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 to Augustus. That astute politician put it out of his power to play further tricks with the fleet, by giving him a command in Pannonia, where he was killed, 36, at the siege of Siscia, the modern Sissek.

Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as a writer of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of his models Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully—for bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man—he showed in other compositions signs of the ire poetic spirit, which afterwards found expression in the consummate grace and finish of his Odes. To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from internal evidence, appears to have been written 40, when the state of Italy, convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fill him with despair. Horace had frequent occasion between this period and the battle of Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed the long struggle for supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to his countrymen against the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray, which might have been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, and spreading the lustre of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose this poem written when the tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusian campaign had arrived in Rome,—the reduction of the town of Perusia by famine, and the massacre of from two to three hundred prisoners, almost all of equestrian or senatorial rank,—we can well understand the feeling under which the poem is written.