Town and country 215 



colonus bears the old general sense ' tiller of the soil ' : in the Satires 

 we find it in the legal sense of * tenant-farmer ' as opposed to * owner/ 

 dominus. He refers in both groups of poems to the military colonists 1 

 pensioned by Augustus with grants of land. In neither place is the 

 word coloni used ; this is natural enough. We need only note the care 

 with which the court-poet refers to the matter. His master doubtless 

 had many an anxious hour over that settlement: the poet refers to 

 the granting of lands, and does not touch on the disturbance caused 

 thereby. Nor is Horace peculiar in this respect. The caution that 

 marks the utterances of all the Augustan writers is very apt to mislead 

 us when we try to form a notion of the actual situation. The general 

 truth seems to be that the beginning of the Empire was a time of unrest 

 tempered by exhaustion, and that things only calmed down gradually 

 as the sufferers of the elder generation died out. Wealth was now the 

 one aim of most ambitions, and the race to escape poverty was extreme. 

 The merchant 2 in Horace is a typical figure. For a while he may have 

 had enough of seafaring perils and turn with joy to the rural quiet of 

 his country town : but to vegetate on narrow means is more than he 

 can stand, and he is off to the seas again. He is contrasted with the 

 farmer content to till his ancestral fields, whom no prospect of gain 

 would tempt to face the dangers of the deep : and he is I believe a 

 much more average representative of the age than the acquiescent 

 farmer. 



One passage in the works of Horace calls for special discussion by 

 itself, for the value of its evidence depends on the interpretation 

 accepted, and opinions have differed. In the fourteenth epistle of the 

 first book the poet expresses his preference for country life in the 

 form of an address to the steward of his Sabine estate, beginning with 

 these lines 



Vilice silvarum et mihi me reddentis agelli, 

 quern tufastidis habitatum quinquefods et 

 quinque bonos soliium Variam dimittere patres, 



thus rendered by Howes 



Dear Bailiff of the woody wild domain 

 Whose peace restores me to myself again, 

 (A sprightlier scene, it seems, thy taste requires, 

 To Varia though it send five sturdy sires 

 The lords of five good households) 



and the question at once arises, what sort of persons are meant by 

 these 'five good fathers.' In agreement with the excellent note of 



1 These coloni of course owned their farms; that is, were domini. Odes ill 4 lines 37-8, 

 Sat II 6 55-6. 



2 Odes I i mercator..,indocilis pauperiem pati, cf in 2. 



