and country. 

And yet, whatever the appeal of the city and its artificialities, Horace's real nature called for the country and its simple ways. It isthe Horace of Venusia and the Sabines who is the more genuine of thetwo. The more formal poems addressed to Augustus and his house-holdsometimes sound the note of affectation, but the most exacting criticwill hesitate to bring a like charge against the odes which celebratethe fields and hamlets of Italy and the prowess of her citizen-soldiersof time gone by, or against the mellow epistles and lyrics in which thepoet philosophizes upon the spectacle of human life. 

_i_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIANLANDSCAPE

The real Horace is to be found first of all as the interpreter of thebeauty and fruitfulness of Italy. It is no land of mere literaryimagination which he makes us see with such clear-cut distinctness. Itis not an Italy in Theocritean colors, like the Italy of Virgil's_Bucolics_, but the Italy of Horace's own time, the Italy of his ownbirth and experience, and the Italy of today. Horace is not adescriptive poet. The reader will look in vain for nature-poems in themodern sense. With a word or a phrase only, he flashes upon our visionthe beautiful, the significant, the permanent in the scenery of Italy. The features which he loved best, or which for other reasons caught hiseye, are those that we still see. There are the oak and the opaque ilex, the pine and the poplar, the dark, funereal cypress, the bright flowerof the too-short-lived rose, and the sweet-scented bed of violets. Thereare the olive groves of Venafrum. Most lovely of sights and mostbeautiful of figures, there is the purple-clustered vine of vari-coloredautumn wedded to the elm. There is the bachelor plane-tree. There arethe long-horned, grey-flanked, dark-muzzled, liquid-eyed cattle, grazingunder the peaceful skies of the Campagna or enjoying in the meadow theirholiday freedom from the plow; the same cattle that Carducci sings--

 "I_n the grave sweetness of whose tranquil eyes_ O_f emerald, broad and still reflected, dwells_ A_ll the divine green silence of the plain_. "

We are made to see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazingheat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leadshis flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Calabria liespread before us, we see the yellow Tiber at flood, the rushing Anio, the deep eddyings of Liris' taciturn stream, the secluded valleys of theApennines, the leaves flying before the wind at the coming of winter, the snow-covered uplands of the Alban hills, the mead sparkling withhoar-frost at the approach of spring, autumn rearing from the fields herhead decorous with mellow fruits, and golden abundance pouring forthfrom a full horn her treasures upon the land. It is real Italy whichHorace cuts on his cameos, --real landscape, real flowers and fruits, real men. 

 "What joy there is in these songs!"

writes Andrew Lang, in _Letters to Dead Authors_, "what delight of life, what an exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that isfair in the glittering stream, the music of the water-fall, the hum ofbees, the silvery gray of the olive woods on the hillside! How human areall your verses, Horace! What a pleasure is yours in the strainingpoplars, swaying in the wind! What gladness you gain from the whitecrest of Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes while thelogs are being piled higher on the hearth!... None of the Latin poetsyour fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known as well asyou, Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, numberingthe glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of hismistress. But the sentiment is ever in your heart, and often on yourlips. 'Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean plain soenraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong Anio, the groveof Tibur, the orchards watered by the wandering rills. ' So a poet shouldspeak, and to every singer his own land should be dearest. Beautiful isItaly, with the grave and delicate outlines of her sacred hills, herdark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on the crags, herrivers gliding under ancient walls: beautiful is Italy, her seas and hersuns. "

_ii_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN LIVING

Again, in its visualization of the life of Italy, Horace's art is noless clear than in the presentation of her scenery. Where else may beseen so many vivid incidental pictures of men at their daily occupationsof work or play? In _Satire_ and _Epistle_ this is to be expected, though there are satirists and writers of letters who never transfer thecolors of life to their canvas; but the lyrics, too, are kaleidoscopicwith scenes from the daily round of human life. We are given fleetingbut vivid glimpses into the career of merchant and sailor. We see thesportsman in chase of the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedythrush, the serenader under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside, the anxious mother at the window on the cliff, never taking her eyesfrom the curved shore, the husbandman passing industrious days on hisown hillside, tilling his own acres with his own oxen, and training thevine to the unwedded tree, the young men of the hill-towns carryingbundles of fagots along rocky slopes, the rural holiday and itsfestivities, the sun-browned wife making ready the evening meal againstthe coming of the tired peasant. We are shown all the quaint and quietlife of the countryside. 

The page is often golden with homely precept or tale of the sort whichfor all time has been natural to farmer folk. There is the story of thecountry mouse and the town mouse, the fox and the greedy weasel that ateuntil he could not pass through the crack by which he came, the rusticwho sat and waited for the river to get by, the horse that called man toaid him against the stag, and received the bit forever. The most formaland dignified of the _Odes_ are not without the mellow charm of Italianlandscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first six_Odes_ of the third book, often called the _Inaugural Odes_, we get suchglimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius onelection day, the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships underthe open sky, the restless Adriatic, the Bantine headlands and thelow-lying Forentum of the poet's infancy, the babe in the wood ofVoltur, the Latin hill-towns, the craven soldier of Crassus, and thestern patriotism of Regulus. Without these the _Inaugurals_ would be butbarren and cold, to say nothing of the splendid outburst against thedomestic degradation of the time, so full of color and heat andpicturesqueness:

 'T_was not the sons of parents such as these_ T_hat tinged with Punic blood the rolling seas_, L_aid low the cruel Hannibal, and brought_ G_reat Pyrrhus and Antiochus to naught_;

 B_ut the manly brood of rustic soldier folk_, T_aught, when the mother or the father spoke_ T_he word austere, obediently to wield_ T_he heavy mattock in the Sabine field_, O_r cut and bear home fagots from the height_, A_s mountain shadows deepened into night_, A_nd the sun's car, departing down the west_, B_rought to the wearied steer the friendly rest_. 

_iii_. THE INTERPRETER OF ROMAN RELIGION

Still farther, Horace is an eloquent interpreter of the religion of thecountryside. He knows, of course, the gods of Greece and theEast, --Venus of Cythera and Paphos, of Eryx and Cnidus, Mercury, deityof gain and benefactor of men, Diana, Lady of the mountain and theglade, Delian Apollo, who bathes his unbound locks in the pure waters ofCastalia, and Juno, sister and consort of fulminating Jove. He isimpressed by the glittering pomp of religious processions winding theirway to the summit of the Capitol. In all this, and even in theemperor-worship, now in its first stages at Rome and more political thanreligious, he acquiesces, though he may himself be a sparing frequenterof the abodes of worship. For him, as for Cicero, religion is one of thesocial and civic proprieties, a necessary part of the nationalmechanism. 

But the great Olympic deities do not really stir Horace's enthusiasm, oreven evoke his warm sympathy. The only _Ode_ in which he prays to one ofthem with really fervent heart stands alone among all the odes to thenational gods. He petitions the great deity of healing and poetry forwhat we know is most precious to him:

 "W_hen, kneeling at Apollo's shrine_, T_he bard from silver goblet pours_ L_ibations due of votive wine_, W_hat seeks he, what implores_?

 "N_ot harvests from Sardinia's shore_; N_ot grateful herds that crop the lea_ I_n hot Calabria; not a store_ O_f gold, and ivory_;

 "N_ot those fair lands where slow and deep_ T_hro' meadows rich and pastures gay_ T_hy silent waters, Liris, creep_, E_ating the marge away_. 

 "L_et him to whom the gods award_ C_alenian vineyards prune the vine_; T_he merchant sell his balms and nard_, A_nd drain the precious wine_

 "F_rom cups of gold--to Fortune dear_ B_ecause his laden argosy_ C_rosses, unshattered, thrice a year_ T_he storm-vexed Midland sea_. 

 "R_ipe berries from the olive bough_, M_allows and endives, be my fare_. S_on of Latona, hear my vow!_ A_pollo, grant my prayer!_

 "H_ealth to enjoy the blessings sent_ F_rom heaven; a mind unclouded, strong_; A_ cheerful heart; a wise content_; A_n honored age; and song_. "

This is not the prayer of the city-bred formalist. It reflects the heartof humble breeding and sympathies. For the faith which really sets thepoet aglow we must go into the fields and hamlets of Italy, among thehouseholders who were the descendants of the long line of Italianforefathers that had worshiped from time immemorial the same gods at thesame altars in the same way. They were not the gods of yesterday, imported from Greece and Egypt, and splendid with display, but thesimple gods of farm and fold native to the soil of Italy. Whatever hisconception of the logic of it all, Horace felt a powerful appeal as hecontemplated the picturesqueness of the worship and the simplicity ofthe worshiper, and reflected upon its genuineness and purity ascontrasted with what his worldly wisdom told him of the heart of theurban worshiper. 

Horace may entertain a well-bred skepticism of Jupiter's thunderbolt, and he may pass the jest on the indifference of the Epicurean gods tothe affairs of men. When he does so, it is with the gods of mythologyand literature he is dealing, not with really religious gods. For theold-fashioned faith of the country he entertains only the kindliestregard. The images that rise in his mind at the mention of religion pureand undefiled are not the gaudy spectacles to be seen in the marbledstreets of the capital. They are images of incense rising in autumn fromthe ancient altar on the home-stead, of the feast of the Terminalia withits slain lamb, of libations of ruddy wine and offerings of brightflowers on the clear waters of some ancestral spring, of the simplehearth of the farmhouse, of the family table resplendent with the silver_salinum_, heirloom of generations, from which the grave paterfamiliasmakes the pious offering of crackling salt and meal to little godscrowned with rosemary and myrtle, of the altar beneath the pine to theVirgin goddess, of Faunus the shepherd-god, in the humor of wooing, roaming the sunny farmfields in quest of retreating wood-nymphs, ofPriapus the garden-god, and Silvanus, guardian of boundaries, and, mostof all, and typifying all, of the faith of rustic Phidyle, with cleanhands and a pure heart raising palms to heaven at the new of the moon, and praying for the full-hanging vine, thrifty fields of corn, andunblemished lambs. Of the religious life represented by these, Horace isno more tempted to make light than he is tempted to delineate theItalian rustic as De Maupassant does the French, --as an amusing animal, with just enough of the human in his composition to make him ludicrous. 

_iv_. THE INTERPRETER OF THE POPULARWISDOM

Finally, in the homely, unconventional wisdom which fills _Satire_ and_Epistle_ and sparkles from the _Odes_, Horace is again the nationalinterpreter. The masses of Rome or Italy had little consciously to dowith either Stoicism or Epicureanism. Their philosophy was vigorouscommon sense, and was learned from living, not from conning books. Horace, too, for all his having been a student of formal philosophy inAthens, for all his professed faith in philosophy as a boon for rich andpoor and old and young, and for all his inclination to yield to thenatural human impulse toward system and adopt the philosophy of one ofthe Schools, is a consistent follower of neither Stoic nor Epicurean. Both systems attracted him by their virtues, and both repelled himbecause of their weaknesses. His half-humorous confession of waveringallegiance is only a reflection of the shiftings of a mind open to theappeal of both:

And, lest you inquire under what guide or to what hearth I look forsafety, I will tell you that I am sworn to obedience in no master'sformula, but am a guest in whatever haven the tempest sweeps me to. NowI am full of action and deep in the waves of civic life, an unswervingfollower and guardian of the true virtue, now I secretly backslide tothe precepts of Aristippus, and try to bend circumstance to myself, notmyself to circumstance. 

Horace is either Stoic or Epicurean, or neither, or both. The characterof philosophy depends upon definition of terms, and Epicureanism withHorace's definitions of pleasure and duty differed little in practicalworking from Stoicism. In profession, he was more of the Epicurean; inpractice, more of the Stoic. His philosophy occupies ground betweenboth, or, rather, ground common to both. It admits of no name. It is nota system. It owes its resemblances to either of the Schools more to hisown nature than to his familiarity with them, great as that was. 

The foundations of Horace's philosophy were laid before he ever heard ofthe Schools. Its basis was a habit of mind acquired by association withhis father and the people of Venusia, and with the ordinary people ofRome. Under the influence of reading, study, and social converse atAthens, under the stress of experience in the field, and from longcontemplation of life in the large in the capital of an empire, itcrystallized into a philosophy of life. The term "philosophy" ismisleading in Horace's case. It suggests books and formulae andexternals. What Horace read in books did not all remain for him the deadphilosophy of ink and paper; what was in tune with his nature heassimilated, to become philosophy in action, philosophy which really wasthe guide of life. His faith in it is unfeigned:

Thus does the time move slowly and ungraciously which hinders me fromthe active realization of what, neglected, is a harm to young and oldalike.... The envious man, the ill-tempered, the indolent, thewine-bibber, the too free lover, --no mortal, in short, is so crude thathis nature cannot be made more gentle if only he will lend a willing earto cultivation. 

The occasional phraseology of the Schools which Horace employs shouldnot mislead. It is for the most part the convenient dress for truthdiscovered for himself through experience; or it may be literaryornament. The humorous and not unsatiric lines to his poet-friend AlbiusTibullus, --"when you want a good laugh, come and see me; you will findme fat and sleek and my skin well cared for, a pig from the sty ofEpicurus, "--are as easily the jest of a Stoic as the confession of anEpicurean. Horace's philosophy is individual and natural, andrepresentative of Roman common sense rather than any School. 

HORACE AND HELLENISM

A word should be said here regarding the frequent use of the word"Hellenic" in connection with Horace's genius. Among the results of hishigher education, it is natural that none should be more prominent tothe eye than the influence of Greek letters upon his work; but to callHorace Greek is to be blinded to the essential by the presence in hispoems of Greek form and Greek allusion. It would be as little reasonableto call a Roman triumphal arch Greek because it displays column, architrave, or a facing of marble from Greece. What makes Romanarchitecture stand is not ornament, but Roman concrete and the Romanvault. Horace is Greek as Milton is Hebraic or Roman, or as Shakespeareis Italian. 

4. HORACE THE PHILOSOPHER OF LIFE

HORACE THE SPECTATOR AND ESSAYIST

A great source of the richness of personality which constitutes Horace'sprincipal charm is to be found in his contemplative disposition. Hisattitude toward the universal drama is that of the onlooker. As we shallsee, he is not without keen interest in the piece, but his prevailingmood is that of mild amusement. In time past, he has himself assumedmore than one of the rôles, and has known personally many of the actors. He knows perfectly well that there is a great deal of the mask andbuskin on the stage of life, and that each man in his time plays manyparts. Experience has begotten reflection, and reflection hascontributed in turn to experience, until contemplation has passed fromdiversion to habit. 

Horace is another Spectator, except that his "meddling with anypractical part in life" has not been so slight:

Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one ofthe species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practicalpart in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband, or afather, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, anddiversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them: asstanders-by discover blots which are apt to escape those who are in thegame. 

He looks down from his post upon the life of men with as clear vision asLucretius, whom he admires:

Nothing is sweeter than to dwell in the lofty citadels secure in thewisdom of the sages, thence to look down upon the rest of mankindblindly wandering in mistaken paths in the search for the way of life, striving one with another in the contest of wits, emulous in distinctionof birth, night and day straining with supreme effort at length toarrive at the heights of power and become lords of the world. 

Farther, Horace is not merely the stander-by contemplating the game inwhich objective mankind is engaged. He is also a spectator of himself. Horace the poet-philosopher contemplates Horace the man with the samequiet amusement with which he surveys the human family of which he is aninseparable yet detachable part. It is the universal aspect of Horacewhich is the object of his contemplation, --Horace playing a parttogether with the rest of mankind in the infinitely diverting _comédiehumaine_. He uses himself, so to speak, for illustrative purposes, --topoint the moral of the genuine; to demonstrate the indispensability ofhard work as well as genius; to afford concrete proof of the possibilityof happiness without wealth. He is almost as objective to himself as thelandscape of the Sabine farm. Horace the spectator sees Horace the managainst the background of human life just as he sees snow-mantledSoracte, or the cold Digentia, or the restless Adriatic, or leafyTarentum, or snowy Algidus, or green Venafrum. The clear-cut elegance ofhis miniatures of Italian scenery is not due to their individualinterest, but to their connection with the universal life of man. Description for its own sake is hardly to be found in Horace. In thesame way, the vivid glimpses he affords of his own life, person, andcharacter almost never prompt the thought of egotism. The most personalof poets, his expression of self nowhere becomes selfish expression. 

But there are spectators who are mere spectators. Horace is more; he isa critic and an interpreter. He looks forth upon life with a keen visionfor comparative values, and gives sane and distinct expression to whathe sees. 

Horace must not be thought of, however, as a censorious or carpingcritic. His attitude is judicial, and the verdict is seldom other thanlenient and kindly. He is not a wasp of Twickenham, not a Juvenalfuriously laying about him with a heavy lash, not a Lucilius with theaxes of Scipionic patrons to grind, having at the leaders of the peopleand the people themselves. He is in as little degree an Ennius, composing merely to gratify the taste for entertainment. There are some, as a matter of fact, to whom in satire he seems to go beyond the limitof good-nature. At vice in pronounced form, at all forms of unmanliness, he does indeed strike out, like Lucilius the knight of Campania, hispredecessor and pattern, gracious only to virtue and to the friends ofvirtue; but those whose hands are clean and whose hearts are pure needfear nothing. Even those who are guilty of the ordinary frailties ofhuman kind need fear nothing worse than being good-humoredly laughed at. The objects of Horace's smiling condemnation are not the trifling faultsof the individual or the class, but the universal grosser stupiditieswhich poison the sources of life. 

The Horace of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ is better called an essayist. That he is a satirist at all is less by virtue of intention than becauseof the mere fact that he is a spectator. To look upon life with the eyeof understanding is to see men the prey to passions and delusions, --thevery comment on which can be nothing else than satire. 

And now, what is it that Horace sees as he sits in philosophicdetachment on the serene heights of contemplation; and what are hisreflections?

The great factor in the character of Horace is his philosophy of life. To define it is to give the meaning of the word Horatian as far ascontent is concerned, and to trace the thread which more than any othermakes his works a unity. 

_i_. THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES

Horace looks forth upon a world of discontented and restless humanity. The soldier, the lawyer, the farmer, the trader, swept over the earth inthe passion for gain, like dust in the whirlwind, --all are dissatisfied. Choose anyone you will from the midst of the throng; either with greedfor money or with miserable ambition for power, his soul is in travail. Some are dazzled by fine silver, some lose their senses over bronze. Some are ever straining after the prizes of public life. There are manywho love not wisely, but too well. Most are engaged in a mad race formoney, whether to assure themselves of retirement and ease in old age, or out of the sportsman's desire to outstrip their rivals in the course. As many as are mortal men, so many are the objects of their pursuit. 

And, over and about all men, by reason of their bondage to avarice, ambition, appetite, and passion, hovers Black Care. It flits above theirsleepless eyes in the panelled ceiling of the darkened palace, it sitsbehind them on the courser as they rush into battle, it dogs them asthey are at the pleasures of the bronze-trimmed yacht. It pursues themeverywhere, swifter than the deer, swifter than the wind that drivesbefore it the storm-cloud. Not even those who are most happy areentirely so. No lot is wholly blest. Perfect happiness is unattainable. Tithonus, with the gift of ever-lasting life, wasted away in undying oldage. Achilles, with every charm of youthful strength and gallantry, wasdoomed to early death. Not even the richest are content. Something isalways lacking in the midst of abundance, and desire more than keepspace with satisfaction. 

Nor are the multitude less enslaved to their desires than the few. Glorydrags bound to her glittering chariot-wheels the nameless as well as thenobly-born. The poor are as inconstant as the rich. What of the man whois not rich? You may well smile. He changes from garret to garret, frombed to bed, from bath to bath and barber to barber, and is just asseasick in a hired boat as the wealthy man on board his private yacht. 

And not only are all men the victims of insatiable desire, but all arealike subject to the uncertainties of fate. Insolent Fortune withoutnotice flutters her swift wings and leaves them. Friends provefaithless, once the cask is drained to the lees. Death, unforeseen andunexpected, lurks in ambush for them in a thousand places. Some areswallowed up by the greedy sea. Some the Furies give to destruction inthe grim spectacle of war. Without respect of age or person, the ways ofdeath are thronged with young and old. Cruel Proserpina passes no manby. 

Even they who for the time escape the object of their dread must at lastface the inevitable. Invoked or not invoked, Death comes to release thelowly from toil, and to strip the proud of power. The same night awaitsall; everyone must tread once for all the path of death. The summons isdelivered impartially at the hovels of the poor and the turreted palacesof the rich. The dark stream must be crossed by prince and peasantalike. Eternal exile is the lot of all, whether nameless and poor, orsprung of the line of Inachus:

 A_las! my Postumus, alas! how speed_ T_he passing years: nor can devotion's deed_ S_tay wrinkled age one moment on its way_, N_or stay one moment death's appointed day_;

 N_ot though with thrice a hundred oxen slain_ E_ach day thou prayest Pluto to refrain_, T_he unmoved by tears, who threefold Geryon drave_, A_nd Tityus, beneath the darkening wave_. 

 T_he wave we all must one day surely sail_ W_ho live and breathe within this mortal vale_, W_hether our lot with princely rich to fare_, W_hether the peasant's lowly life to share_. 

 I_n vain for us from murderous Mars to flee_, I_n vain to shun the storms of Hadria's sea_, I_n vain to fear the poison-laden breath_ O_f Autumn's sultry south-wind, fraught with death_;

 A_down the wandering stream we all must go_, A_down Cocytus' waters, black and slow_; T_he ill-famed race of Danaus all must see_, A_nd Sisyphus, from labors never free_. 

 A_ll must be left, --lands, home, beloved wife_, -- A_ll left behind when we have done with life_; O_ne tree alone, of all thou holdest dear_, S_hall follow thee, --the cypress, o'er thy bier!_

 T_hy wiser heir will soon drain to their lees_ T_he casks now kept beneath a hundred keys_; T_he proud old Caecuban will stain the floor_, M_ore fit at pontiffs' solemn feasts to pour_. 

Nor is there a beyond filled with brightness for the victim of fate tolook to. Orcus is unpitying. Mercury's flock of souls is of sable hue, and Proserpina's realm is the hue of the dusk. Black Care clings to poorsouls even beyond the grave. Dull and persistent, it is the onlysubstantial feature of the insubstantial world of shades. Sappho stillsighs there for love of her maiden companions, the plectrum of Alcaeussounds its chords only to songs of earthly hardships by land and sea, Prometheus and Tantalus find no surcease from the pangs of torture, Sisyphus ever rolls the returning stone, and the Danaids fill theever-emptying jars. 

_ii_. THE PLEASURES OF THIS WORLD

The picture is dark with shadow, and must be relieved with light andcolor. The hasty conclusion should not be drawn that this is thephilosophy of gloom. The tone of Horace is neither that of the cheerlessskeptic nor that of the despairing pessimist. He does not rise from hiscontemplation with the words or the feeling of Lucretius:

O miserable minds of men, O blind hearts! In what obscurity and in whatdangers is passed this uncertain little existence of yours!

He would have agreed with the philosophy of pessimism that life containsstriving and pain, but he would not have shared in the gloom of aSchopenhauer, who in all will sees action, in all action want, in allwant pain, who looks upon pain as the essential condition of will, andsees no end of suffering except in the surrender of the will to live. The vanity of human wishes is no secret to Horace, but life is not tohim "a soap-bubble which we blow out as long and as large as possible, though each of us knows perfectly well it must sooner or later burst. "

No, life may have its inevitable pains and its inevitable end, but it isfar more substantial in composition than a bubble. For those who possessthe secret of detecting and enjoying them, it contains solid goods inabundance. 

What is the secret?

The first step toward enjoyment of the human lot is acquiescence. Ofcourse existence has its evils and bitter end, but these are minimizedfor the man who frankly faces them, and recognizes the futility ofstruggling against the fact. How much better to endure whatever our lotshall impose. Quintilius is dead: it is hard; but patience makes lighterthe ill that fate will not suffer us to correct. 

And then, when we have once yielded, and have ceased to look uponperfect happiness as a possibility, or upon any measure of happiness asa right to be demanded, we are in position to take the second step;namely, to make wise use of life's advantages:

 M_id all thy hopes and all thy cares, mid all thy wraths and fears_, T_hink every shining day that dawns the period to thy years_. T_he hour that comes unlooked for is the hour that doubly cheers_. 

Because there are many things to make life a pleasure. There is thesolace of literature; Black Care is lessened by song. There are theriches of philosophy, there is the diversion of moving among men. Thereare the delights of the country and the town. Above all, there arefriends with whom to share the joy of mere living in Italy. For whatpurpose, if not to enjoy, are the rose, the pine, and the poplar, thegushing fountain, the generous wine of Formian hill and Massic slope, the villa by the Tiber, the peaceful and healthful seclusion of theSabines, the pleasing change from the sharp winter to the soft zephyrsof spring, the apple-bearing autumn, --"season of mists and mellowfruitfulness"? What need to be unhappy in the midst of such a world?

And the man who is wise will not only recognize the aboundingpossibilities about him, but will seize upon them before they vanish. Who knows whether the gods above will add a tomorrow to the to-day? Beglad, and lay hand upon the gifts of the passing hour! Take advantage ofthe day, and have no silly faith in the morrow. It is as if Omar weretranslating Horace:

 "W_aste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit_ 0_f This and That endeavor and dispute;_ B_etter be jocund with the fruitful Grape_ T_han sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit. _

 "A_h! fill the Cup: what boots it to repeat_ H_ow Time is slipping underneath our Feet:_ U_nborn tomorrow, and dead yesterday, _ W_hy fret about them if today be sweet!"_

The goods of existence must be enjoyed here and now, or never, for allmust be left behind. What once is enjoyed is forever our very own. Happyis the man who can say, at each day's close, "I have lived!" The day ishis, and cannot be recalled. Let Jove overcast with black cloud theheavens of to-morrow, or let him make it bright with clear sunshine, --ashe pleases; what the flying hour of to-day has already given us he nevercan revoke. Life is a stream, now gliding peacefully onward inmid-channel to the Tuscan sea, now tumbling upon its swirling bosom thewreckage of flood and storm. The pitiful human being on its banks, everlooking with greedy expectation up the stream, or with vain regret atwhat is past, is left at last with nothing at all. The part of wisdomand of happiness is to keep eyes on that part of the stream directlybefore us, the only part which is ever really seen. 

 Y_ou see how, deep with gleaming snow, _ S_oracte stands, and, bending low, _ Y_on branches droop beneath their burden, _ A_nd streams o'erfrozen have ceased their flow. _

 A_way with cold! the hearth pile high_ W_ith blazing logs; the goblet ply_ W_ith cheering Sabine, Thaliarchus;_ D_raw from the cask of long years gone by. _

 A_ll else the gods entrust to keep, _ W_hose nod can lull the winds to sleep, _ V_exing the ash and cypress agèd, _ O_r battling over the boiling deep. _

 S_eek not to pierce the morrow's haze, _ B_ut for the moment render praise;_ N_or spurn the dance, nor love's sweet passion, _ E_re age draws on with its joyless days. _

 N_ow should the campus be your joy, _ A_nd whispered loves your lips employ, _ W_hat time the twilight shadows gather, _ A_nd tryst you keep with the maiden coy. _

 F_rom near-by nook her laugh makes plain_ W_here she had meant to hide, in vain!_ H_ow arch her struggles o'er the token_ F_rom yielding which she can scarce refrain!_

_iii_. LIFE AND MORALITY

But Horace's Epicureanism never goes to the length of Omar's. He wouldhave shrunk from the Persian as extreme:

 "YESTERDAY _This Day's Madness did prepare_, TOMORROW'S _Silence, Triumph, or Despair_, _Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why_: D_rink! for you know not why you go, nor where_. "

The Epicureanism of Horace is more nearly that of Epicurus himself, thesaintly recluse who taught that "to whom little is not enough, nothingis enough, " and who regarded plain living as at the same time a duty anda happiness. The lives of too liberal disciples have been a slander onthe name of Epicurus. Horace is not among them. With degenerateEpicureans, whose philosophy permitted them "To roll with pleasure in asensual sty, " he had little in common. The extraction from life of thehoney of enjoyment was indeed the highest purpose, but the purpose couldnever be realized without the exercise of discrimination, moderation, and a measure of spiritual culture. Life was an art, symmetrical, unified, reposeful, --like the poem of perfect art, or the statue, orthe temple. In actual conduct, the hedonist of the better type differedlittle from the Stoic himself. 

The gracious touch and quiet humor with which Horace treats even themost serious themes are often misleading. This effect is the morepossible by reason of the presence among his works of passages, not manyand for the most part youthful, in which he is guilty of too greatfreedom. 

Horace is really a serious person. He is even something of a preacher, apraiser of the time when he was a boy, a censor and corrector of hisyoungers. So far as popular definitions of Stoic and Epicurean areconcerned, he is much more the former than the latter. 

For Horace's counsel is always for moderation, and sometimes forausterity. He is not a wine-bibber, and he is not a total abstainer. Tobe the latter on principle would never have occurred to him. The vinewas the gift of God. Prefer nothing to it for planting in the mellowsoil of Tibur, Varus; it is one of the compensations of life:

 "I_ts magic power of wit can spread_ T_he halo round a dullard's head_, C_an make the sage forget his care_, H_is bosom's inmost thoughts unbare_, A_nd drown his solemn-faced pretense_ B_eneath its blithesome influence_. B_right hope it brings and vigor back_ T_o minds outworn upon the rack_, A_nd puts such courage in the brain_ A_s makes the poor be men again_, W_hom neither tyrants' wrath affrights_, N_or all their bristling satellites_. "

When wine is a curse, it is not so because of itself, but because ofexcess in its use. The cup was made for purposes of pleasure, but toquarrel over it, --leave that to barbarians! Take warning by theThracians, and the Centaurs and Lapiths, never to overstep the bounds ofmoderation. Pleasure with after-taste of bitterness is not realpleasure. Pleasure purchased with pain is an evil. 

Upon women he looks with the same philosophic calm as upon wine. Love, too, was to be regarded as one of the contributions to life's pleasure. To dally with golden-haired Pyrrha, with Lyce, or with Glycera, thebeauty more brilliant than Parian marble, was not in his eyes to beblamed in itself. What he felt no hesitation in committing to his poemsfor friends and the Emperor to read, they on their part felt as littlehesitation in confessing to him. The fault of love lay not in itself, but in abuse. This is not said of adultery, which was always an offensebecause it disturbed the institution of marriage and rotted thefoundation of society. 

There is thus no inconsistency in the Horace of the love poems and theHorace of the _Secular Hymn_ who petitions Our Lady Juno to prosper thedecrees of the Senate encouraging the marriage relation and the rearingof families. Of the illicit love that looked to Roman women in the home, he emphatically declares his innocence, and against it directs the lastand most powerful of the six _Inaugural Odes_; for this touched thefamily, and, through the family, the State. This, with neglect ofreligion, he classes together as the two great causes of national decay. 

Horace is not an Ovid, with no sense of the limits of either indulgenceor expression. He is not a Catullus, tormented by the furies of youthfulpassion. The flame never really burned him. We search his pages in vainfor evidence of sincere and absorbing passion, whether of the flesh orof the spirit. He was guilty of no breach of the morals of his time, andit is likely also, in spite of Suetonius, that he was guilty of noexcess. He was a supporter in good faith of the Emperor in his attemptsat the moral improvement of the State. If Virgil in the writing of the_Georgics_ or the _Aeneid_ was conscious of a purpose to second theproject of Augustus, it is just as likely that his intimate friendHorace also wrote with conscious moral intent. Nothing is more inkeeping with his conception of the end and effect of literature:

It shapes the tender and hesitating speech of the child; it straightremoves his ear from shameless communication; presently with friendlyprecepts it moulds his inner self; it is a corrector of harshness andenvy and anger; it sets forth the righteous deed; it instructs therising generations with the familiar example; it is a solace to thehelpless and the sick at heart. 

_iv_. LIFE AND PURPOSE

Horace's philosophy of life is thus based upon something deeper than theprinciple of seizing upon pleasure. His definition of pleasure is notwithout austerity; he preaches the positive virtues of performance aswell as the negative virtue of moderation. He could be an unswervingfollower and guardian of true virtue, and could bend self tocircumstance. 

He stands for domestic purity, and for patriotic devotion. _Dulce etdecorum est pro patria mori_, --to die for country is a privilege and aglory. His hero is Regulus, returning steadfastly through the ranks ofprotesting friends to keep faith with the pitiless executioners ofCarthage. Regulus, and the Scauri, and Paulus, who poured out his greatspirit on the disastrous field of Cannae, and Fabricius, of simple heartand absolute integrity, he holds up as examples to his generation. Inpraise of the sturdy Roman qualities of courage and steadfastness hewrites his most inspired lines:

The righteous man of unswerving purpose is shaken in his solid willneither by the unworthy demands of inflamed citizens, nor by thefrowning face of the threatening tyrant, nor by the East-wind, turbidruler of the restless Adriatic, nor by the great hand of fulminatingJove himself. If the heavens should fall asunder, the crashing fragmentswould descend upon him unterrified. 

He preaches the gospel of faithfulness not only to family, country, andpurpose, but to religion. He will shun the man who violates the secretsof the mysteries. The curse of the gods is upon all such, and pursuesthem to the day of doom. 

Faithfulness to friendship stands out with no less distinctness. WhileHorace is in his right mind, he will value nothing so highly as adelightful friend. He is ready, whenever fate calls, to enter withMaecenas even upon the last journey. Among the blest is he who isunafraid to die for dear friends or native land. 

Honor, too, --the fine spirit of old Roman times, that refused bribes, that would not take advantage of an enemy's weakness, that asked noquestions save the question of what was right, that never turned itsback upon duty, that swore to its own hurt and changed not; the samelofty spirit the recording of whose manifestations never fails to bringthe glow to Livy's cheek and the gleam to his eye, --honor is also firstand foremost in Horace's esteem. Regulus, the self-sacrificing; Curius, despising the Samnite gold; Camillus, yielding private grievance to cometo his country's aid; Cato, dying for his convictions after Thapsus, arehis inspirations. The hero of his ideal fears disgrace worse than death. The diadem and the laurel are for him only who can pass on without thebackward glance upon stores of treasure. 

Finally, not least among the qualities which enter into the ideal ofHorace is the simplicity of the olden time, when the armies of Rome weremade up of citizen-soldiers, and the eye of every Roman was single tothe glory of the State, and the selfishness of luxury was yet unknown. 

 S_cant were their private means, the public, great_; 'T_was still a commonwealth, that State_; N_o portico, surveyed with private rule_, A_ssured one man the shady cool_. 

 T_he laws approved the house of humble sods_; 'T_was only to the homes of gods_, T_he structures reared with earnings of the nation_, T_hey gave rich marble decoration_. 

The healthful repose of heart which comes from unity of purpose andsimple devotion to plain duty, he sees existing still, even in his ownless strenuous age, in the remote and peaceful countryside. Blessed isthe man far from the busy life of affairs, like the primeval race ofmortals, who tills with his own oxen the acres of his fathers! Horacecovets the gift earnestly for himself, because his calm vision assureshim that it, of all the virtues, lies next to happy living. 

_v_. THE SOURCES OF HAPPINESS

Here we have arrived at the kernel of Horace's philosophy, the key whichunlocks the casket containing his message to all men of everygeneration. In actual life, at least, mankind storms the citadel ofhappiness, as if it were something material and external, to be taken byviolent hands. Horace locates the citadels of happiness in his ownbreast. It is the heart which is the source of all joy and all sorrow, of all wealth and all poverty. Happiness is to be sought, not outside, but within. Man does not create his world; he _is_ his world. 

Men are madly chasing after peace of heart in a thousand wrong ways, allthe while over-looking the right way, which is nearest at hand. Toobserve their feverish eagerness, the spectator might be led to thinkhappiness identical with possession. And yet wealth and happiness areneither the same nor equivalent. They may have nothing to do one withthe other. Money, indeed, is not an evil in itself, but it is notessential except so far as it is a mere means of life. Poor men may behappy, and the wealthy may be poor in the midst of their riches. A man'swealth consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesseth. Morejustly does he lay claim to the name of rich man who knows how to usethe blessings of the gods wisely, who is bred to endurance of hard want, and who fears the disgraceful action worse than he fears death. 

Real happiness consists in peace of mind and heart. Everyone desires it, and everyone prays for it, --the sailor caught in the storms of theAegean, the mad Thracian, the Mede with quiver at his back. But peace isnot to be purchased. Neither gems nor purple nor gold will buy it, norfavor. Not all the externals in the world can help the man who dependsupon them alone. 

 N_ot treasure trove nor consul's stately train_ D_rives wretched tumult from the troubled brain_; S_warming with cares that draw unceasing sighs_, T_he fretted ceiling hangs o'er sleepless eyes_. 

Nor is peace to be pursued and laid hold of, or discovered in some otherclime. Of what avail to fly to lands warmed by other suns? What exileever escaped himself? It is the soul that is at fault, that never can befreed from its own bonds. The sky is all he changes:

 T_he heavens, not themselves, they change_ W_ho haste to cross the seas_. 

The happiness men seek for is in themselves, to be found at littleUlubrae in the Latin marshes as easily as in great cities, if only theyhave the proper attitude of mind and heart. 

But how insure this peace of mind?

At the very beginning, and through to the end, the searcher afterhappiness must recognize that unhappiness is the result of slavery ofsome sort, and that slavery in turn is begotten of desire. The man whois overfond of anything will be unwilling to let go his hold upon it. Desire will curb his freedom. The only safety lies in refusing the reinto passion of any kind. "To gaze upon nothing to lust after it, Numicius, is the simple way of winning and of keeping happiness. " He wholives in either desire or fear can never enjoy his possessions. He whodesires will also fear; and he who fears can never be a free man. Thewise man will not allow his desires to become tyrants over him. Moneywill be his servant, not his master. He will attain to wealth by curbinghis wants. You will be monarch over broader realms by dominating yourspirit than by adding Libya to far-off Gades. 

The poor man, in spite of poverty, may enjoy life more than the rich. Itis possible under a humble roof to excel in happiness kings and thefriends of kings. Wealth depends upon what men want, not upon what menhave. The more a man denies himself, the greater are the gifts of thegods to him. One may hold riches in contempt, and thus be a moresplendid lord of wealth than the great landowner of Apulia. Bycontracting his desires he may extend his revenues until they are morethan those of the gorgeous East. Many wants attend those who have manyambitions. Happy is the man to whom God has given barely enough. Let himto whom fate, fortune, or his own effort has given this enough, desireno more. If the liquid stream of Fortune should gild him, it would makehis happiness nothing greater, because money cannot change his nature. To the man who has good digestion and good lungs and is free from gout, the riches of a king could add nothing. What difference does it make tohim who lives within the limits of nature whether he plow a hundredacres or a thousand?

As with the passion of greed, so with anger, love, ambition for power, and all the other forms of desire which lodge in the human heart. Makethem your slaves, or they will make you theirs. Like wrath, they are allforms of madness. The man who becomes avaricious has thrown away thearmor of life, has abandoned the post of virtue. Once let a man submitto desire of an unworthy kind, and he will find himself in the case ofthe horse that called a rider to help him drive the stag from theircommon feeding-ground, and received the bit and rein forever. 

So Horace will enter into no entangling alliances with ambition forpower, wealth, or position, or with the more personal passions. By someof them he has not been altogether untouched, and he has not regret; butto continue, at forty-five, would not do. He will be content with justhis home in the Sabine hills. This is what he always prayed for, a patchof ground, not so very large, with a spring of ever-flowing water, agarden, and a little timberland. He asks for nothing more, except that akindly fate will make these beloved possessions forever his own. He willgo to the ant, for she is an example, and consider her ways and be wise, and be content with what he has as soon as it is enough. He will notenter the field of public life, because it would mean the sacrifice ofpeace. He would have to keep open house, submit to the attentions of abody-guard of servants, keep horses and carriage and a coachman, and bethe target for shafts of envy and malice; in a word, lose his freedomand become the slave of wretched and burdensome ambition. 

The price is too great, the privilege not to his liking. Horace's prayeris rather to be freed from the cares of empty ambition, from the fear ofdeath and the passion of anger, to laugh at superstition, to enjoy thehappy return of his birthday, to be forgiving of his friends, to growmore gentle and better as old age draws on, to recognize the properlimit in all things:

 "H_ealth to enjoy the blessings sent_ F_rom heaven; a mind unclouded, strong_; A_ cheerful heart; a wise content_; A_n honored age; and song_. "

II. HORACE THROUGH THE AGES

INTRODUCTORY

Thus much we have had to say in the interpretation of Horace. Ourinterpretation has centered about his qualities as a person: his broadexperience, his sensitiveness, his responsiveness, his powers ofassimilation, his gift of expression, his concreteness as arepresentative of the world of culture, as a son of Italy, as a citizenof eternal Rome, as a member of the universal human family. 

Let us now tell the story of Horace in the life of after times. It willinclude an account of the esteem in which he was held while still in theflesh; of the fame he enjoyed and the influence he exercised until Romeas a great empire was no more and the Roman tongue and Roman spiritalike were decayed; of the way in which his works were preserved intactthrough obscure centuries of ignorance and turmoil; and of their secondbirth when men began to delight once more in the luxuries of the mind. This will prepare the way for a final chapter, on the peculiar qualityand manner of the Horatian influence. 

1. HORACE THE PROPHET

Horace is aware of his qualities as a poet. In an interesting blend, ofwhich the first and larger part is detached and judicial estimation ofhis work, a second part literary convention, and the third and least asmiling and inoffensive self-assertion, he prophesies his ownimmortality. 

From infancy he has been set apart as the child of the Muses. At birthMelpomene marked him for her own. The doves of ancient story covered himover with the green leaves of the Apulian wood as, lost and overcome byweariness, he lay in peaceful slumber, and kept him safe from creepingand four-footed things, a babe secure in the favor of heaven. The sacredcharm that rests upon him preserved him in the rout at Philippi, rescuedhim from the Sabine wolf, saved him from death by the falling tree andthe waters of shipwreck. He will abide under its shadow wherever he maygo, --to his favorite haunts in Latium, to the far north where fierceBritons offer up the stranger to their gods, to the far east and theblazing sands of the Syrian desert, to rude Spain and the streams ofScythia, to the treeless, naked fields of the frozen pole, to homelesslands under the fiery car of the too-near sun. He will rise superior tothe envy of men. The pinions that bear him aloft through the clear etherwill be of no usual or flagging sort. For him there shall be no death, no Stygian wave across which none returns:

 F_orego the dirge; let no one raise the cry_, O_r make unseemly show of grief and gloom_, N_or think o'er me, who shall not really die_, T_o rear the empty honor of the tomb_. 

His real self will remain among men, ever springing afresh in theirwords of praise:

 N_ot lasting bronze nor pyramid upreared_ B_y princes shall outlive my powerful rhyme_. T_he monument I build, to men endeared_, N_ot biting rain, nor raging wind, nor time_, E_ndlessly flowing through the countless years_, S_hall e'er destroy. I shall not wholly die_; T_he grave shall have of me but what appears_; F_or me fresh praise shall ever multiply_. A_s long as priest and silent Vestal wind_ T_he Capitolian steep, tongues shall tell o'er_ H_ow humble Horace rose above his kind_ W_here Aufidus's rushing waters roar_ I_n the parched land where rustic Daunus reigned_, A_nd first taught Grecian numbers how to run_ I_n Latin measure. Muse! the honor gained_ I_s thine, for I am thine till time is done_. G_racious Melpomene, O hear me now_, A_nd with the Delphic bay gird round my brow_. 

Yet Horace does not always refer to his poetry in this serious vein; ifindeed we are to call serious a manner of literary prophecy which hasalways been more or less conventional. His frequent disclaimers of thehigher inspiration are well known. The Muse forbids him to attempt theepic strain or the praise of Augustus and Agrippa. In the face of grandthemes like these, his genius is slight. He will not essay even thestrain of Simonides in the lament for an Empire stained by land and seawith the blood of fratricidal war. His themes shall be rather the feastand the mimic battles of revelling youths and maidens, the making oflove in the grots of Venus. His lyre shall be jocose, his plectrum ofthe lighter sort. 

He not only half-humorously disclaims the capacity for lofty themes, but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps lesslyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to persevering effort. He has

 "N_or the pride nor ample pinion_ T_hat the Theban eagle bear_, S_ailing with supreme dominion_ T_hrough the azure deep of air_;"

he is the bee, with infinite industry flitting from flower to flower, the unpretending maker of verse, fashioning his songs with only toil andpatience. He believes in the file, in long delay before giving forth tothe world the poem that henceforth can never be recalled. The onlyinspiration he claims for _Satire_ and _Epistle_, which, he says, approximate the style of spoken discourse, lies in the aptness andpatience with which he fashions his verses from language in ordinaryuse, giving to words new dignity by means of skillful combination. Letanyone who wishes to be convinced undertake to do the same; he will findhimself perspiring in a vain attempt. 

And if Horace did not always conceive of his inspiration as purelyethereal, neither did he always dream of the path to immortality asleading through the spacious reaches of the upper air. At forty-four, heis already aware of a more pedestrian path. He has observed the ways ofthe public with literature, as any writer must observe them still, andknows also of a certain use to which his poems are being put. Perhapswith some secret pride, but surely with a philosophic resignation thatis like good-humored despair, he sees that the path is pedagogical. Inreproachful tones, he addresses the book of _Epistles_ that is so eagerto try its fortune in the big world: But if the prophet is not blindedby disgust at your foolishness, you will be prized at Rome until thecharm of youth has left you. Then, soiled and worn by much handling ofthe common crowd, you will either silently give food to vandal worms, orseek exile in Utica, or be tied up and sent to Ilerda. The monitor youdid not heed will laugh, like the man who sent his balky ass headlongover the cliff; for who would trouble to save anyone against his will?This lot, too, you may expect: for a stammering old age to come upon youteaching children to read in the out-of-the-way parts of town. 

2. HORACE AND ANCIENT ROME

That Horace refers to being pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrelof the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satireprovokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and ajustification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that hefinally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are allindications of the prominence to which he rose. That Virgil and Varius, poets of recognized worth, and their friend Plotius Tucca, third of thewhitest souls of earth, introduced him to the attention of Maecenas, andthat the discriminating lover of excellence became his patron and madehim known to Augustus, are evidences of the appeal of which he wascapable both as poet and man. In the many names of worthy anddistinguished men of letters and affairs to whom he addresses theindividual poems, and with whom he must therefore have been on terms ofmutual respect, is seen a further proof. Even Virgil contains passagesdisclosing a more than ordinary familiarity with Horace's work, and menlike Ovid and Propertius, of whose personal relations with Horacenothing is known, not only knew but absorbed his poems. 

If still further evidence of Horace's worth is required, it may be seenin his being invited to commemorate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius, the royal stepsons, against the hordes of the North, and the greatnessof Augustus himself, ever-present help of Italy, and imperial Rome; andin the Emperor's expression of disappointment, sometime before thesecond book of _Epistles_ was published, that he had been mentioned innone of the "Talks. " And, finally, if there remained in the minds of hisgeneration any shadow of doubt as to the esteem in which he was held bythe foremost men in the State, who were in most cases men of letters aswell as patrons of letters, it was dispelled when, in the year 17, Horace was chosen to write the _Secular Hymn_, for use in the greatestreligious and patriotic festival of the times. 

These facts receive greater significance from an appreciation of thepoet's sincerity and independence. He will restore to Maecenas hisgifts, if their possession is to mean a curb upon the freedom of livinghis nature calls for. He declines a secretaryship to the Emperorhimself, and without offense to his imperial friend, who bids him befree of his house as if it were his own. 

But Horace must submit also to the more impartial judgment of time. Ofthe two innovations which gave him relief against the generalbackground, one was the amplification of the crude but vigorous satireof Lucilius into a more perfect literary character, and the other wasthe persuasion of the Greek lyric forms into Roman service. Bothexamples had their important effects within the hundred years thatfollowed on Horace's death. 

The satire and epistle, which Horace hardly distinguished, giving toboth the name of _Sermo_, or "Talk, " was the easier to imitate. Persius, dying in the year 62, at the age of twenty-eight, was steeped in Horace, but lacked the gentle spirit, the genial humor, and the suavity ofexpression that make Horatian satire a delight. In Juvenal, writingunder Trajan and Hadrian, the tendency of satire toward consistentaggressiveness which is present in Horace and further advanced inPersius, has reached its goal. With Juvenal, satire is a matter of thelash, of vicious cut and thrust. Juvenal may tell the truth, but thesmiling face of Horatian satire has disappeared. With him the line ofRoman satire is extinct, but the nature of satire for all time to comeis fixed. Juvenal, employing the form of Horace and substituting for hiscontent of mellow contentment and good humor the bitterness of anoutraged moral sense, is the last Roman and the first modern satirist. 

The _Odes_ found more to imitate them, but none to rival. The mostpronounced example of their influence is found in the choruses of thetragic poet Seneca, where form and substance alike are constantlyreminiscent of Horace. Two comments on the _Odes_ from the second halfof the first century are of even greater eloquence than Seneca's exampleas testimonials to the impression made by the Horatian lyric. Petronius, of Nero's time, speaks of the poet's _curiosa felicitas_, meaning thegift of arriving, by long and careful search, at the inevitable word orphrase. Quintilian, writing his treatise on Instruction, sums him upthus: "Of our lyric poets, Horace is about the only one worth reading;for he sometimes reaches real heights, and he is at the same time fullof delightfulness and grace, and both in variety of imagery and in wordsis most happily daring. " To these broad strokes the modern critic hasadded little except by way of elaboration. 

The _Life of Horace_, written by Suetonius, the secretary of Hadrian, contains evidence of another, and perhaps a stronger, characterregarding the poet's power. We see that doubtful imitations arebeginning to circulate. "I possess, " says the imperial secretary, "someelegies attributed to his pen, and a letter in prose, supposed to be arecommendation of himself to Maecenas, but I think that both arespurious; for the elegies are commonplace, and the letter is, besides, obscure, which was by no means one of his faults. "

The history of Roman literature from the end of the first century afterChrist is the story of the decline of inspiration, the decline of taste, the decline of language, the decline of intellectual interest. Beneathit all and through it all there is spreading, gradually and silently, the insidious decay that will surely crumble the constitution of theancient world. Pagan letters are uncreative, and, with few exceptions, without imagination and dull. The literature of the new religion, beginning to push green shoots from the ruins of the times, is amingling of old and new substance under forms that are always old. 

In the main, neither Christian nor pagan will be attracted by Horace. The Christian will see in his gracious resignation only the philosophyof despair, and in his light humors only careless indulgence in thevanities of this world and blindness to the eternal concerns of life. The pagan will not appreciate the delicacy of his art, and will find theabundance of his literary, mythological, historical, and geographicalallusion, the compactness of his expression, and the maturity and depthof his intellect, a barrier calling for too much effort. Both willprefer Virgil--Virgil of "arms and the man, " the story-teller, Virgilthe lover of Italy, Virgil the glorifier of Roman deeds and destiny, Virgil the readily understood, Virgil who has already drawn aside, atleast partly, the veil that hangs before the mystic other-world, Virgilthe almost Christian prophet, with the almost Biblical language, Virgilthe spiritual, Virgil the comforter. 

Horace will not be popular. He will remain the poet of the few who enjoythe process of thinking and recognize the charm of skillful expression. Tacitus and Juvenal esteem him, the Emperor Alexander Severus reads himin leisure hours, the long list of mediocrities representing the courseof literary history demonstrate by their content that the education ofmen of letters in general includes a knowledge of him. The greatest ofthe late pagans, --Ausonius and Claudian at the end of the fourthcentury; Boëthius, philosopher-victim of Theodoric in the early sixth;Cassiodorus, the chronicler, imperial functionary in the samecentury, --disclose a familiarity whose foundations are to be looked forin love and enthusiasm rather than in mere cultivation. It may be safelyassumed that, in general, appreciation of Horace was proportionate togreatness of soul and real love of literature. 

The same assumption may be made in the realm of Christian literature. Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianityagainst paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiastand martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications offamiliarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that theydid not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the intense, the irascible, Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christianpoets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the latesixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still anative tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a lovefor him. 

The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of thecenturies called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to thename of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they mustat any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light wasnot totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters wasdue to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leavingthe era of ancient Rome. 

Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have consideredonly his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admirationwhich represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was anotherphase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though itsfirst cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was thephase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations hadprobably appeared in his own life-time. It was the immortality of thetext-book and the commentary. 

Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the _Institutes_ is an indicationthat the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latterhalf of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next, gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where littleboys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lampshining upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discoloredby soot from the wicks, _totidem olfecisse lucernas_, Q_uot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset_ F_laccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni_. (VII. 225 ff. )

The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as wellas lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. Thefirst critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appearedas early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut, disappointed in the military career, he turned to the collection, study, and critical editing of Latin authors, among whom, besides Horace, wereVirgil, Lucretius, Persius, and Terence. His method, comprising carefulcomparison of manuscripts, emendations, and punctuation, withannotations explanatory and aesthetic, all prefaced by the author'sbiography, won him the reputation of the most erudite of Roman men ofletters. It is in no small measure due to him that the tradition ofHorace's text is so comparatively good. 

There were many other critics and interpreters of Horace. Of many ofthem, the names as well as the works have been lost. Modestus andClaranus, perhaps not long after Probus, are two names that survive. Suetonius, as we have seen, wrote the poet's _Life_, though it containsalmost nothing not found in the works of Horace themselves. In the timeof Hadrian appeared also the edition of Quintus Terentius Scaurus, inten books, of which the _Odes_ and _Epodes_ made five, and the _Satires_and _Epistles_ five, the _Ars Poetica_ being set apart as a book initself. At the end of the second or the beginning of the third century, Helenius Acro wrote commentaries on certain plays of Terence and onHorace, giving special attention to the persons appearing in the poet'spages, a favorite subject on which a considerable body of writing sprangup. Not long afterward appeared the commentary of Pomponius Porphyrio, originally published with the text of Horace, but later separately. Inspite of modifications wrought in the course of time, only Porphyrio's, of all the commentaries of the first three hundred years, has preservedan approximation to its original character and quantity. Acro's has beenoverlaid by other commentators until the identity of his work is lost. The purpose of Porphyrio was to bring poetic beauty into relief byclarifying construction and sense, rather than to engage in learnedexposition of the subject matter. 

Finally, in the year 527, the consul Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius, with the collaboration of one Felix, revised the text of at least the_Odes_ and _Epodes_, and perhaps also of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_. That there were many other editions intervening between Porphyrio's andhis, there can be little doubt. 

This review of scant and scattered, but consistent, evidence is proofenough of Horace's hold upon the intellectual and literary leaders ofthe ancient Roman world. For the individual pagan who clung to the oldorder, he represented more acceptably than anyone else, or anyone elsebut Virgil, the ideal of a glorious past, and afforded consequentlysomething of inspiration for the decaying present. Upon men who, whetherpagan or Christian, were possessed by literary enthusiasms, and upon menwho delighted in contemplation of the human kind, he cast the spell ofart and humanity. Those who caught the fire directly may indeed havebeen few, but they were men of parts whose fire was communicated. 

As for the influence exercised by Horace upon Roman society at largethrough generation after generation of schoolboys as the centuriespassed, its depth and breadth cannot be measured. It may be partlyappreciated, however, by those who realize from their own experienceboth as pupils and teachers the effect upon growing and impressionableminds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflectupon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients, by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle ofdiscipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself. 

3. HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE

There is no such thing as a line marking definitely the time whenancient Rome ceased to be itself and became the Rome of the Middle Age. If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already, whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian housein order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus, the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end ofthe Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culminationof the movement long since begun in the interferences of an armycomposed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and endingin a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion andthe permanent seizure of civil as well as military authority. The comingof Odoacer is the ultimate stage in the process of Roman and Italianexhaustion, the sign that life is not longer possible except throughinfusion of northern blood. 

The military and political change itself was only exterior, the outwarddemonstration of deep-seated maladies. The too-successfulbureaucratization of Augustus and such of his successors as were reallyable and virtuous, the development of authority into tyranny by such aswere neither able nor virtuous, but mad and wilful, had removed fromRoman citizenship the responsibility which in the olden time had made itstrong; and the increase of taxes, assessments, and compulsory honorsinvolving personal contribution, had substituted for responsibility andprivilege a burden so heavy that under it the civic life of the Empirewas crushed to extinction. In Italy, above all, the ancient seed wasrunning out. Under the influence of economic and social movement, theold stock had died and disappeared, or changed beyond recognition. Theold language, except in the mouths and from the pens of the few, wasfast losing its identity. Uncertainty, indifference, stagnation, weariness of body, mind, and soul, leaden resignation and despair, forgetfulness of the glories of the past in art and even in heroism, were the inheritance of the last generations of the old order. Jeromefelt barbarism closing in: _Romanus orbis ruit_, he says, --the Romanworld is tumbling in ruins. 

In measure as the vitality of pagan Rome was sapped, into the inert anddecaying mass there penetrated gradually the two new life-currents of anew religion and a new blood. The change they wrought from the firstcentury to the descent of the Northerners was not sudden, nor was itrapid. Nor was it always a change that carried visible warrant ofvirtue. The mingling of external races in the army and in trade, theinterference of a Northern soldiery in the affairs of the throne, themore peaceful but more intimate shuffling of the population through thesocial and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whetherof native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to ananaemic society, but the result most apparent to the eye and mostdisturbing to the soul was the debasement of standards and the fearsthat naturally come with violent, sudden, or merely unfamiliar change. The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected newstandards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, andnew uncertainties. The life of logic began to be displaced by the lifeof feeling. 

The change and turmoil of the times that attended and followed thecrumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production ofletters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage. Goth, Byzantine, Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil ofItaly. If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure ofpeaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart withoutwhich assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation. Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered thepeople. The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds. Their language, never the facile language of the people and thepartially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign tothe general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, theirmetres forgotten. Their substance, never grasped without effort, was nownot only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people andanother age. To all but the cultivated few, they were known for anythingbut what they really were. It was an age of Virgil the mysteriousprophet of the coming of Christ, of Virgil the necromancer. Realknowledge withdrew to secret and secluded refuges. 

If the classical authors in general were beyond the powers and outsidethe affection of men, Horace was especially so. More intellectual thanVirgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost totheir knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather thanof men in the national or racial mass, the poet strictly of this worldand in no respect of the next, he almost vanished from the life of men. 

Yet the classics were not all lost, and not even Horace perished. Strange to say, and yet not really strange, the most potent activeinfluence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the mosteffective instrument of his preservation. Through the darkness and thestorms of the nine hundred years following the fall of the WesternEmpire, Horace was sheltered under the wing of the Church. 

It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teachingabsolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouthsof such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed andnothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts ofpaganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from itsreligion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, morethan Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its activeenmity. Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are ofspiritual import. The only immortality of which he takes account is theimmortality of fame. Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow. 

It is true that in the depth of his heart he does not feel withDemocritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius that "Dust thou art, to dustreturnest" is spoken of soul as well as body. The old Roman instinct forancestor-communion is too strong in him for that. But he acquiesces intheir doctrine in so far as shadowy existence in another world inspiresin him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in thesupernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality. He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with thedivine, of self-abasement in the presence of the eternal, which belongto Christian poetry. The flights of his muse rarely take him into therealm of a divine love and providence. His aspirations are for thingsachievable in this world: for faithfulness in friendship, for enduringcourage, for irreproachable patriotism, --in short, for ideal _human_relations. 

Horace's idealism is not Christian idealism, and is only in a limitedway even spiritual idealism. When he prays, it is likely to be forothers rather than himself, and for temporal blessings only: for thesuccess of Augustus at home and in the field, for prolongation ofMaecenas' life and happiness, for the weal of the State, for thenurslings of his little flock, for health of body and contentment ofheart. His dwelling is not in the secret place of the Most High. Philosophy, not religion, is his refuge and his fortress. In philosophy, not in God, will he trust. 

In a word, Horace is logical, self-reliant, and self-sufficient. He seesno happy future after this life, is conscious of no providence watchingover him, is involved in no obligation to the beings of an eternalworld. He looks this world and the next, gods and men, directly in theface, and expects other men to do the same. Life and its duties are forhim clear-cut. He is no propounder of problems, no searcher after hiddenpurposes. He lacks almost absolutely the feverish aspiration and unrestwhich characterize Christian and other humanitarian modes of thought andsentiment, and whose manifestation is one of the best known features ofrecent modern times, as it was of the earliest Christian experience. 

But Christianity was a religion of men, and therefore human. If itsexaggerations were natural, its reservations and its reactions were alsonatural. There were men whose admiration continued to be roused andwhose affections continued to be touched by Virgil and Horace. Therewere men whose reason as well as whose instinct impelled them to employthe classic authors and the classic arts in the service of the newreligion. Christianity possessed no distinct and separate media ofexpression and no separate body of knowledge which could bear fruit asmatter of instruction. Pagan art and literature were indispensablewhether for the study of history or of mere humanity. Christianity wastherefore compelled to employ the old forms of art, which involved theuse of the old instrumentalities of literary education. When, finally, paganism had fallen under its repeated assaults, what had been forceduse became a matter of choice, and the classics were taken under theChurch's protection and marked with her approval. 

The data regarding Horace in the Middle Age are few, but they are clear. We need not examine them all in order to draw conclusions. 

The monastic idea, of eastern origin and given currency in the West byJerome, was first reduced to systematic practice by Benedict, whocreated the first Rule at Monte Cassino about the time of the Mavortianrecension of Horace, in 527. New moral strength issued from thecloisters now rapidly established. Cassiodorus, especially active inpromoting the spiritual phase of monkish retreat, made the intellectuallife also his concern. Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, andBobbio, in the northern part of the peninsula, were the great Italiancenters. The Benedictine influence spread to Ireland, which before theend of the sixth century became a stronghold of the movement and aninspiration to England, Germany, France, and even Italy, where Bobbioitself was founded by Columban and his companions. St. Gall inSwitzerland, Fulda at Hersfeld in Hesse-Nassau, Corvey in Saxony, Ionain Scotland, Tours in France, Reichenau on Lake Constance, were allactive centers of religion and learning within two hundred years fromBenedict's death. 

The monasteries not only afforded the spiritual enthusiast theopportunity of separation from the world of temptation and storm, butwere equally inviting to men devoted first of all to the intellectuallife. The scholar and the educator found within their walls not onlypeaceful escape from the harshnesses of political change and militarybroil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in theoccupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christianinstitute. The example of Cassiodorus was followed two hundred yearslater on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded both incloister and at court, scholars summoned, manuscripts copied, the lifeof pagan antiquity studied, and the bond between the languages andcultures of present and past made firmer. The schools of the old régimehad fallen away in the sixth century, when Northern rule had closed thecivic career to natives of Italy. A great advance in the intellectuallife now laid the foundations of all cultural effort in the Middle Age. 

No small part of this advance was due to the preservation of manuscriptsby copying. In this activity France was first, so far as Horace wasconcerned. The copies by the scribes of Charlemagne went back toMavortius and Porphyrio, the originals of which were probably discoveredat Bobbio by his scholars. Of the two hundred and fifty manuscripts inexistence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being theBernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orléans. Germany wasa worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of bothcountries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century wereespecially rich. Italy, on the contrary, preserved few manuscripts ofher poet, and none that is really ancient. Italy began the greatmonastery movement, but disorder and change were against the diffusionof culture. Charlemagne's efforts probably had little to do with Italy. The Church seems to have had no care to preserve the ancient culture ofher native land. 

What this meant in terms of actual acquaintance with the poet would notbe clear without evidence of other kinds. By the end of the sixthcentury, knowledge of Horace was already vague. He was not read inAfrica, Spain, or Gaul. Read in Italy up to Charlemagne's time, ahundred years later his works are not to be found in the catalogue ofBobbio, one of the greatest seats of learning. What the general attitudeof the Church's leadership toward him was, may be conjectured from thedeclaration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Itsgeneral capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from theconfession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he isunfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of thelate Empire had become fewer still. The difficult form and matter of the_Odes_, and their unadaptability to religious and moral use, disqualified them for the approval of all but the individual scholar orliterary enthusiast. The moralities of the _Epistles_ were moretractable, and formed the largest contribution to the _Florilegia_, orflower-collections, that were circulated by themselves. Horace did notcontain the facile and stimulating tales of Ovid, he was not a Virgilthe story-teller and almost Christian, his lines did not exercise astrong appeal to the ear, he was not an example of the rhetorical, likeLucan, his satire did not lend itself, like a Juvenal's, to universalcondemnation of paganism. 

In the eighth century, Columban knows Horace, the Venerable Bede citeshim four times, and Alcuin is called a Flaccus. The York catalogue ofAlcuin shows the presence of most of the classic authors. Paul theDeacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, isdeclared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, butungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare withdogs. " In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventhcentury, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monasticlegislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without specialpermission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and thestruggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizationsresulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems totaloblivion of the poet. 

In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingianfavor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace'spresence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center ofmanuscript activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars datingfrom this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbiocontain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loeschcontained his complete works. The _Ecbasis Captivi_, an animal-epicappearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out ofHorace in the manner of the _cento_, or patchwork. At about the sametime, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christiandramas patterned after Terence, and in them uses Horace. Mention byWalter of Speyer, and interest shown by the active monastery on theTegernsee, are of the same period. The tenth century is sometimes spokenof as the Latin Renaissance under the Ottos, the first of whom, calledthe Great, crowned Emperor at Rome in 962, welcomed scholars at hiscourt and made every effort to promote learning. 

The momentum of intellectual interest is not lost in the eleventhcentury. Paris becomes its most ardent center, with Reims, Orléans, andFleury also of note. The _Codex Parisinus_ belongs to this period. German activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education ofboys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horacecopied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning, but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied byrivalry with the emperors. It was the century of Gregory the Seventh andCanossa. 

In the twelfth century came the struggle of the Hohenstaufen with theItalian cities, and the disorder and turmoil of the rise of the communesand the division of Italy. One catalogue shows a Horace, and onemanuscript dates from the time. England and France are united by theNorman Conquest in much the same way as Germany and France had beenassociated in the kingdom of Charlemagne. It is the century of RogerBacon. Especially in Germany, England, and France, it is the age of theCrusades and the knightly orders. It is an age of the spread of cultureamong the common people. In France, it is the age of the monastery ofCluny, and the age of Abelard. Education and travel became the mode. Ingeneral, acquaintance with Horace among cultivated men may now be takenfor granted. The _Epistles_ and _Satires_ find more favor than the_Odes_. Five hundred and twenty citations of the former andseventy-seven of the latter have been collected for the twelfth century. 

The thirteenth century marks a decline in the intellectual life. TheCrusades exhaust the energies of the time, and detract from its literaryinterest. The German rulers and the Italian ecclesiasts are absorbed inthe struggle for supremacy between pope and emperor. Scholasticismovershadows humanism. The humanistic tradition of Charlemagne has diedout, and the intellectual ideal is represented by Vincent of Beauvaisand the _Speculum Historiale_. There is no mention of Horace in thecatalogues of Italy. The manuscripts of France are careless, thecomments and glosses poor. The decline will continue until arrested bythe Renaissance. 

It must not be forgotten that among all these scattered and flickeringattentions to Horace there was the constant nucleus of instruction inthe school. That he was used for this purpose first in the Carolingiancloister-schools, and later in the secular schools which grew toindependent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educationalspirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of theeleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpretedHorace in his school. This is the oldest direct evidence of thescholastic use of Horace, but other proofs are to be seen in thecommentaries of the medieval period, all of which are of a kind suitablefor school use, and in the marginal annotations, often in the nativetongue. 

The decline of humane studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuriesmeant also the decline of interest in Horace, who had always been aboveall the poet of the cultivated few. At the beginning of the thirteenthcentury in Italy, nowhere but at Bologna and Rome was Latin taughtexcept as the elementary instruction necessary to the study of civil andcanonical law. Gaufried of Vinesaux, coming from England to Italy, andcomposing an _Ars Dictaminis_ and a _Poietria Nova_ containing Horatianreminiscences, is one of two or three significant examples of Latinteachers who concerned themselves with literature as well as language. Coluccio Salutati, wanting to buy a copy of Horace in 1370, isapparently unable to find it. The decline of interest in Horace will bearrested only by the Rebirth of Learning. 

The intellectual movement back to the classical authors and theclassical civilizations is well called the Rebirth. The brilliance ofthe new era as compared with the thousand years that lead to it from themost high and palmiest days of Rome is such as to dim almost to darknessthe brightest days of medieval culture. The new life into which Horaceis now to enter will be so spirited and full that the old life, thoughby no means devoid of active influence in society at large and in theindividual soul, will seem indeed like a long death and a waiting forthe resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth. 

4. HORACE AND MODERN TIMES

THE REBIRTH OF HORACE

The national character of the _Aeneid_ gave Virgil a greater appeal thanHorace in ancient Roman times. In the Middle Age, his qualities asstory-teller and poet of the compassionate heart, together with his fameas necromancer and prophet, made still more pronounced the favor inwhich he was held. The ignorance of the earlier centuries of the periodcould not appreciate Horace the logical, the intellectual, thedifficult, while the schematized religion and knowledge of the laterwere not attracted by Horace the philosophical and individual. 

With the Renaissance and its quickening of intellectual life in general, and in particular the value it set upon personality and individualism, the positions of the poets were reversed. For four hundred years now itcan hardly be denied that Horace rather than Virgil has been therepresentative Latin poet of humanism. 

This is not to say that Horace is greater than Virgil, or that he is asgreat. Virgil is still the poet of stately movement and goldennarrative, the poet of the grand style. Owing to the greater facilitywith which he may be read, he is also still the poet of the young and ofgreater numbers. With the coming of the new era he did not lose in theesteem that is based upon the appreciation of literary art, but rathergained. 

It will be better to say that Horace finally came more fully into hisown. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The timeschanged. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away, and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-timeappeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also werediscovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of thehuman heart. Virgil lost nothing of his charm for youth and age, butHorace was discovered as the poet of the riper and more thoughtful mind. Virgil remained the admired, but Horace became the friend. Virgilremained the guide, but Horace became the companion. "Virgil, " saysOliver Wendell Holmes, "has been the object of an adoration amountingalmost to worship, but he will often be found on the shelf, while Horacelies on the student's table, next his hand. "

The nature and extent of Horace's influence upon modern letters and lifewill be best brought into relief by a brief historical review. It is notnecessary to this purpose, nor would it be possible, within ordinarylimits, to enter into a detailed account. It will be appropriate tobegin with Italy. 

_i_. IN ITALY

Horace did not spring immediately into prominence with the coming of theRenaissance, whether elsewhere or in Italy. As might be expected, theessentially epic and medieval Dante found inspiration in Virgil ratherthan in Horace, though the _Ars Poetica_ was known to him and quotedmore than once as authority on style. "This is what our master Horaceteaches, " runs one of the passages, "when at the beginning of _Poetry_he says, 'Choose a subject, etc. '" The imperfect idea of Horace formedin Dante's mind is indicated by the one verse in the _Divina Commedia_which refers to him:

 L' altro è Orazio satiro che viene, --

 T_he other coming is Horace the satirist_. 

With Petrarch, the first great figure to emerge from the obscure vistasof medievalism, the case was different. The first modern who reallyunderstood the classics understood Horace also, and did him greaterjustice than fell to his lot again for many generations. The copy ofHorace's works which he acquired on November 28, 1347, remained by himuntil on the 18th of July in 1374 the venerable poet and scholar wasfound dead at the age of seventy among his books. Fond as he was ofVirgil, Cicero, and Seneca, he had an intimate and affectionateknowledge of Horace, to whom there are references in all his works, andfrom whom he enriched his philosophy of life. Even his greatest and mostoriginal creation, the _Canzoniere_, is not without marks of Horace, andtheir fewness here, as well as their character, are a sign thatPetrarch's familiarity was not of the artificial sort, but based on realassimilation of the poet. His letter to Horace begins:

 Salve o dei lirici modi sovrano, Salve o degl' Itali gloria ed onor, --

 H_ail! Sovereign of the lyric measure_, H_ail! Italy's great pride and treasure_;

and, after recounting the qualities of the poet, and acknowledging himas guide, teacher, and lord, concludes:

 Tanto è l' amor che a te m'avvince; tanto È degli affetti miei donno il tuo canto--

 S_o great the love that bindeth me to thee_; S_o ruleth in my heart thy minstrelsy_. 

But Petrarch is a torch-bearer so far in advance of his successors thatthe illumination almost dies out again before they arrive. It was notuntil well into the fifteenth century that the long and numerous line ofimitators, translators, adapters, parodists, commentators, editors, andpublishers began, which has continued to the present day. Themodern-Latin poets in all countries were the first, but their effortssoon gave place to attempts in the vernacular tongues. The German EduardStemplinger, in his _Life of the Horatian Lyric Since the Renaissance_, published in 1906, knows 90 English renderings of the entire _Odes_ ofHorace, 70 German, 100 French, and 48 Italian. Some are in prose, someeven in dialect. The poet of Venusia is made a Burgundian, a Berliner, and even a Platt-deutsch. All of these are attempts to transfuse Horaceinto the veins of modern life, and are significant of their authors'conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No authorfrom among the classics has been so frequently translated as Horace. 

Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in theappreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after thelaureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of thepoet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin inthe third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 waspublished the first Horace containing both text and notes, which werethose of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, thefirst printed commentary on Horace by a modern humanist. Landinus wasprefaced by a Latin poem of Politian's, who, with Lorenzo dei Medici, was a sort of arbiter in taste, and who produced in 1500 a Horace of hisown. Mancinelli, who, like many other scholars of the time, gave publicreadings and interpretations of Horace and other classics, in 1492dedicated to the celebrated enthusiast Pomponius Laetus an edition ofthe _Odes_, _Epodes_, and _Secular Hymn_, in which he so successfullyintegrated the comments of Acro, Porphyrio, Landinus, and himself, thatfor the next hundred years it remained the most authoritative Horace. InItaly, between 1470 and 1500, appeared no fewer than 44 editions of thepoet, while in France there were four and in Germany about ten. Venicealone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing textand commentary by "The Great Four, " as they were called. The famousAldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, andRome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study, Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the moredistinguished, if less scholastic, discipleship of Ariosto and Tasso. Naples and the South displayed little activity. 

Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of manuscriptrecovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century oftranslation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients ontheir own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries ofcritical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and muchdiscussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the centuryof scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italyhad comparatively small part. Among her translators during thesecenturies must be mentioned Ludovico Dolce, whose excellent rendering ofthe _Satires_ and _Epistles_ was a product of the early sixteenth;Scipione Ponsa, whose faithful _Ars Poetica_ in _ottava rima_ appearedin the first half of the seventeenth; the advocate Borgianelli, whosebrilliant version of Horace entire belongs to the second half; and theVenetian Abriani, whose complete _Odes_ in the original meters, thefirst achievement of the kind, was a not unsuccessful performance whichhas taken its place among Horatian curiosities. Among literary criticsare the names of Gravina, whose _Della Ragione Poetica_, full of soundscholarship and refreshing good sense, appeared in 1716 at Naples; Volpiof Padua, author of a treatise on Satire, in which the merits ofLucilius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius were effectively discussed; andtheir followers, Algarotti the Venetian and Vannetti of Roveredo, inwhom Horatian criticism reached its greatest altitude. 

If we look outside the field of scholastic endeavor and academicimitation, and attempt to discern the effect of Horace in actualliterary creation, we are confronted by the difficulty of determiningexactly where imitation and adaptation cease to be artificial, and reachthe degree of individuality and independence which entitles them to thename of originality. If we are to include here such authors as aremanifestly indebted to suggestion or inspiration from Horace, and yetare quite as manifestly modern and Italian, we may note at least thenames of Petrarch, already mentioned; the famous Cardinal Bembo, whoseideal, to write "thoughtfully and little, " was a reflection of Horace;Ariosto, whose satires are in the Horatian spirit, and who, complainingto his brother Alessandro of the attitude of his patron, CardinalHippolyto d'Este, recites the story of the fox and the weasel, changingthem to donkey and rat; Chiabrera of Savona, who wrote satirehoneycombed with Horatian allusion and permeated by Horatian spirit, andwho, in Leopardi's opinion, had he lived in a different age, would havebeen a second Horace; Testi of Ferrara, whom Ariosto's enthusiasm forHorace so kindled that he gravitated from the modern spirit to theclassical; Parini of Milan, whose poem, _Alla Musa_, is Horatian inspirit and phrase; Leopardi, who composed a parody on the _Ars Poetica_;Prati, who transmuted _Epode II_ into the _Song of Hygieia_; andCarducci, whose use of Horatian meters, somewhat strained, is due to theconscious desire of making Italy's past greatness serve the present. Thenames of Bernardo Tasso and Torquato Tasso might be added. 

It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italyis in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the_Odes_ as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention ofmonks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is aquestion hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music inthe Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritoniuscomposed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace andother poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was forschool purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, thesecompositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictlyto the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable tosuspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse andmusic there exist the beginnings of the musical drama. 

_ii_. IN FRANCE

France, where the great majority of Horatian manuscripts were preserved, was the first to produce a translation of the _Odes_. Grandichan in1541, and Pelletier in 1545, published translations of the _Ars Poetica_which had important consequences. The famous Pleiad, whose mostbrilliant star, Pierre de Ronsard, was king of poetry for more than ascore of years, were enthusiastic believers in the imitation of theclassics as a means for the improvement of letters in France. Du Bellay, the second in magnitude, published in 1550 his _Deffence et illustrationde la langue françoyse_, a manifesto of the Pleiad full of quotationsfrom the _Ars Poetica_ refuting a similar work of Sibilet published in1548. Ronsard himself is said to have been the first to use the word"ode" for Horace's lyrics. The meeting of the two, in 1547, is regardedas the beginning of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Horace thusbecame at the beginning an influence of the first magnitude in theactual life of modern French letters. In 1579 appeared Mondot's completetranslation. The versions of Dacier and Sanadon, in prose, in theearlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spiritedopposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusiastsin France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of greatauthors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, "The FrenchHorace, " Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le Brun, André Chénier, DeMusset. 

_iii_. IN GERMANY

In Germany, the Renaissance movement had its pronounced beginning atHeidelberg. In that city began also the active study of Horace, in thelectures on Horace in 1456. The _Epistles_ were first printed in 1482 atLeipzig, the _Epodes_ in 1488, and in 1492 appeared the first completeHorace. Up to 1500, about ten editions had been published, only those of1492 and 1498 being Horace entire, and none of them with commentaryexcept that of 1498, which had a few notes and metrical signs toindicate the structure of the verse. The first German to translate apoem of Horace was Johann Fischart, 1550-90, who rendered the second_Epode_ in 145 rhymed couplets. The famous Silesian, Opitz, "father ofGerman poetry, " and his followers, were to Germany what the Pleiad wereto France. His work on poetry, 1624, was grounded in Horace, and waslong the canon. Bucholz, in 1639, produced the first translation of anentire book of the _Odes_ in German. Weckherlin, 1548-1653, translatedthree _Odes_, Gottsched of Leipzig, 1700-66, and Breitinge of Zurich, confess Horace as master of the art of poetry, and their cities becomethe centers of many translations. Günther, 1695-1728, the most giftedlyric poet of his race before Klopstock, made Horace his companion andconfidant of leisure hours. Hagedorn, 1708-54, forms his philosophy fromHorace, --"my friend, my teacher, my companion. " Of Ramler, forthirty-five years dictator of the Berlin literary world, who translatedand published some of the _Odes_ in 1769 and was called the GermanHorace, Lessing said that no sovereign had ever been so beautifullyaddressed as was Frederick the Great in his imitation of the Maecenasode. The epoch-making Klopstock, 1724-1803, quotes, translates, andimitates Horace, and uses Horatian subjects. Heinse reads him and writesof him enthusiastically, and Platen, 1796-1835, is so full of Homer andHorace that he can do nothing of his own. Lessing and Herder are devotedHoratians, though Herder thinks that Lessing and Winckelmann are toounreserved in their enthusiasm for the imitation of classical letters. Goethe praises Horace for lyric charm and for understanding of art andlife, and studies his meters while composing the _Elegies_. Nietzsche'sletters abound in quotation and phrase. Even the Church in Germany showsthe impress of Horace in some of her greatest hymns, which are inAlcaics and Sapphics of Horatian origin. To speak of the German editors, commentators, and critics of the nineteenth century would be almost toreview the history of Horace in modern school and university; such hasbeen the ardor of the German soul and the industry of the German mind. 

_iv_. IN SPAIN

A glance at the use of Horace in Spain will afford not the leastedifying of modern examples. The inventories of Spanish libraries in theMiddle Age rarely contain the name of Horace, or the names of his lyricbrethren, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Virgil, Lucan, Martial, Seneca, and Pliny are much more frequent. It was not until the fifteenthcentury that reminiscences of the style and ideas of Horace began toappear in quantity. Imitation rather than translation was the vehicle ofSpanish enthusiasm. The fountain of Horatianism in Spain was theimitation of _Epode II_, _Beatus Ille_, by the Marquis de Santillana, one of Castile's two first sonneteers, in the first half of thefifteenth century. Garcilaso also produced many imitations of the_Odes_. The Horatian lyric seemed especially congenial to the Spanishspirit and language. Fray Luís de León, of Salamanca, the first realSpanish poet, and the most inspired of all the Spanish lovers of Horace, was an example of the poet translating the poet where both were greatmen. He not only brought back to life once more "that marveloussobriety, that rapidity of idea and conciseness of phrase, thatterseness and brilliance, that sovereign calm and serenity in the spiritof the artist, " which characterized the ancient poet, but added to theHoratian lyre the new string of Christian mysticism, and thus wedded theancient and the modern. "Luís de León is our great Horatian poet, " saysMenéndez y Pelayo. Lope de Vega wrote an _Ode to Liberty_, and wasinfluenced by the _Epistles_. The _Flores de Poetas ilustres de España_, arranged by Pedro Espinosa and published in 1605 at Valladolid, includedtranslations of eighteen odes. Hardly a lyric poet of the eighteenthcentury failed to turn some part of Horace into Spanish. Salamancaperfected the ode, Seville the epistle, Aragon the satire. Mendoza inhis nine _Epistles_ shows his debt to Horace. In 1592, Luís de Zapatapublished at Lisbon a not very successful verse translation of the _ArsPoetica_. In 1616, Francisco de Cascales of Murcia published _FablasPoeticas_, containing in dialogue the substance of the same composition, which had been translated by Espinel, 1551-1624, and which wastranslated again in 1684, twice in 1777, and in 1827. Seville founded aHoratian Academy. The greatest of the Spanish translators of Horaceentire was Javier de Burgos, whose edition of four volumes, 1819-1844, is called by Menéndez y Pelayo the only readable complete translation ofHorace, "one of the most precious and enviable jewels of our modernliterature, " and "perhaps the best of all Horaces in the neo-Latintongues. " The nearest rival of Burgos was Martinez de la Rosa. Thegreatest Spanish scholar and critic of Horace is Menéndez y Pelayo, editor of the _Odes_, 1882, and author of _Horacio en España_, 1885. 

In the index of _Horacio en España_ are to be found the names of 165Castilian translators of the poet, 50 Portuguese, 10 Catalan, 2Asturian, and 1 Galician. There appear the names of 29 commentators. Ofcomplete translations, there are 6 Castilian and 1 Portuguese; ofcomplete translations of the _Odes_, 6 Castilian and 7 Portuguese; ofthe _Satires_, 1 Castilian and 2 Portuguese; of the _Epistles_, 1Castilian and 1 Portuguese; of the _Ars Poetica_, 35 Castilian, 11Portuguese, and 1 Catalan. The sixteenth century translators weredistinguished in general by facility and grace, the freshness andabandon of youth, and a considerable degree of freedom, or even license. Those of the eighteenth show a gain in accuracy and a loss in spirit. 

_v_. IN ENGLAND

The appeal of Horace in England and English-speaking countries has beenas fruitful as elsewhere in scholarship, with the possible exception ofGermany. In its effect upon the actual fibre of literature and life, ithas been more fruitful. 

A review of Horatian study in England would include the names of Talbotand Baxter, but, above all, of the incomparably brilliant RichardBentley, despite his excesses, themselves due to his very genius, themost famous and most stimulating critic and commentator of Horace theworld has seen. His edition, appearing in 1711, provoked in 1717 theanti-Bentleian rejoinder of Richard Johnson, and in 1721 the moreambitious but equally unsuccessful attempt to discredit him by theScotch Alexander Cunningham. The primacy in the study of Horace whichBentley conferred upon England had been enjoyed previously by the LowCountries and France, to which it had passed from Italy in the secondhalf of the sixteenth century. The immediate sign of this transfer ofthe center to northern lands was the publication in 1561 at Lyons of theedition containing the text revision and critical notes of Lambinus andthe commentary of the famous Cruquius of Bruges. The celebrated Scaligerwas unfavorably disposed to Horace, who found a defender in Heinsius, another scholar of the Netherlands. D'Alembert, who became a sort of_Ars Poetica_ to translators, published his _Observations_ at Amsterdamin 1763. 

An account of the English translations of the poet would include manyrenderings of individual poems, such as those of Dryden, Sir Stephen E. De Vere, and John Conington, and the version of Theodore Martin, probably the most successful complete metrical translation of Horace inany language. It is literally true that "every theory of translation hasbeen exemplified in some English rendering of Horace. "

It is in the field of literature, however, that the manifestations ofHorace's hold upon the English are most numerous and most significant. Even Shakespeare's "small Latin" includes him, in _Titus Andronicus_:

Demetrius. 

 W_hat's here? A scroll, and written round about!_ L_et's see_:

 Integer vitae scelerisque purus Non eget Mauri jaculis nec arcu. 

Chiron. 

 O_, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well_: I_ read it in the grammar long ago_. 

The mere mention of English authors in poetry and prose who were touchedand kindled by the Horatian flame would amount to a review of the wholecourse of English literature. It would begin principally with Spenserand Ben Jonson, who in some measure represented in their land what thePleiad meant in France, and Opitz and his following in Germany. "Steepyourselves in the classics, " was Jonson's counsel, and his countrymendid thus steep themselves to such a degree that it is possible for thestudent to say of Milton's times: "The door to English literature andhistory of the seventeenth century is open wide to those who are at easein the presence of Latin. Many writings and events of the time maydoubtless be understood and enjoyed by readers ignorant of the classics, but to them the heart and spirit of the period as a whole will hardly berevealed. Poetry, philosophy, history, biography, controversy, sermons, correspondence, even conversation, --all have come down to us from theage of Milton either written in or so touched with Latin that one iscompelled to enter seventeenth century England by way of Rome as Romemust be entered by way of Athens. "

Great as was the vogue of Latin in the earlier centuries, it was thefirst half of the eighteenth, the most critical period in Englishletters, that realized to the full the virtues of Horace. His words inthe _Ars Poetica_ "were accepted, even more widely than the laws ofAristotle, as the standard of critical judgment. Addison and Steele bytheir choice of mottoes for their periodicals, Prior by his adoption ofa type of lyric that has since his time been designated as Horatian, andPope with his imposing series of _Imitations_, gave such an impulse tothe already widespread interest that it was carried on through the wholeof the century. " "Horace may be said to pervade the literature of theeighteenth century in three ways: as a teacher of political and socialmorality; as a master of the art of poetry; and as a sort of _elegantiaearbiter_. " Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, and Fielding, Gay, SamuelJohnson, Chesterfield, and Walpole, were all familiar with and fond ofHorace, and took him unto themselves. 

In the nineteenth century, Wordsworth has an intimate familiarity withVirgil, Catullus, and Horace, but loves Horace best; Coleridge thinkshighly of his literary criticism; Byron, who never was greatly fond ofhim, frequently quotes him; Shelley reads him with pleasure; Browning's_The Ring and the Book_ contains many quotations from him; Thackeraymakes use of phrases from the _Odes_ "with an ease and facility whichnothing but close intimacy could produce"; Andrew Lang addresses to himthe most charming of his _Letters to Dead Authors_; and Austin Dobson isinspired by him in many of his exquisite poems in lighter vein. Thesenames, and those in the paragraphs preceding, are not all that might bementioned. The literature of England is honey-combed with the classicauthors in general, and Horace is among the foremost. Without him andwithout the classics, a great part of our literary patrimony is oflittle use. 

_vi_. IN THE SCHOOLS

Of the place of Horace in the schools and universities of all thesecountries, and of the world of western civilization in general, it ishardly necessary to speak. The enlightened sentiment of the five hundredyears since the death of Petrarch has been enthusiastic in theconviction that the Greek and Latin classics are indispensable toinstruction of the first quality, and that among them Horace is ofexceeding value as a model of poetic taste and as an influence in theformation of a philosophy of life. If his place has been less secure inlatter days, it is due less to alteration of that conviction than toextension of the educational system to the utilitarian arts andsciences, and to the passing of educational control from the few to thegeneral average. 

III. HORACE THE DYNAMIC

THE CULTIVATED FEW

We have followed in such manner and at such length as is possible forour purpose the fortunes of Horace through the ages from his death andthe death of the Empire in whose service his pen was employed to our owntimes. We have seen that he never was really forgotten, and that therenever was a time of long duration when he ceased to be of realimportance to some portion of mankind. 

The recital of historical fact is at best a narration of circumstance towhich there clings little of the warmth of life. An historical eventitself is but the cumulated and often frigid result of intimate originalforces that may have meant long travail of body and soul before the actof realization became possible. The record of the event in chronicle orits commemoration in monument is only the sign that at some time thereoccurred a significant moment rendered inevitable by previous stirringsof life whose intensity, if not whose very identity, are forgotten or nolonger realized. 

Thus the enumeration of manuscript revisions, translations, imitations, and scholastic editions of Horace may also seem at first sight thenarrative of cold detail. There may be readers who, remembering thescant stream of the cultivated few who tided the poet through thecenturies of darkness, and the comparative rareness of cultivated men atall times, will be slow to be convinced of any real impress of Horaceupon the life of men. They especially who reflect that during all thelong sweep of time the majority of those who have known him, and even ofthose who have been stirred to enthusiasm by him, have known him throughthe compulsion of the school, and who reflect farther on theartificialities, the insincerities, the pettinesses, the abuses, and thehatreds of the class-room, the joy with which at the end the text-bookis dropped or bidden an even more violent farewell, and the apparentlytotal oblivion that follows, will be inclined to view as exaggerationthe most moderate estimate of our debt to him. 

Yet skepticism would be without warrant. The presence of any subject inan educational scheme represents the sincere, and often the fervent, conviction that it is worthy of the place. In the case of literarysubjects, the nearer the approach to pure letters, the less demonstrablethe connection between instruction and the winning of livelihood, themore intense the conviction. The immortality of literature and the arts, which surely has been demonstrated by time, the respect in which theyare held by a world so intent on mere living that of its own motion itwould never heed, is the work of the passionate few whose enthusiasmsand protestations never allow the common crowd completely to forget, andkeep forever alive in it the uneasy sense of imperfection. That Horacewas preserved for hundreds of years by monastery and school, that thefact of acquaintance with him is due to his place in modern systems ofeducation, are not mere statements empty of life. They represent thenoble enthusiasms of enlightened men. The history of human progress hasbeen the history of enthusiasms. Without enthusiasms, the fabric ofcivilization would collapse in a day into the chaos of barbarism. 

To give greater completeness and reality to our account of Horace'splace among men, ancient and modern, we must in some way add to thenarrative of formal fact the demonstration of his influence in actualoperation. In the case of periods obscure and remote, this is hardlypossible. In the case of modern times it is not so difficult. For therecent centuries, as proof of the peculiar power of Horace, we have theabundant testimony of literature and biography. 

Let us call this influence the Dynamic Power of Horace. Dynamic power isthe power that explodes men, so to speak, into physical or spiritualaction, that operates by inspiration, expansion, fertilization, vitalization, and results in the living of a fuller life. If we can beshown concrete instances of Horace enriching the lives of men byincreasing their love and mastery of art or multiplying their means ofhappiness, we shall not only appreciate better the poet's meaning forthe present day, but be better able to imagine his effect upon men inthe remoter ages whose life is less open to scrutiny. 

Our purpose will best be accomplished by demonstrating the very specificand pronounced effect of Horace, first, upon the formation of theliterary ideal; second, upon the actual creation of literature; and, third, upon living itself. 

1. HORACE AND THE LITERARY IDEAL

There is no better example of the direct effect of Horace than the partplayed in the discipline of letters by the _Ars Poetica_. This work is aliterary _causerie_ inspired in part by the reading of Alexandriancriticism, but in larger part by experience. In it the author'suppermost themes, as in characteristic manner he allows himself to beled on from one thought to another, are unity, consistency, propriety, truthfulness, sanity, and carefulness. Such has been its power by reasonof inner substance and outward circumstance that it has been at timesexalted into a court of appeal hardly less authoritative than Aristotlehimself, from whom in large part it ultimately derives. 

We have seen how the Pleiad, with Du Bellay and Ronsard leading, seizedupon the classics as a means of elevating the literature of France, andhow the treatise of Du Bellay which was put forth as their manifesto wasfull of matter from the _Ars Poetica_, which two years previously hasserved Sibilet also, whose work Du Bellay attacked. A century later, Boileau's _L'Art Poétique_ testifies again to the inspiration of Horace, who is made the means of riveting still more firmly upon French drama, for good or ill, the strict rules that have always governed it; and bythe time of Boileau's death the program of the Pleiad is revived asecond time by Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Opitz and Gottsched in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries are for Germany what Du Bellay andBoileau were for France in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Literary Spainof the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was under the sameinfluence. The Spanish peninsula, according to Menéndez y Pelayo, hasproduced no fewer than forty-seven translations of the _Ars Poetica_. Even in England, always less tractable in the matter of rules than theLatin countries, Ben Jonson and his friends are in some sort anotherPleiad, and the treatise possesses immense authority throughout thecenturies. We turn the pages of Cowl's _The Theory of Poetry inEngland_, a book of critical extracts illustrating the development ofpoetry "in doctrines and ideas from the sixteenth century to thenineteenth century, " and note Ben Jonson and Wordsworth referring to orquoting Horace in the section on Poetic Creation; Dryden and Templeappealing to him and Aristotle on the Rules; Hurd quoting him on Natureand the Stage; Roger Ascham, Ben Jonson, and Dryden citing him as anexample on Imitation; Dryden and Chapman calling him master andlaw-giver on Translation; Samuel Johnson referring to him on the samesubject; and Ben Jonson and Dryden using him on Functions and Principlesof Criticism. "Horace, " writes Jonson, "an author of much civility, ... An excellent and true judge upon cause and reason, not because hethought so, but because he knew so out of use and experience. " Pope, inthe _Essay on Criticism_, describes with peculiar felicity both Horace'scritical manner and the character of the authority, persuasive ratherthan tyrannical, which he exercises over Englishmen:

 "H_orace still charms with graceful negligence_, A_nd without method talks us into sense_; W_ill, like a friend, familiarly convey_ T_he truest notions in the easiest way_. "

But the dynamic power of the _Ars Poetica_ will be still betterappreciated if we assemble some of its familiar principles. Who has notheard of and wondered at the hold the "Rules" have had upon moderndrama, especially in France, --the rule of five acts, no more and noless; the rule of three actors only, liberalized into the rule ofeconomy; the rule of the unities in time, place, and action; the ruleagainst the mingling of the tragic and comic "kinds"; the rule againstthe artificial dénouement? Who has not heard of French playwrightscomposing "with one eye on the clock" for fear of violating the unity oftime, or of their delight in the writing of drama as in "a difficultgame well played?" If Alexandrian criticism, and, back of it, Aristotle, were ultimately responsible for the rules, Horace was their disseminatorin later times, and was looked up to as final authority. Who has notheard and read repeatedly the now common-place injunctions to beappropriate and consistent in character-drawing; to avoid, on the onehand, clearness at the cost of diffuseness, and, on the other, brevityat the cost of obscurity; to choose subject-matter suited to one'spowers; to respect the authority of the masterpiece and to con by nightand by day the great Greek exemplars; to feel the emotion one wishes torouse; to stamp the universal with the mark of individual genius; to bestraightforward and rapid and omit the unessential; to be truthful tolife; to keep the improbable and the horrible behind the scenes; to beappropriate in meter and diction; to keep clear of the fallacy of poeticmadness; to look for the real sources of successful writing in sanity, depth of knowledge, and experience with men; to remember the mutualindispensability of genius and cultivation; to combine the pleasant andthe useful; to deny one's self the indulgence of mediocrity; never tocompose unless under inspiration; to give heed to solid criticalcounsel; to lock up one's manuscript for nine years before giving it tothe world; to destroy what does not measure up to the ideal; to takeever-lasting pains; to beware of the compliments of good-naturedfriends? Not less familiar are the apt figurative illustrations of thewoman beautiful above and an ugly fish below, the purple patch, thepainter who would forever put in his cypress tree, the amphora that cameout a pitcher, the dolphin in the wood and the boar in the waters, thesesquipedalian word, the mountains in travail and the birth of theridiculous mouse, the plunge _in medias res_, the praiser of the goodold times, the exclusion of sane poets from Helicon, the counsellor whohimself can write nothing, but will serve as whetstone for genius, thenodding of Homer. 

Nor did the effects of this diffusion of Horatian precept consist merelyin restraint upon the youthful and the impulsive, or confine themselvesto the drama, with which the _Ars Poetica_ was mainly concerned. Thepersuasive and authoritative counsels of the Roman poet have entered, soto speak, into the circulatory system of literary effort and become partof the life-blood of modern enlightenment. Their great effect has beenformative: the cultivation of character in literature. 

2. HORACE AND LITERARY CREATION

_i_. THE TRANSLATOR'S IDEAL

Besides the invisible, and the greatest, effect of Horace in themoulding of character in literature, is the visible effect in literarycreation. His inspiration wrought by performance as well as by precept. The numerous essays in verse and prose on the art of letters which havebeen prompted by the _Ars Poetica_ are themselves examples of thiseffect. They are not alone, however, though perhaps the most apparent. The purer literature of the lyric also inspired to creation, withresults that are far more charming, if less substantial. 

In the case of the lyric inspired by the _Odes_, as well as in the caseof the critical essay inspired by the _Ars Poetica_, it is not alwayseasy to distinguish adaptation or imitation from actual creation. Bernardo Tasso's _Ode_, for example, and Giovanni Prati's _Song ofHygieia_, while really independent poems, are so charged with Horatianmatter and spirit that one hesitates to call them original. The same istrue of the many inspirations traceable to the famous _Beatus IlleEpode_, which, with such _Odes_ as _The Bandusian Spring_, _Pyrrha_, _Phidyle_, and _Chloe_, have captured the fancy of modern poets. Pope's_Solitude_, on the other hand, while surely an inspiration of the second_Epode_, shows hardly a mark affording proof of the fact. 

To some of the most manifest imitations and adaptations, it isimpossible to deny originality. The _Fifth Book of Horace_, by Kiplingand Graves, is an example. Thackeray's delightful _Ad Ministram_ isanother example which must be classed as adaptation, yet such is itsspontaneity that not to see in it an inspiration would be stupid andunjust:

AD MINISTRAM

 D_ear Lucy, you know what my wish is_-- I_ hate all your Frenchified fuss_: Y_our silly entrées and made dishes_ W_ere never intended for us_. N_o footman in lace and in ruffles_ N_eed dangle behind my arm-chair_; A_nd never mind seeking for truffles_ A_lthough they be ever so rare_. 

 B_ut a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy_, I_ prithee get ready at three_: H_ave it smoking, and tender, and juicy_, A_nd what better meat can there be?_ A_nd when it has feasted the master_, 'T_will amply suffice for the maid_; M_eanwhile I will smoke my canaster_, A_nd tipple my ale in the shade_. 

In similar strain of exquisite humor are the adaptations of theWhichers, American examples of spirit and skill not second to that ofThackeray:

MY SABINE FARM

LAUDABUNT ALII

 S_ome people talk about "Noo Yo'k"_; O_f Cleveland many ne'er have done_; T_hey sing galore of Baltimore_, C_hicago, Pittsburgh, Washington_. 

 O_thers unasked their wit have tasked_ T_o sound unending praise of Boston_-- O_f bean-vines found for miles around_ A_nd crooked streets that I get lost on_. 

 G_ive me no jar of truck or car_, N_o city smoke and noise of mills_; R_ather the slow Connecticut's flow_ A_nd sunny orchards on the hills_. 

 T_here like the haze of summer days_ B_efore the wind flee care and sorrow_. I_n sure content each day is spent_, U_nheeding what may come to-morrow_. 

VITAS HINNULEO

DONE BY MR. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

 I _met a little Roman maid_; S_he was just sixteen (she said)_, A_nd O! but she was sore afraid_, A_nd hung her modest head_. 

 A _little fawn, you would have vowed_, T_hat sought her mother's side_, A_nd wandered lonely as a cloud_ U_pon the mountain wide_. 

 W_hene'er the little lizards stirred_ S_he started in her fear_; I_n every rustling bush she heard_ S_ome awful monster near_. 

 "I_'m not a lion; fear not so_; S_eek not your timid dam_. "-- B_ut Chloe was afraid, and O!_ S_he knows not what I am_:

 A creature quite too bright and good To be so much misunderstood. 

Again, in Austin Dobson's exquisite _Triolet_, whether the inspirationof the poem itself is in Horace, or the inspiration, so far as Horace isconcerned, lies in the choice of title after the verses were written, wemust in either case confess a debt of great delight to the author of the_Ars Poetica_:

URCEUS EXIT

 I_ intended an Ode_, A_nd it turned to a Sonnet_. I_t began_ à la mode, I_ intended an Ode_; B_ut Rose crossed the road_ I_n her latest new bonnet_; I_ intended an Ode_, A_nd it turned to a Sonnet_. 

The same observation applies equally to the same author's _Iocosa Lyra_:

IOCOSA LYRA

 I_n our hearts is the great one of Avon_ E_ngraven_, A_nd we climb the cold summits once built on_ B_y Milton_;

 B_ut at times not the air that is rarest_ I_s fairest_, A_nd we long in the valley to follow_ A_pollo_. 

 T_hen we drop from the heights atmospheric_ T_o Herrick_, O_r we pour the Greek honey, grown blander_, O_f Landor_, O_r our cosiest nook in the shade is_ W_here Praed is_, O_r we toss the light bells of the mocker_ W_ith Locker_. 

 O_ the song where not one of the Graces_ T_ightlaces_, -- W_here we woo the sweet Muses not starchly_, B_ut archly_, --

 W_here the verse, like a piper a-Maying_ C_omes playing_, -- A_nd the rhyme is as gay as a dancer_ I_n answer_, --

 I_t will last till men weary of pleasure_ I_n measure!_ I_t will last till men weary of laughter_ ... A_nd after!_

Whatever we may say of the indebtedness of things like these to theletter of the ancient poet, we must acknowledge them all alike asexamples of the dynamic power of Horace. 

_ii_. CREATION

But there are other examples whose character as literary creation isstill farther beyond question. Such a one, to mention one brilliantspecimen in prose, is the letter of Andrew Lang to Horace. In verse, Austin Dobson again affords one of the happiest examples:

TO Q. H. F. 

 "H_oratius Flaccus_, B. C. 8, " T_here's not a doubt about the date_, -- Y_ou're dead and buried_: A_s you observed, the seasons roll_; A_nd 'cross the Styx full many a soul_ H_as Charon ferried_, S_ince, mourned of men and Muses nine_, T_hey laid you on the Esquiline_. 

 A_nd that was centuries ago!_ Y_ou'd think we'd learned enough, I know_, T_o help refine us_, S_ince last you trod the Sacred Street_, A_nd tacked from mortal fear to meet_ T_he bore Crispinus_; O_r, by your cold Digentia, set_ T_he web of winter birding-net_. 

 O_urs is so far-advanced an age!_ S_ensation tales, a classic stage_, C_ommodious villas!_ W_e boast high art, an Albert Hall_, A_ustralian meats, and men who call_ T_heir sires gorillas!_ W_e have a thousand things, you see_, N_ot dreamt in your philosophy_. 

 A_nd yet, how strange! Our "world, " today_, T_ried in the scale, would scarce outweigh_ Y_our Roman cronies_; W_alk in the Park, --you'll seldom fail_ T_o find a Sybaris on the rail_ B_y Lydia's ponies_, O_r hap on Barrus, wigged and stayed_, O_gling some unsuspecting maid_. 

 T_he great Gargilius, then, behold!_ H_is "long-bow" hunting tales of old_ A_re now but duller_; F_air Neobule too! Is not_ O_ne Hebrus here, --from Aldershot?_ A_ha, you colour!_ B_e wise. There old Canidia sits_; N_o doubt she's tearing you to bits_. 

 A_nd look, dyspeptic, brave, and kind_, C_omes dear Maecenas, half behind_ T_erentia's skirting_; H_ere's Pyrrha, "golden-haired" at will_; P_rig Damasippus, preaching still_; A_sterie flirting_, -- R_adiant, of course. We'll make her black_, -- A_sk her when Gyges' ship comes back_. 

 S_o with the rest. Who will may trace_ B_ehind the new each elder face_ D_efined as clearly_; S_cience proceeds, and man stands still_; O_ur "world" today's as good or ill_, -- A_s cultured_ (_nearly_), A_s yours was, Horace! You alone_, U_nmatched, unmet, we have not known_. 

But it is not only to comparatively independent creation that we mustlook. The dynamic power of Horace is to be found at work even in thetranslation of the poet. The fact that he has had more translators thanany other poet, ancient or modern, is itself an evidence ofinspirational quality, but a greater proof lies in the variety andcharacter of his translators and the quality of their achievement. Alist of those who have felt in this way the stirrings of the Horatianspirit would include the names not only of many great men of letters, but of many great men of affairs, whose successes are to be countedamong examples of genuine inspiration. Translation at its best is notmere craftsmanship, but creation, --in Roscommon's lines, 'T_is true, composing is the Nobler Part_, B_ut good Translation is no easy Art_. 

Theodore Martin's rendering of I. 21, _To a Jar of Wine_, already quotedin part, is an example. Another brilliant success is Sir Stephen E. DeVere's I. 31, _Prayer to Apollo_, quoted in connection with the poet'sreligious attitude. No less felicitous are Conington's spirited twelvelines, reproducing III. 26, _Vixi puellis_:

VIXI PUELLIS NUPER IDONEUS

 F_or ladies' love I late was fit_, A_nd good success my warfare blest_; B_ut now my arms, my lyre I quit_, A_nd hang them up to rust or rest_. H_ere, where arising from the sea_ S_tands Venus, lay the load at last_, L_inks, crowbars, and artillery_, T_hreatening all doors that dared be fast_. O_ Goddess! Cyprus owns thy sway_, A_nd Memphis, far from Thracian snow_: R_aise high thy lash, and deal me, pray_, T_hat haughty Chloe just one blow!_

To translate in this manner is beyond all doubt to deserve the name ofpoet. 

We may go still farther and claim for Horace that he has been a dynamicpower in the art of translation, not only as it concerned his own poems, but in its concern of translation as a universal art. No other poetpresents such difficulties; no other poet has left behind him so long atrain of disappointed aspirants. "Horace remains forever the type of theuntranslatable, " says Frederic Harrison. Milton attempts the _Pyrrha_ode in unrhymed meter, and the light and bantering spirit of Horacedisappears. Milton is correct, polished, restrained, and pure, but heavyand cold. An exquisite _jeu d'esprit_ has been crushed to death:

 W_hat slender youth, bedew'd with liquid odours_, C_ourts thee on roses in some pleasant cave_, P_yrrha? For whom bind'st thou_ I_n wreaths thy golden hair_, P_lain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he_ O_n faith and changèd gods complain, and seas_ R_ough with black winds and storms_ U_nwonted shall admire_! W_ho now enjoys thee credulous, all gold_, W_ho, always vacant, always amiable_ H_opes thee, of flattering gales_ U_nmindful! Hapless they_ T_o whom thou untried seem'st fair! Me in my vowed_ P_icture, the sacred wall declares to have hung_ M_y dank and dropping weeds_ T_o the stern God of Sea_. 

But let the attempt be made to avoid the ponderous movement andexcessive sobriety of Milton, and to communicate the Horatian airiness, and there is a loss in conciseness and reserve:

 W_hat scented youth now pays you court_, P_yrrha, in shady rose-strewn spot_ D_allying in love's sweet sport_? F_or whom that innocent-seeming knot_ I_n which your golden strands you dress_ W_ith all the art of artlessness?_

 D_eluded lad! How oft he'll weep_ O_'er changèd gods! How oft, when dark_ T_he billows roughen on the deep_, S_torm-tossed he'll see his wretched bark_! U_nused to Cupid's quick mutations_, I_n store for him what tribulations!_

 B_ut now his joy is all in you_; H_e thinks your heart is purest gold_; E_xpects you'll always be love-true_, A_nd never, never, will grow cold_. P_oor mariner on summer seas_, U_ntaught to fear the treacherous breeze!_

 A_h, wretched whom your Siren call_ D_eludes and brings to watery woes_! F_or me--yon plaque on Neptune's wall_ S_hows I've endured the seaman's throes_. M_y drenchèd garments hang there, too_: H_enceforth I shun the enticing blue. _

It is not improbable that the struggle of the centuries with thedifficulties of rendering Horace has been a chief influence in thedevelopment of our present exacting ideal of translation; so exactingindeed that it has defeated its purpose. By emphasis upon theimpossibility of rendering accurately the content of poetry in the formof poetry, scholastic discussion of the theory of translation has ledfirst to despair, and next from despair to the scientific andunaesthetic principle of rendering into exact prose all forms ofliterature alike. The twentieth century has thus opened again andsettled in opposite manner the old dispute of the French D'Alembert andthe Italian Salvini in the seventeen-hundreds, which was resolved byactual results in favor of D'Alembert and fidelity to spirit as opposedto Salvini and fidelity to letter. 

In what we have said thus far of the dynamic power of Horace in literarycreation, we have dealt with visible results. We should not be misled, however, by the satisfaction of seeing plainly in imitation, adaptation, translation, quotation, or real creation, the mark of Horatianinfluence. The discipline of the literary ideal in the individual, andthe moulding of character in literature as an organism, are effects lessclearly visible, but, after all, of greater value. If the bread and meatof human sustenance should appear in the body as recognizable bread andmeat, it would hardly be a sign of health. Its value is in the strengthconferred by assimilation. With all respect and gratitude for creationmanifestly due to Horace, we must also realize that this is but asuperficial result as compared with the chastening restraint ofexpression and the health and vigor of content that have been encouragedby allegiance to him, but are known by no special marks. It is no badsign when we turn the pages of the _Oxford Selections of Verse_ in thevarious modern languages and find but few examples of the visible sortof Horatian influence. To detect the more invisible sort requires thekeen eye and the sensitive spirit of the poet-scholar, but the readernot so specially qualified may have faith that it exists. With Goethewriting of Horace as a "great, glowing, noble poet, full of heart, whowith the power of his song sweeps us along, lifts us, and inspires us, "with Menéndez y Pelayo in Spain defining the Horatian lyric, whetherChristian or pagan, by "sobriety of thought, rhythmic lightness, theabsence of artificial adornment, unlimited care in execution, andbrevity, " and holding this ideal aloft as the influence needed by themodern lyric, and with no countries or periods without leaders in poetryand criticism uttering similar sentiments and exhortations, it would bedifficult not to believe in a substantial Horatian effect on literaryculture, however slight the external marks. 

3. HORACE IN THE LIVING OF MEN

Let us take leave of these illustrations of the dynamic power of Horacein letters, and consider in conclusion his power as shown directly inthe living of men. 

First of all, we may include in the dynamic working of the poet hisstirring of the heart by pure delight. If this is not the highest andthe ultimate effect of poetry, it is after all the first and theessential effect. Without the giving of pleasure, no art becomes reallythe possession of men and the instrument of good. As a matter of fact, many of the most frequently and best translated _Odes_ are devoid bothof moral intent, and, in the ordinary sense, of moral effect. _ToPyrrha_, _Soracte Covered with Snow_, _Carpe Diem_, _To Glycera_, _Integer Vitae_, _To Chloe_, _Horace and Lydia_, _The Bandusian Spring_, _Faunus_, _To an Old Wine-Jar_, _The End of Love_, and _Beatus Ille_ aremerely _jeux-d'esprit_ of the sort that for the moment lighten and clearthe spirit. The same may be said of _The Bore_ and the _Journey toBrundisium_ among the _Satires_, and of many of the _Epistles_. 

But these trifles light as air are nevertheless of the sort for whichmankind is eternally grateful, because men are convinced, withoutprocess of reason, that by them the fibre of life is rested and refinedand strengthened. We may call this familiar effect by the less familiarname of re-creative. What lover of Horace has not felt his inmost beingcleansed and refreshed by the simple and exquisite art of _The BandusianSpring_, whose cameo of sixty-eight Latin words in four stanzas is anunapproachable model of vividness, elegance, purity, and restraint:

 O_ crystal-bright Bandusian Spring_, W_orthy thou of the mellow wine_ A_nd flowers I give to thy pure depths_: A_ kid the morrow shall be thine_. 

 T_he day of lustful strife draws on_, T_he starting horn begins to gleam_; I_n vain! His red blood soon shall tinge_ T_he waters of thy clear, cold stream_. 

 T_he dog-star's fiercely blazing hour_ N_e'er with its heat doth change thy pool_; T_o wandering flock and ploughworn steer_ T_hou givest waters fresh and cool_. 

 T_hee, too, 'mong storied founts I'll place_, S_inging the oak that slants the steep_, A_bove the hollowed home of rock_ F_rom which thy prattling streamlets leap_. 

Or who does not live more abundant life at reading the _Chloe Ode_, withits breath of the mountain air and its sense of the brooding forestsolitude, and its exquisite suggestion of timid and charming girlhood?

 "Y_ou shun me, Chloe, wild and shy_ A_s some stray fawn that seeks its mother_ T_hrough trackless woods. If spring-winds sigh_, I_t vainly strives its fears to smother_;--

 "I_ts trembling knees assail each other_ W_hen lizards stir the bramble dry_;-- Y_ou shun me, Chloe, wild and shy_ A_s some stray fawn that seeks its mother_. 

 "A_nd yet no Libyan lion I_, -- N_o ravening thing to rend another_; L_ay by your tears, your tremors by_, -- A_ husband's better than a brother_; N_or shun me, Chloe, wild and shy_ A_s some stray fawn that seeks its mother_. "

But there are those who demand of poetry a usefulness more easilymeasurable than that of recreation. In their opinion, it is improvementrather than pleasure which is the end of art, or at least improvement aswell as pleasure. In this, indeed, the poet himself is inclined toagree: "He who mingles the useful with the pleasant by delighting andlikewise improving the reader, will get every vote. "

Let us look for these more concrete results, and see how Horace theperson still lives in the character of men, as well as Horace the poetin the character of literature. 

To appreciate this better, we must return to the theme of Horace'spersonal quality. We have already seen that in no other poet so fully asin Horace is the reality of personal contact to be felt. The lyrics, aswell as the _Epistles_ and _Satires_, are almost without exceptionaddressed to actual persons. So successful is this attempt of the poetto speak from the page that it needs but the slightest touch ofimagination to create the illusion that we ourselves are addressed. Wefeel, as if at first hand, all the qualities that went to make upHorace's character, --his good will, good faith, and good-nature, thedepth and constancy of his friendship, his glow of admiration for thebrave deed, the pure heart, and the steadfast purpose, his patientendurance of ill, his delight in men and things, his affection for whatis simple and sincere, his charity for human weakness, his mildlyironical mood, as of one who is aware that he himself is not undeservingof the good-humored censure he passes on others, his clear vision of thesources of happiness, his reposeful acquiescence, and his elusive humor, which never bursts into laughter and yet is never far away from it. Weare taken into his confidence, like old friends. He describes himselfand his ways; he lets us share in his own vision of himself and in hisamusement at the bustling and self-deluded world, and subtly conciliatesus by making us feel ourselves partakers with him in the criticism oflife. There is no better example in literature of personal magnetism. 

And he is more than merely personal. He is sincere and unreserved. Werehe otherwise, the delight of intimate acquaintance with him would beimpossible. It is the real Horace whom we meet, --not a person on theliterary stage, with buskins, pallium, and mask. Horace holds the mirrorup to himself; rather, not to himself, but to nature in himself. Everyside of his personality appears: the artist, and the man; the formalist, and the skeptic; the spectator, and the critic; the gentleman insociety, and the son of the collector; the landlord of five hearths, andthe poet at court; the stern moralist, and the occasional voluptuary;the vagabond, and the conventionalist. He is independent and unhamperedin his expression. He has no exalted social position to maintain, andblushes neither for parentage nor companions. His philosophy is notSchool-made, and the fear of inconsistency never haunts him. Hisreligion requires no subscription to dogma; he does not even take thetrouble to define it. Politically, his duties have come to be also hisdesires. He will accept the favors of the Emperor and his ministers ifthey do not compromise his liberty or happiness. If they withdraw theirgifts, he knows how to do without them, because he has already donewithout them. He conceals nothing, pretends to nothing, makes noexcuses, suffers from no self-consciousness, exercises no reserve. Thereare few expressions of self in all literature so spontaneous and socomplete. Horace has left us a portrait of his soul much more perfectthan that of his person. It is a truthful portrait, with both shadow andlight. 

And there is a corollary to Horace's frankness that constitutes anotherelement in the charm of his personality. His very unreserve is the proofof an open and kindly heart. To call him a satirist at all is tonecessitate his own definition of satire, "smilingly to tell the truth. "At least in his riper work, there is no trace of bitterness. He laughswith some purpose and to some purpose, but his laughter is not sardonic. Sane judgment and generous experience tell him that the foibles ofmankind are his own as well as theirs, and are not to be changed by soslight a means as a railing tongue. He reflects that what in himself hasproduced no very disastrous results may without great danger be forgivenalso in them. 

It is this intimate and warming quality in Horace that prompts Hagedornto call him "my friend, my teacher, my companion, " and to take the poetwith him on country walks as if he were a living person:

 Horaz, mein Freund, mein Lehrer, mein Begleiter, Wir gehen aufs Land. Die Tage sind so heiter;

and Nietzsche to compare the atmosphere of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_to the "geniality of a warm winter day"; and Wordsworth to be attractedby his appreciation of "the value of companionable friendship"; andAndrew Lang to address to him the most personal of literary letters; andAustin Dobson to give his Horatian poems the form of personal address;and countless students and scholars and men out of school and immersedin the cares of life to carry Horace with them in leisure hours. _Circumpraecordia ludit_, "he plays about the heartstrings, " said Persius, longbefore any of these, when the actual Horace was still fresh in thememory of men. 

If we were to take detailed account of certain qualities missed inHorace by the modern reader, we should be even more deeply convinced ofhis power of personal attraction. He is not a Christian poet, but apagan. Faith in immortality and Providence, penitence and penance, andhumanitarian sentiment, are hardly to be found in his pages. He issometimes too unrestrained in expression. The unsympathetic orunintelligent critic might charge him with being commonplace. 

Yet these defects are more apparent than real, and have never been anobstacle to souls attracted by Horace. His pages are charged withsympathy for men. His lapses in taste are not numerous, and are, afterall, less offensive than those of European letters today, after thecoming of sin with the law. And he is not commonplace, but universal. His content is familiar matter of today as well as of his own time. Hisdelightful natural settings are never novel, romantic, or forced; wehave seen them all, in experience or in literature, again and again, andthey make familiar and intimate appeal. Phidyle is neither ancient normodern, Latin nor Teuton; she is all of them at once. The exquisiteexpressions of friendship in the odes to a Virgil, or a Septimius, areapplicable to any age or nationality, or any person. The story of thetown mouse and country mouse is always old and always new, and alwaystrue. _Mutato nomine de te_ may be said of it, and of all Horace's otherstories; alter the names, and the story is about you. Their applicationand appeal are universal. 

"Without sustained inspiration, without profundity of thought, withoutimpassioned song, " writes Duff, "he yet pierces to the universalheart.... His secret lies in sanity rather than impetus. Kindly andshrewd observer of the manifold activities of life, he draws vignettestherefrom and passes judgments thereon which awaken undying interest. _Non omnis moriar_--he remains fresh because he is human. "

Horace's philosophy of life may be imperfect for the militanthumanitarian and the Christian, but, as a matter of fact, it is acomplete and perfect thing in itself. Horace does not fret or fume. Heis not morbid or unpleasantly melancholy. It is true that "his temperedand polished expression of common experience, free from transports andfree from despairs, speaks more forcibly to ripe middle age than toyouth, " but it is not without its appeal also to youth. Horace sums upan attitude toward existence which all men, of whatever nation or time, can easily understand, and which all, at some moment or other, sympathize with. Whether they believe in his philosophy of life or not, whether they put it into practice or not, it is always and everywhereattractive, --attractive because founded on clear and sympathetic visionof the joys and sorrows that are the common lot of men, attractivebecause of its frankness and manly courage, and, above all, attractivebecause of its object. So long as the one great object of human longingis peace of mind and heart, no philosophy which recognizes it will bewithout followers. The Christian is naturally unwilling to adopt theHoratian philosophy as a whole, but with its _summum bonum_, and withmany of its recommendations, he is in perfect accord. Add Christianfaith to it, or add it, so far as is consonant, to Christian faith, andeither is enriched. 

We are better able now to appreciate the dynamic power of Horace theperson. We may see it at work in the fostering of friendly affection, inthe deepening of love for favorite spots of earth, in the encouragementof righteous purpose, in the true judging of life's values. 

Horace is the poet of friendship. With his address to "Virgil, the halfof my soul, " his references to Plotius, Varius, and Virgil as the purestand whitest souls of earth, his affectionate messages in _Epistle_ and_Ode_, he sets the heart of the reader aglow with love for his friends. "Nothing, while in my right mind, would I compare to the delight of afriend!" What numbers of men have had their hearts stirred to deeperlove by the matchless ode to Septimius:

 "S_eptimius, who with me would brave_ F_ar Gades, and Cantabrian land_ U_ntamed by Rome, and Moorish wave_ T_hat whirls the sand_;

 "F_air Tibur, town of Argive kings_, T_here would I end my days serene_, A_t rest from seas and travelings_, A_nd service seen_. 

 "S_hould angry Fate those wishes foil_, T_hen let me seek Galesus, sweet_ T_o skin-clad sheep, and that rich soil_, T_he Spartan's seat_. 

 "O_h, what can match the green recess_, W_hose honey not to Hybla yields_, W_hose olives vie with those that bless_ V_enafrum's fields_?

 "L_ong springs, mild winters glad that spot_ B_y Jove's good grace, and Aulon, dear_ T_o fruitful Bacchus, envies not_ F_alernian cheer_. 

 "T_hat spot, those happy heights desire_ O_ur sojourn; there, when life shall end_, Y_our tear shall dew my yet warm pyre_, Y_our bard and friend_. "

And what numbers of men have taken to their hearts from the same ode thefamous

 Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes Angulus ridet, --

 Y_onder little nook of earth_ B_eyond all others smiles on me_, --

and expressed through its perfect phrase the love they bear their ownbeloved nook of earth. "Happy Horace!" writes Sainte-Beuve on the marginof his edition, "what a fortune has been his! Why, because he onceexpressed in a few charming verses his fondness for the life of thecountry and described his favorite corner of earth, the lines composedfor his own pleasure and for the friend to whom he addressed them havelaid hold on the memory of all men and have become so firmly lodgedthere that one can conceive no others, and finds only those when hefeels the need of praising his own beloved retreat!"

To speak of sterner virtues, what a source of inspiration torighteousness and constancy men have found in the apt and undyingphrases of Horace! "Cornelius de Witt, when confronting the murderousmob; Condorcet, perishing in the straw of his filthy cell; Herrick, athis far-away old British revels; Leo, during his last days at theVatican, and a thousand others, " strengthened their resolution byrepeating _Iustum et tenacem_:

 "T_he man of firm and noble soul_ N_o factious clamors can control_ N_o threat'ning tyrant's darkling brow_ C_an swerve him from his just intent_.... A_y, and the red right arm of Jove_, H_urtling his lightnings from above_, W_ith all his terrors then unfurl'd_, H_e would unmoved, unawed behold_: T_he flames of an expiring world_ A_gain in crashing chaos roll'd_, I_n vast promiscuous ruin hurl'd_, M_ust light his glorious funeral pile_: S_till dauntless midst the wreck of earth he'd smile_. "

Of this passage Stemplinger records thirty-one imitations. How many havehad their patriotism strengthened by _Dulce et decorum est pro patriamori_, the verse which is aptly found in modern Rome on the monument tothose who fell at Dogali. How many have been supported and comforted incalamity and sorrow by the poet's immortal words of consolation on thedeath of Quintilius:

 Durum: sed levius fit patientia Quicquid corrigere est nefas, --

 A_h, hard it is! but patience lends_ S_trength to endure what Heaven sends_. 

The motto of Warren Hastings was _Mens aequa in arduis_, --An even temperin times of trial. Even humorous use of these phrases has served apurpose. The French minister, compelled to resign, no doubt drewsubstantial consolation from _Virtute me involvo_, when he turned it tofit his case:

 I_n the robe of my virtue I wrap me round_ A _solace for loss of all I had_; B_ut ah! I realize I've found_ W_hat it really means to be lightly clad_!

But the most pronounced effect of Horace's dynamic power is itsinspiration to sane and truthful living. Life seems a simple thing, yetthere are many who miss the paths of happiness and wander in wretcheddiscontent because they are not bred to distinguish between the falseand the real. We have seen the lesson of Horace: that happiness is notfrom without, but from within; that it is not abundance that makesriches, but attitude; that the acceptation of worldly standards ofgetting and having means the life of the slave; that the fraction isbetter increased by division of the denominator than by multiplying thenumerator; that unbought riches are better possessions than those theworld displays as the prizes most worthy of striving for. No poet is sofull of inspiration as Horace for those who have glimpsed these simpleand easy yet little known secrets of living. Men of twenty centurieshave been less dependent on the hard-won goods of this world because ofhim, and lived fuller and richer lives. Surely, to give our young peoplethis attractive example of sane solution of the problem of happy livingis to leaven the individual life and the life of the social mass. 

IV. CONCLUSION

We have visualized the person of Horace and made his acquaintance. Wehave seen in his character and in the character of his times the sourcesof his greatness as a poet. We have seen in him the interpreter of hisown times and the interpreter of the human heart in all times. We havetraced the course of his influence through the ages as both man andpoet. We have seen in him not only the interpreter of life, but adynamic power that makes for the love of men, for righteousness, and forhappier living. We have seen in him an example of the word made flesh. "He has forged a link of union, " writes Tyrrell, "between intellects sodiverse as those of Dante, Montaigne, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Hooker, Chesterfield, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Thackeray. "

To know Horace is to enter into a great communion of twentycenturies, --the communion of taste, the communion of charity, thecommunion of sane and kindly wisdom, the communion of the genuine, thecommunion of righteousness, the communion of urbanity and of friendlyaffection. 

"Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise and kindly heathen; ofmortals the most human, the friend of my friends and of so manygenerations of men. "

NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following groups of references are not meant as annotations in theusual sense. Those to the text of the poet are for such persons as wishto increase their acquaintance with Horace by reading at first hand theprincipal poems which have inspired the essayist's conclusions. Theothers are for those who desire to view in detail the working of theHoratian influence. 

 HORACE THE PERSON: _Odes_, I. 27; 38; II. 3; 7; III. 8; IV. 11. _Satires_, I. 6; 9; II. 6. _Epistles_, I. 7; 10; 20. Suetonius, _Life of Horace_. (see below. )

 HORACE THE POET: _Odes_, I. 1; 3; 6; 12; 24; 35; II. 7; 16; III. 1; 21; 29; IV. 2; 3; 4. _Satires_, I. 4; 6. _Epistles_, I. 3; 20; II. 2. 

 HORACE THE INTERPRETER OF HIS TIMES: Landscape; _Odes_, I. 4; 31; II. 3; 6; 14; 15; III. 1; 13; 18; 23. _Epistles_, I. 12; 14. Living; _Odes_, I. 1; III. 1; 2; 4; 6; IV. 5; _Epode_, 2. _Satires_, I. 1; II. 6. _Epistles_, I. 7; 10. Religion; _Odes_, I. 4; 10; 21; 30; 31; 34; III. 3; 13; 16; 18; 22; 23; IV. 5; 6; _Epode_, 2. Popular Wisdom; _Epistle_, I. 1; 4; II. 2. 

 HORACE THE PHILOSOPHER OF LIFE: The Spectator and Essayist; _Satires_, I. 4; II. 1. The Vanity of Human Wishes; _Odes_, I. 4; 24; 28; II. 13; 14; 16; 18; III. 1; 16; 24; 29; IV. 7. _Satires_, I. 4; 6. _Epistles_, I. 1. The Pleasures of this World; _Odes_, I. 9; 11; 24; II. 3; 14; III. 8; 23; 29; IV. 12. _Epistles_, I. 4. Life and Morality; _Odes_, I. 5; 18; 19; 27; III. 6; 21; IV. 13. _Epistles_, I. 2; II. 1. Life and Purpose; _Odes_, I. 12; II. 2; 15; III. 2; 3; IV. 9; _Epode_, 2. _Satires_, I. 1. _Epistles_, I. 1. The Sources of Happiness; _Odes_, I. 31; II. 2; 16; 18; III. 16; IV. 9. _Satires_, I. 1; 6; II. 6. _Epistles_, I. 1; 2; 6; 10; 11; 12; 14; 16. 

 HORACE THE PROPHET: _Odes_, II. 20; III. 1; 4; 30; IV. 2; 3. 

 HORACE AND ANCIENT ROME: _Odes_, IV. 3. _Epistles_, I. 20. Suetonius, _Vita Horati, Life of Horace_, Translation, J. C. Rolfe, in _The Loeb Classical Library_, New York, 1914. Hertz, Martin, _Analecta ad carminum Horatianorum Historiam_, i-v. Breslau, 1876-82. Schanz, Martin, _Geschichte der Römischen Litteratur_. München, 1911. 

 HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE: Manitius, Maximilian, _Analekten zur Geschichte des Horaz im Mittelalter, bis 1300_. Göttingen, 1893. 

 HORACE AND MODERN TIMES: In Italy; Curcio, Gaetano Gustavo, _Q. Orazio Flacco, studiato in Italia dal secolo XIII al XVIII_. Catania, 1913. In France and Germany; Imelmann, J. , _Donec gratus eram tibi, Nachdichtungen und Nachklänge aus drei Jahrhunderten_. Berlin, 1899. Stemplinger, Eduard, _Das Fortleben der Horazischen Lyrik seit der Renaissance_. Leipzig, 1906. In Spain; Menéndez y Pelayo, D. Marcelino, _Horacio en España_, 2 vols. Madrid, 1885. [2] In England; Goad, Caroline, _Horace in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century_. New Haven, 1918. Myers, Weldon T. , _The Relations of Latin and English as Living Languages in England during the Age of Milton_. Dayton, Virginia, 1913. Nitchie, Elizabeth, "Horace and Thackeray, " in _The Classical Journal_, XIII. 393-410 (1918). Shorey, Paul, and Laing, Gordon J. , _Horace: Odes and Epodes_ (Revised Edition). Boston, 1910. Thayer, Mary R. , _The Influence of Horace on the Chief English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. New Haven, 1916. 

 HORACE THE DYNAMIC: _Ars Poetica. _ Cowl, R. P. , _The Theory of Poetry in England; its development in doctrines and ideas from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century_. London, 1914. Dobson, Henry Austin, _Collected Poems_, Vol. I, 135, 181, 219, 222, 224, 231, 236, 245, 263; II. 66, 83, 243, etc. London, 1899. Gladstone, W. E. , _The Odes of Horace_, English Verse Translation. New York, 1901. Kipling, Rudyard, et Graves, C. L. , _Q. Horati Flacci Carminum Liber Quintus_. New Haven, 1920. [3] Lang, Andrew, _Letters to Dead Authors_. New York, 1893. Martin, Sir Theodore, _The Odes of Horace_; translated into English verse. London, 1861. [2] Untermeyer, Louis, "_--and Other Poets_. " New York, 1916. Whicher, G. M. And G. F. , _On the Tibur Road, a Freshman's Horace_. Princeton, 1912. 

Besides the works mentioned above, reference should be made to:

 CAMPAUX, A. , _Des raisons de la popularité d'Horace en France_. Paris, 1895. D'ALTON, J. F. , _Horace and His Age_. London, 1917. MCCREA, N. G. , _Horatian Criticism of Life_. New York, 1917. STEMPLINGER, EDUARD, _Horaz im Urteil der Jahrhunderte_. Leipzig, 1921. TAYLOR, HENRY OSBORN, _The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_. New York, 1903. [2] _The Century Horace. _

and, also, to the two following works, cited and quoted in the text:

 DUFF, J. WIGHT, _A Literary History of Rome_. London, 1910. [2] (p. 545) TYRRELL, R. Y. , _Latin Poetry_. Boston, (lectures delivered at The Johns Hopkins University, 1893). (p. 164)

_Note_: Translations of Horace, not otherwise assigned or not enclosedin quotation marks, are those of G. S. 

Our Debt to Greece and Rome

AUTHORS AND TITLES

 1. HOMER. John A. Scott, Northwestern University. 2. SAPPHO. David M. Robinson, The Johns Hopkins University. 3A. EURIPIDES. F. L. Lucas, King's College, Cambridge. 3B. AESCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES. J. T. Sheppard, King's College, Cambridge. 4. ARISTOPHANES. Louis E. Lord, Oberlin College. 5. DEMOSTHENES. Charles D. Adams, Dartmouth College. 6. ARISTOTLE'S POETICS. Lane Cooper, Cornell University. 7. GREEK HISTORIANS. Alfred E. Zimmern, University of Wales. 8. LUCIAN. Francis G. Allinson, Brown University. 9. PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. Charles Knapp, Barnard College, Columbia University. 10A. CICERO. John C. Rolfe, University of Pennsylvania. 10B. CICERO AS PHILOSOPHER. Nelson G. McCrea, Columbia University. 11. CATULLUS. Karl P. Harrington, Wesleyan University. 12. LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. George Depue Hadzsits, University of Pennsylvania. 13. OVID. Edward K. Rand, Harvard University. 14. HORACE. Grant Showerman, University of Wisconsin. 15. VIRGIL. John William Mackail, Balliol College, Oxford. 16. SENECA. Richard Mott Gummere, The William Penn Charter School. 17. ROMAN HISTORIANS. G. Ferrero, Florence. 18. MARTIAL. Paul Nixon, Bowdoin College. 19. PLATONISM. Alfred Edward Taylor, University of Edinburgh. 20. ARISTOTELIANISM. John L. Stocks, University of Manchester, Manchester. 21. Stoicism. Robert Mark Wenley, University of Michigan. 22. LANGUAGE AND PHILOLOGY. Roland G. Kent, University of Pennsylvania. 23. RHETORIC AND LITERARY CRITICISM. (Greek) W. Rhys Roberts, Leeds University. 24. GREEK RELIGION. Walter W. Hyde, University of Pennsylvania. 25. ROMAN RELIGION. Gordon J. Laing, University of Chicago. 26. MYTHOLOGIES. Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College, Cambridge. 27. THEORIES REGARDING THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. Clifford H. Moore, Harvard University. 28. STAGE ANTIQUITIES. James T. Allen, University of California. 29. GREEK POLITICS. Ernest Barker, King's College, University of London. 30. ROMAN POLITICS. Frank Frost Abbott, Princeton University. 31. ROMAN LAW. Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School. 32. ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY. M. T. Rostovtzeff, Yale University. 33. WARFARE BY LAND AND SEA. E. S. McCartney, University of Michigan. 34. THE GREEK FATHERS. Roy J. Deferrari, The Catholic University of America. 35. BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE. Henry Osborn Taylor, New York. 36. MATHEMATICS. David Eugene Smith, Teachers College, Columbia University. 37. LOVE OF NATURE. H. R. Fairclough, Leland Stanford Junior University. 38. ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY. Franz Cumont, Brussels. 39. THE FINE ARTS. Arthur Fairbanks, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 40. ARCHITECTURE. Alfred M. Brooks, Swarthmore College. 41. ENGINEERING. Alexander P. Gest, Philadelphia. 42. GREEK PRIVATE LIFE, ITS SURVIVALS. Charles Burton Gulick, Harvard University. 43. ROMAN PRIVATE LIFE, ITS SURVIVALS. Walton B. McDaniel, University of Pennsylvania. 44. FOLK LORE. 

 45. GREEK AND ROMAN EDUCATION. 

 46. CHRISTIAN LATIN WRITERS. Andrew F. West, Princeton University. 47. ROMAN POETRY AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON EUROPEAN CULTURE. Paul Shorey, University of Chicago. 48. PSYCHOLOGY. 49. MUSIC. Théodore Reinach, Paris. 50. ANCIENT AND MODERN ROME. Rodolfo Lanciani, Rome.