236 Vergil and Horace, differences of attitude 



toilers' lot. Far from it. When enjoying a change in his country place, 

 he may occasionally divert himself with a short spell 1 of field-work, at 

 which his neighbours grin. On the other hand the spectacle of a dis- 

 reputable freedman, enriched by speculations in time of public calamity, 

 and enabled through ill-gotten wealth to become a great landlord, is 

 the cause of wrathful indignation (epode IV). And these and other 

 candid utterances come from one whose father was a freedman in a 

 country town, farming in quite a small way, to whose care and self- 

 denial the son owed the education that equipped him for rising in the 

 world. Horace indeed is one of the best of witnesses on these points. 

 There are points on which Vergil and Horace are agreed, though 

 generally with a certain difference of attitude. Thus, both prefer the 

 country to the town, but Horace frankly because he enjoys it and likes 

 a rest : he does not idealize country life as such, still less agricultural 

 labour. Both disapprove latifundia, but Horace on simple common- 

 sense grounds, not as a reformer. Both praise good old times, but 

 Horace without the faintest suggestion of possible revival of them, or 

 anything like them. Both refer to the beginnings of civilization, but 

 Vergil looks back to a golden age of primitive communism, when in 

 medium quaerebant and so forth ; a state of things ended by Jove's 

 ordinance that man should raise himself by toil. Horace, less convinced 

 of the superiority of the past, depicts 8 the noble savage as having to 

 fight for every thing, even acorns; and traces steps, leading eventually 

 to law and order, by which he became less savage and more noble. 

 Horace is nearer to Lucretius here than Vergil is. Neither could ignore 

 the disturbing effect of the disbanding of armies and ejectment of 

 farmers to make way for the settlement of rude soldiers on the land. 

 But to Horace, personally unconcerned, a cool view was more possible. 

 So, while hinting at public uneasiness 3 as to the detailed intentions of 

 the new ruler in this matter, he is able to look at the policy in general 

 merely as the restoration of weary veterans to a life of peace and the 

 relief of their chief's anxieties. Vergil, himself a sufferer, had his little 

 fling in the Bucolics, and was silent 4 in the Georgics. Again, Vergil 

 shuns the function of war as a means of supplying the slave-market. 

 He knows it well chough, and as a feature of the ' heroic ' ages the fate 

 of the captive appears in the Aeneid. Horace makes no scruple 5 of 

 stating the time-honoured principle that a captive is to the conqueror 

 a valuable asset : there is a market for him as a serviceable drudge, 



1 Hor epist I 14 39, cf II 2 184-6. 



2 Hor Sat I 3 99 foil, where animalia seems to mean little more than homines. 



3 Hor Sat n 6 55-6, Odes in 4 37-40. 



4 The one reference to the assignations [G n 198] only speaks of the misfortune of Mantua, 

 not of his own. 



6 Hor Epist I 1 6 69-72. 



