Horace and His Influence

le Age. If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already, whether in recording the last real Roman setting of

e and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending in a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion and the permanent seizure of civil as well as military au

g; and the increase of taxes, assessments, and compulsory honors involving personal contribution, had substituted for responsibility and privilege a burden so heavy that under it the civic life of the Empire was crushed to extinction. In Italy, above all, the ancient seed was running out. Under the influence of economic and social movement, the old stock had died and disappeared, or changed beyond recognition. The old lan

external races in the army and in trade, the interference of a Northern soldiery in the affairs of the throne, the more peaceful but more intimate shuffling of the population through the social and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whether of native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to an anaemic society, but the result most apparent

t heart without which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation. Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the people. The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds. Their language, never the facile language of the people and the partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to the general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and c

n Virgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost to their knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather th

influence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the most effective instrument of his preservation. Through the darkness

hat literature and all the other arts of paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its religion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, more than Virgil, should be the object of its 092 neglect, and

owy existence in another world inspires in him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in the supernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality. He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with the divine, of self-abasement in the presence of the eternal

s only: for the success of Augustus at home and in the field, for prolongation of Maecenas' life and happiness, for the weal of the State, for the nurslings of his little flock, for health o

and the next, gods and men, directly in the face, and expects other men to do the same. Life and its duties are for him clear-cut. He is no propounder of problems, no searcher after hidden purposes. He lacks almost absolutely the feverish

o employ the classic authors and the classic arts in the service of the new religion. Christianity possessed no distinct and separate media of expression and no separate body of knowledge which could bear fruit as matter of instruction. Pagan art and literature were indispensable whether for the study of history or of mere humanity. Christ

ge are few, but they are clear. We need not e

ng the spiritual phase of monkish retreat, made the intellectual life also his concern. Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, and Bobbio, in the northern part of the peninsula, were the great Italian centers. The Benedictine influence spread to Ireland, which before the end of the sixth century became a stronghold of the movement and an inspirat

roil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in the occupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christian institute. The example of Cassiodorus was followed two hundred years later on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded both in cloister and at court, scholars summoned, manuscripts copied, the life of pa

fifty manuscripts in existence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being the Bernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orléans. Germany was a worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of both countries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century were especially rich. Italy, on the co

claration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Its general capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from the confession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he is unfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of the late 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 or literary enthusi

is declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but ungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare with dogs." In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic legislato

me of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch contained his complete works. The Ecbasis Captivi, an animal-epic 100 appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of Horace in the manner of the cento, or patchwork. At about the same time, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christian dramas patterned after Terence, and

this period. German activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education of boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace copied under Desiderius. Peter Damia

any and France had been associated in the kingdom of Charlemagne. It is the century of Roger Bacon. Especially in Germany, England, and France, it is the age of the Crusades and the knightly orders. It is an age of the spread of culture among the common people. In France, it is the age of the monastery of Cluny, and the

the struggle 102 for supremacy between pope and emperor. Scholasticism overshadows humanism. The humanistic tradition of Charlemagne has died out, and the intellectual ideal is represented by Vincent of Beauvais an

schools which grew to independent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educational spirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of the eleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpreted Horace in his school. This

Latin taught except as the elementary instruction necessary to the study of civil and canonical law. Gaufried of Vinesaux, coming from England to Italy, and composing an Ars Dictaminis and a Poietria Nova containing Horatian reminiscences, is one of two or three signifi

e most high and palmiest days of Rome is such as to dim almost to darkness the brightest days of medieval culture. The new life into which Horace is now to 104 enter will be so spirited and full that the o