Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/37

 HORACE 17 In the autumn of this year, Brutus, then propraetor of Macedonia, visited Athens while levying troops. Horace joined his side ; and such was the scarcity of Roman officers, that though barely twenty-one, and totally without military experience, he was at once given a high commission. He was present at the bat- tle of Phiiippi, and joined in the general flight that followed the republican de- feat ; he found his way back to Italy, and apparently was not thought important enough for proscription by the triumvirate. His property, howevei, had been confiscated, and he found employment in the lower grade of the civil service to gain a livelihood. It was at this period that poverty, he says, drove him to make verses. His earliest were chiefly satires and personal lampoons ; but it was probably from some of his first lyrical pieces, in which he showed a new mastery of the Roman language, that he became known to Varius and Virgil, who in or about 38 b.c introduced him to Maecenas, the confidential minister of Octavianus and a mu- nificent patron of art and letters The friendship thus formed was uninterrupted till the death of Maecenas, to whose liberality Horace owed release from busi- ness and the gift of the celebrated farm among the Sabine Hills. From this time forward his life was without marked incident. His springs and summers were generally spent at Rome, where he enjoyed the intimacy of nearly all the most prominent men of the time ; his autumns at the Sabine farm, or a small villa which he possessed at Tibur ; he sometimes passed the winter in the milder seaside air of Baiae. Maecenas introduced him to Augustus, who, ac- cording to Suetonius, offered him a place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace grad- ually acquired the position of poet-laureate ; and his ode written to command for the celebration of the Secular Games in 1 7 b.c, with the official odes which fol- lowed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the glories of the Au- gustan age, mark the highest level which this kind of poetry has reached. On November 27, 8 b.c, he died in his fifty-seventh year. Virgil had died eleven years before. Tibullus and Propertius soon after Virgil. Ovid, still a young man, was the only considerable poet whom he left behind ; and with his death the 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 questions 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 book 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 collec- tion of lyrics in iambic and composite metres, imitated from the Greek of Archi- lochus, 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 repre- sents the long labor 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 2