HORACE 



777 



Rome, where he enjoyed the intimacy of nearly all 

 the most prominent men of the time, his autumns 

 at the Sanine furm or a Hinall villa which he pos- 

 ened iit Tihur; he sometimes passed the winter 

 in tin- milder seaside uir of l!:n;i-. Ma-cenan in- 

 troduced him to Augustus, who, according to 

 Suetonius, ottered him a place in his own house- 

 hold, which the |..iet prudently declined. Hut as 

 the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradu- 

 ally Required tin- position of IN >et- laureate ; and 

 his ode written to command lor the celebration 

 of the Secular (iames in 17 B.C., with the official 

 odes which followed it on the victories of Tiberius 

 and Ihusus, and on the glories of the Augustan 

 mark the highest level which this kind of 

 poetry lias reached. On the 27th Noveml>er 8 B.C. 

 lie died in his fifty-seventh year. Virgil had died 

 eleven years before; Tihullus and Properties soon 

 after V irgil ; Ovid, still a young man, was the 

 only considerable poet whom he left behind; and 

 with bis death the great Augustan age of Latin 

 poetry ends. 



The following is the list of Horace's works, 

 arranged according to the dates which have been 

 most plausibly fixed by scholars. Some of the 

 i|iiestions of Horatian chronology, however, are 

 still at issue, and to most of the dates now to be 

 given the word ' about ' should be prefixed. 



The first lxx>k of Satires, ten in number, his 

 earliest publication, appeared 35 B.C. A second 

 volume of eight satires, showing more maturity 

 and finish than the first, was published 30 B.C. ; 

 and about the same time the small collection of 

 lyrics in iambic and composite metres imitated 

 from the Greek of Archilochus, which is known as 

 the Epodes. In 19 B.C., at the age of forty-six, 

 he produced his greatest work, three books 

 of Odes, a small volume which represents the 

 long labour of years, and which placed him at once 

 in the front rank of poets. About the same time, 

 whether before or after remains uncertain, is to be 

 placed his incomparable volume of Epistles, which 

 in grace, ease, good sense, and wit mark as high a 

 level as the Odes do in terseness, melody, and 

 exquisite finish. These two works are Horace's 

 great achievement. The remainder of his writings 

 demand but brief notice. They are the Carmen 

 Seculare already noticed ; a fourth book of Odes, 

 with all the perfection in style of the others, but 

 showing a slight decline in freshness; and three 

 more epistles, one, that addressed to Florus, the 

 most charming in its lively and graceful ease of all 

 Horace's familiar writings ; the other two some- 

 what fragmentary essays in literary criticism. One 

 of them, generally known as the Ars Poetica, was 

 perhaps left unfinished at his death. 



In his youth Horace had been an aristocrat, but 

 his choice of sides was perhaps more the result of 

 accident and association than of conviction, and he 

 afterwards acquiesced without great difficulty in the 

 imperial government. His acquiescence was not 

 at first untempered with regret; ami in the Odes 

 modern critics nave found touches of veiled sarcasm 

 against the new monarchy, and even a certain 

 sympathy with the abortive conspiracy of Murena 

 in 22 B.C. But as the empire grew stronger and 

 the advantages which it brought became more evi- 

 dent the repair of the destruction caused by the 

 civil wars, the organisation of government, the 

 development of agriculture and commerce, the 

 establishment at home and abroad of the peace of 

 Koine his tone passes into real enthusiasm for the 

 new order. 



Horace profeased himself a follower of the doc- 

 trines of Epicurus, which he took as a reasonable 

 mean between the harshness of Stoicism and the 

 low morality of the Cyrenaics. In his Odes, espe- 

 cially those written on public occasions, he uses, as 



all public men did, the language of the natioi.al 

 religion. Hut Itoth in religion and in philosophy 

 he remains In-fore all things a man of the world ; 

 lii- -atire JH more of manner* and follies than of 

 vice or impiety ; and hit* excellent sense keep* him 

 always to that 'golden mean ' in which he sums up 

 the lesson of Epicurus. AH a critic he shows the 

 same general good sense, but his criticisms do not 

 profess to be original or to go much Ix-neath 

 the surface. In Greek literature he follows Alex- 

 andrian taste; in Latin he represents the tendency 

 of his age to undervalue the earlier efforts of the 

 native genius, and lay great stress on the technical 

 finish of his own day. 



From his own lifetime till now Horace has had a 

 popularity unexampled in literature. A hundred 

 generations who have learned him as schoollK>vH 

 nave remembered and returred to him in mature 

 age as to a personal friend. He is one of those rare 

 examples, like Julius Ca-sar in politics, of genius 

 which ripens late, and leaves the more enduring 

 traces. Up to the age of thirty-five his work is 

 still crude and tentative ; afterwards it is charac- 

 terised by a jewel-finish, an exquisite sense of 

 language which weighs every word accurately and 

 makes every word inevitable and perfect. He was 

 not a profound thinker ; his philosophy is that 

 rather of the market-place than of the schools ; 

 he does not move among high ideals or subtle 

 emotions. The romantic note which makes Virgil 

 so magical and prophetic a figure at that turn- 

 ing-point of the world's history has no place in 

 Horace; to gain a universal audience he offers 

 nothing more and nothing less than what is uni- 

 versal to mankind. Of the common range of 

 thought and feeling he is perfect and absolute 

 master ; and in the graver passages of the Epistles, 

 as in the sad and noble cadence of his most 

 famous Odes, the melancholy temper which under- 

 lay his quick and bright humour touches the deepest 

 springs of human nature. Of his style the most 

 perfect criticism was given in the next generation 

 by a single phrase, Horatii curiosa felicitas ; of no 

 poet can it be more truly said, in the phrase of 

 the Greek dramatist Agathon, that 'skill has an 

 affection for luck, and luck for skill.' His poetry 

 supplies more phrases which have become pro- 

 verbial than the rest of Latin literature put to- 

 gether. To suggest a parallel in English literature 

 we must unite in thought the excellences of Pope 

 and Gray with the easy wit and cultured grace of 

 Addison. 



Horace's historical position in Latin literature is 

 this : on the one hand he carried on and perfected 

 the native Roman growth, satire, from the mder 

 essays of Lucilius, so as to make Roman life from 

 day to day, in city and country, live anew under 

 his pen ; on the other he naturalised the metres 

 and manner of the great Greek lyric poets from 

 Alcteus and Sappho downwards. 'Before Horace 

 Latin lyric poetry is represented almost wholly by 

 the brilliant but technically immature poems of 

 Catullus ; after him it ceases to exist. For what 

 he made it he claims, in a studied modesty of 

 phrase but with a just sense of his own merits, an 

 immortality to rival that of Rome. 



EDITIONS : Horace's works are believed to have been 

 printed for the first time in 1470 at Milan. The most 

 important commentaries (wit)i I.atin notes) are those 

 of Denis Lambin (1561), Ilentley (1711), and Orelli and 

 Baiter (1850-52). For ordinary students, with English 

 notes, the most useful editions are hy Macleane (1853), 

 Yon-e I IStiT), Wickham (vol. i. tklrs and Epodrt, 1874), 

 Wilkins (Kristin, ISfO) and Palmer (Satire*, 1883). 

 TRANSLATIONS: Francis, Conington (the whole), sir 

 Theodore Martin (Ode and Satire*), Rutherfurd Clark 

 (Odrt). The Life of Horace, by Dean Milman, and Sir 

 T. Martin's book (1870) in the 'Ancient Classics for 

 English Readers' way also be read with advantage. 



