Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/172

160 160 and in one of his finest odes he speaks of Mount Yulturnus as the scene of an adventure of his childhood, which marked him out as a special object of divine protection and as appointed to a poetic destiny. The descriptive touches in that passage, such as &quot; celste nidum Acherontise,&quot; show that the -scenery by which he was surrounded in his early years had imprinted itself vividly on his mind. As he connects his native mountains with the dawn of his poetic inspiration, so he associates the name of the &quot; far-sounding Aufidus,&quot; the river familiar to his early recollection, in more than one passage of his Odes (iii. 30, 10; iv. 9, 2) with his hopes of poetic immortality. He dwells fondly on the virtues of the people belonging to his native district, as in that picture of family happiness and innocence which he paints in the second Epode &quot; Quod si pudiea mulicr in partcm juvet Domum atque dulces liberos, Sabina qualis, aut perusta solibus Pernicis uxor Apuli ;&quot; and elsewhere he recalls with pride the old martial glory of the race amongst whom his first years were passed (Ode i. 22,14; iii. 5, 9). Like Virgil he regards the Sabellian , stock as that branch of the Italian people which had con tributed most to the virtue of Rome as well as to her j greatness in war. In the Ofella of the Satires we meet with a still surviving type of that primitive virtue. The Servius Oppidios, whose dying directions to his sons are recorded in Sat. ii. 3, 168, &c., seems to have been another representative of &quot; the wisdom unborrowed from the schools,&quot; who must have been known to Horace through the tie of neighbourhood. We note also, as a trace of the influence of early impressions on his later tastes, that the name of the &quot; Bandusian fountain,&quot; which he has made as immortal as the names of Castalia or Aganippe, seems to have been transferred by him from a spring in his native district to one on his Sabine farm, which charmed and inspired him in the meridian of his poetical power. We may thus trace some of the germs of his poetical inspira tion, as well as of his moral sympathies, to the early years which he spent on the farm near Venusia. But the most important moral influence of his youth was the training and example of his father, of whose worth, affectionate solicitude, and homely wisdom Horace has given a most pleasing and life-like picture (Sat. i. 6, 70, &c.). He was a freedman by position ; and it is supposed that he had been originally a slave of the town of Venusia, and on his emancipation had received the gentile name of Horatius from the Horatian tribe in which the inhabitants of Venusia ] were enrolled. After his emancipation he acquired by the occupation of &quot; coactor &quot; (a collector of the payments made at public auctions, or, according to another interpretation, a collector of taxes) sufficient means to enable him to buy a small farm (&quot; macro pauper agello,&quot; Sat. i, 6, 71), to make sufficient provision for the future of his eon (Sat. i. 4, 108), and to take him to Rome to give him the advantage of the best education there. To his care Horace attributes, not only the intellectual training which enabled him in later life to take his place among the best men of Rome, but also [ his immunity from the baser forms of moral evil (Sat. i. 6, 68, &amp;lt;kc.). To his practical teaching he attributes also his tendency to moralize and to observe character (Sat. i. 4, 103, &c.) the tendency which enabled him to become the most truthful painter of social life and manners which the ancient world produced. If Horace drew some of his poetical sensi bility from the influences of his native district, we may believe that he derived his moral health and practical sagacity from a father who combined with the intelligence and prudence which raised him above his original position the serious spirit and respect for the morality handed down from their forefathers (&quot;mi satis est si Traditum ab antiquis morem sen-are,&quot; &c.) which formed the basis of the old Italian character. 1 In one of his latest writings (Epist. ii. 2, 42, &c.) Horace gives a further account of his education ; but we hear no more of his father, nor is there any allusion in his writings to the existence of any other member of his family or any other relative. After the ordinary grammatical and literary training at Rome, he went to Athens, the most famous school of philosophy, as Rhodes was of oratory ; and he describes himself while there as &quot; searching after truth among the groves of the Academy &quot; as well as advanc ing in literary accomplishment. His pleasant residence there was interrupted by the breaking out of the civil war. Following the example of his young associates, he attached himself to the cause of Brutus, whom he seems to have accompanied to Asia, probably as a member of his staff ; and he served at the battle of Philippi in the post of military tribune. He shared in the rout which followed the battle, and in an ode addressed to his old comrade Pompeius Grosphus he alludes, in imitation of a similar confession of Alcpeus, to the inglorious casting aw r ay of his shield. In interpreting sueh passages in the works of Horace, we have always to bear in mind the irony habitual to him, and the reserve imposed on him by his subsequent relations to the chiefs of the victorious party. The enthusiasm which he had felt for the republican cause, though necessarily re pressed, still betrays itself in some expressions of that ode, and in that addressed to Asinius Pollio (ii. 1, 21, &c.) ; and though he describes himself as &quot; Imbellis et firm us paruni,&quot; and as more fitted to treat of the light warfare of love than of the themes of actual war, yet both the martial and the patriotic feeling expressed in many of his later Odes enables us to understand the motives which induced him to quit the placid haunts of art and literature for the harsher experience of the campaign and battlefield. He returned to Rome shortly after the battle, stripped of his property, which formed part of the land confiscated for the benefit of the soldiers of Octavianus and Antony, It may have been at this time that he encountered the danger of shipwreck, which he mentions among the perils from which his life had been protected by supernatural aid (Ode iii. 4, 28). He procured in some way the post of a clerkship in the quaestor s office, and about three years after the battle of Philippi, he was introduced by Virgil and Varius to Maecenas. This was the turning-point of his fortunes. He owed his friendship with the greatest of literary patrons to his personal merits rather than to his poetic fame ; for, though some of his shorter and less im portant pieces may have been known to a small circle of friends before the date of this introduction, his first pub lished work (book i. of the Satires) shows that the relations of intimacy and mutual confidence which were never after wards disturbed had been established between the statesman and poet some time before this book was given to the world. He tells us in one of his Satires (i. 10, 31) that his earliest ambition was to write Greek verses. In giving this direc tion to his ambition, he was probably influenced by his admiration of the old iambic and lyrical poets whom he has made the models of his own Epodes and Odes. A parallel to this may be found in the early Latin verse of Milton and Gray, in whom, as in Horace, the gift of expression has been brought to the highest perfection. His common sense as well as his national feeling fortunately saved him from becoming a second-rate Greek versifier in an age when poetic inspiration had passed from Greece to Italy, and the 1 Cf. the line of Ennius, which Cicero compares to the voice of n oracle &quot;Moribus antiquis stat res Roinana virisque.&quot;