Horace and His Influence

THE D

e natural Horace, simple and direct, of ordinary Italian manners and ideals, and a less natural Horace, finished in the cultur

affectionate companionship with his son, never faded from Horace's mind. The ways of the city were superimposed upon the ways of the country, but never displaced 024 nor even covered them. They were a garment put on and off, sometimes partly hiding, but never for long, the original cloak of simplicity. It is not necessary to think its wearer insincere when, constrained by soci

e two. The more formal poems addressed to Augustus and his house-hold sometimes sound the note of affectation, but the most exacting critic will hesitate to bring a like charge against the odes which cele

RETER OF ITAL

vain for nature-poems in the modern sense. With a word or a phrase only, he flashes upon our vision the beautiful, the significant, the permanent in the scenery of Italy. The features which he loved best, or which for other reasons caught his eye, 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 flower of the too-short-lived rose, and the sweet-scented bed

weetness of who

ad and still re

green silence

lood, the rushing Anio, the deep eddyings of Liris' taciturn stream, the secluded valleys of the Apennines, the leaves flying before the wind at the coming of winter, the snow-covered uplands of the Alban hills, the mead sparkling with hoar-frost at the approach o

here is in

est of Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes while the logs are being piled higher on the hearth!... None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known as well as you, 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, numbering the glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of his mistress. But the sentiment is ever in your heart, and often on your lips.

RPRETER OF I

aleidoscopic with scenes from the daily round of human life. We are given fleeting but vivid glimpses into the career of merchant and sailor. We see the sportsman in chase of the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedy thrush, the serenader under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside, the anxious mother at the window on 029 the cliff, never taking her eyes from the curved shore, the husbandm

bit forever. The most formal and dignified of the Odes are not without the mellow charm of Italian landscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first six Odes of the third book, often called the Inaugural Odes, we get such glimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius on election day, 030 the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships under the open sky, the r

sons of parent

h Punic blood t

cruel Hanniba

s and Antioc

brood of rusti

he mother or t

tere, obedie

ttock in the

r home fagots

hadows deepen

car, departing

wearied steer t

3

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elian Apollo, who bathes his unbound locks in the pure waters of Castalia, and Juno, sister and consort of fulminating Jove. He is impressed by the glittering pomp of religious processions winding their way to the summit of the Capitol. In all this, and even in the emperor-wors

nly Ode in which he prays to one of them with really fervent heart stands alone among all the odes to the na

ling at Apo

om silver g

due of v

s he, wha

s from Sardi

herds that

labria; n

d, and

ir lands wher

ws rich and

waters, L

the mar

o whom the

neyards pru

sell his ba

the prec

of gold-to

his lade

shattered,

-vexed Mi

3

es from the

d endives,

tona, hea

grant my

enjoy the b

a mind uncl

heart; a wi

ed age;

efathers that had worshiped from time immemorial the same gods at the same altars in the same way. They were not the gods of yesterday, imported from Greece and Egypt, and splendid with display, but the simple gods of farm and fold native to the soil of Italy. Whatever his conceptio

the home-stead, of the feast of the Terminalia with its slain lamb, of libations of ruddy wine and offerings of bright flowers on the clear waters of some ancestral spring, of the simple hearth of the farmhouse, of the family table resplendent with the silver salinum, heirloom of generations, from which the grave paterfamilias makes the pious offering of crackling salt and meal to little gods crowned with rosemary and myrtle, of the altar beneath the pine to the Virgin goddess, of Faunus the shepherd-god, in the humor of wooing, roaming the sunny farmfields in quest of retreati

PRETER OF THE

living, not from conning books. Horace, too, for all his having been a student of formal philosophy in Athens, for all his professed faith in philosophy 036 as a boon for rich and poor and old and young, and for all his inclination to yield to the natural human impulse toward system and adopt the philoso

am a guest in whatever haven the tempest sweeps me to. Now I am full of action and deep in the waves of civic life, an unswerving follower and guar

ered little in practical working from Stoicism. In profession, he was more of the Epicurean; in practice, more of the Stoic. His 037 philosophy occupies ground between both, or, rather, gr

al converse at Athens, under the stress of experience in the field, and from long contemplation of life in the large in the capital of an empire, it crystallized into a philosophy of life. The term "philosophy" is misleading in Horace's case. It suggests books and for

to 038 young and old alike.... The envious man, the ill-tempered, the indolent, the wine-bibber, the too free lover,-no m

y ornament. The humorous and not unsatiric lines to his poet-friend Albius Tibullus,-"when you want a good laugh, come and see me; you will find me fat and sleek and my skin well cared for, a pig from

AND H

nce of Greek letters upon his work; but to call Horace Greek is to be blinded to the essential by the presence in his poems of Greek form and Greek allusion. It would be as little reasonable to call a Roman triumphal arch Greek because