One of the pleasantest pictures in the world of letters—where jealousy is only less rife than in love—is Virgil introducing Horace to Maecenas. The two poets had met in 40 B.C., when Virgil was thirty and Horace twenty-five. Virgil opened the doors of Maecenas to him a year later, and all three remained fast friends till death.
In 1935 Italy celebrated the two thousandth birthday of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. He was born in the little town of Venusia, in Apulia. His father was an ex-slave who had risen to the dignity of a tax collector—or, some said, a fishmonger.25 Flaccus meant flap-eared; Horatius was probably the name of the master whom the father had served. Somehow the freedman prospered, sent Quintus to Rome for rhetoric, and to Athens for philosophy. There the youth joined the army of Brutus, and received command of a legion. It was dulce et decorum pro patria mori—“sweet and honorable to die for one’s country”;26 but Horace, who often imitated Archilochus, dropped his shield in the midst of battle and took to his heels. After the war was over he found himself shorn of all property and patrimony, and “barefaced poverty drove me to writing verses.”27 Actually, however, he buttered his bread by being a quaestor’s clerk.
He was short and stout, proud and shy, disliking the common crowd and yet not having the garb or means to move in circles whose education might equal his own. Too cautious to marry, he contented himself with courtesans who may have been real or may have been forms of poetic license invented to demonstrate maturity. He wrote of prostitutes with scholarly restraint and intricate prosody, and thought he deserved much for not seducing married women.28 Too poor to ruin himself sexually, he took to books and composed Greek and Latin lyrics in the most recondite of Greek meters. Virgil saw one of these poems and praised it to Maecenas. The kindly epicure was complimented by Horace’s stammering timidity and found a sly relish in his sophisticated thought. In 37 Maecenas took Virgil, Horace, and some others on a jaunt by canal boat, stagecoach, litter, and foot across Italy to Brundisium. Shortly afterward he introduced Horace to Octavian, who proposed that Horace should become his secretary. The poet excused himself, having no passion for work. In 34 Maecenas gave him a house and income-producing farm in the Sabine valley of Ustica, some forty-five miles from Rome. Horace was now free to live in the city or the country, and to write as authors dream of writing—with lazy leisure and laborious care.II
For a while he stayed in Rome, enjoying the life of an amused spectator of the hurrying world. He mingled with all ranks, studying the types that made up Rome, contemplating with clinical pleasure the follies and vices of the capital. He pictured some of these types in two books of Satires (34 and 30 B.C..) modeled at first on Lucilius and later in a milder and more tolerant strain. He called these poems sermones—not by any means sermons, but informal conversations, sometimes intimate dialogues, in almost colloquial hexameters; he confessed that they were prose in everything but meter, “for you would not call one a poet who writes, as I do, lines more akin to prose.” In these racy verses we meet the living men and women of Rome and hear them talking as Romans talked: not the shepherds, peasants, and heroes of Virgil, nor the legendary lechers and heroines of Ovid, but the saucy slave, the vain poet, the pompous lecturer, the greedy philosopher, the gabbing bore, the eager Semite, the businessman, the statesman, the streetwalker: this at last, we feel, is Rome. With homicidal playfulness Horace lays down for the hunter of legacies the rules for success in that ghoulish game.29 He laughs at the gourmets who feast on delicacies and limp with gout.30 He reminds the laudator temporis acti—the “praiser of times past”—that “if some god were for taking you back to those days you would refuse every time”;31 the chief charm of the past is that we know we need not live it again. He wonders, like Lucretius, at the restless souls who in the city long for the country, and there long for the city; who can never enjoy what they have because there is someone who has more; who, not content with their wives, hanker with too great and yet too little imagination for the charms of other women who have in turn become prose to other men. Money-madness, he concludes, is the basic disease of Rome. He asks the itching gold-seeker, “Why do you laugh at Tantalus, from whose thirsty lips the water always moves away? Change the name, and the story is about you”: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.32 He satirizes himself, too: he represents his slave telling him to his face that he, the moralist, is hot-tempered, never knows his own mind or purpose, and is the menial of his passions like anybody else. It is doubtless to himself, as well as to others, that he recommends the golden mean, aurea mediocritas;33 est modus in rebus, he says—“there’s a limit, a measure in things,”34 which the intelligent man will neither fall short of nor exceed. In opening his second series of Satires he complains to a friend that the first group were criticized as too savage and too weak. He asks advice and is told, “Take a rest.” “What?” the poet objects, “not write verses at all?” “Yes.” “But I can’t sleep.”35
He would have done well to take the advice for a time. His next publication, the Epodes, or “Refrains” (29 B.C.), is the least worthy of his works: harsh and coarse, ungenerous, tastelessly and bisexually obscene, forgivable only as an experiment in the iambic meters of Archilochus. Perhaps his disgust with the “smoke and wealth and noise of Rome”36 had mounted to bitterness; he could not bear the pressure of the “ignorant and evil-thinking crowd.” He pictures himself jostled and jostling in the human flotsam of the capital, and cries out: “O rural home! when shall I behold you? When shall I be able, now with the books of the ancients, now with sleep and idle hours, to quaff sweet forgetfulness of life’s cares? When will beans, the very brethren of Pythagoras, be served to me, and greens well larded with fat bacon? O nights and feasts divine!”37 His stays in Rome became shorter; he spent so much time in his Sabine villa that his friends, even Maecenas, complained that he had cut them out of his life. After the heat and dust of the city he found the pure air, the peaceful routine, and the simple workmen on his farm a cleansing delight. His health was poor, and like Augustus he lived for the most part on a vegetarian diet. “My stream of pure water, my few acres of woodland, my sure trust in a crop of corn, bring me more blessing than the lot of the dazzling lord of fertile Africa.”39 In him, as in the other Augustan poets, the love of country life finds a warm expression rare in the literature of Greece. Beatus ille qui procul negotiis—
Happy is he who far from business cares,
Even as the oldest race of men,
Tills with his own oxen his patrimonial fields,
Freed from every debt. . . .
How sweet it is to lie under the ancient ilex tree,
Or on the matted grass,
While the stream flows on between high banks,
And the woodland birds sing,
And springs with leaping waters plash,
Inviting to soft sleep! 40
It should be added, however, that these lines are put with Horatian irony into the mouth of a city moneylender, who, having uttered them, at once forgets them and loses himself in his coins.
Probably it was in those quiet haunts that he labored with “painstaking happiness”—curiosa felicitasIII—over those odes by which he knew that his name would live or die. He was tired of hexameters, the endless march of their measured feet, the sharp caesura cleaving the line like some inexorable guillotine. He had enjoyed in his youth the subtle and vivacious meters of Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Anacreon; he proposed now to transplant these “sapphics” and “alcaics,” these iambics and hendecasyllabics, into Roman lyric form, to express his thoughts on love and wine, religion and the state, life and death, in stanzas refreshingly new, epigrammatically compact, modeled for music, and teasing the mind with the complex skein of their weaving. He did not intend them for simple or hurried souls; indeed, he warned such away by the bluenosed opening of the third group:
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Favete linguis. Carmina non prius
audita Musarum sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto:—
“I hate and shun the profane crowd. Be silent! I, priest of the Muses, sing for maidens and youths songs never heard before.”
The maidens, if they had cared to tread and skip their way through Horace’s playful inversions of speech and desire, might have been pleasantly shocked by the chiseled epicureanism of these odes. The poet pictures the pleasures of friendship, eating and drinking, and making love; one would hardly surmise from such lauds that their author was a recluse who ate little and drank less. Why disturb ourselves with Roman politics and distant wars? he asks (anticipating the reader of these pages). Why plan so carefully a future whose shape will laugh at our plans? Youth and beauty touch us and flit away; let us enjoy them now, “reclining under the pine trees, our gray locks garlanded with roses and perfumed with Syrian nard.”42 Even as we speak, envious time runs out; seize the occasion, carpe diem, “snatch the day.”43 He intones a litany of loose ladies whom he claims to have loved: Lalage, Glycera, Neaera, Inacha, Cinara, Candia, Lyce, Pyrrha, Lydia, Tyndaris, Chloe, Phyllis, Myrtale. We need not believe all his protestations of guilt; these were literary exercises almost compulsory among the poets of the day; the same ladies or names had served other pens. The now virtuous Augustus was not deceived by these iambic fornications; he was pleased to find, among them, stately praises of his reign, his victories, his aides, his moral reforms, and the Augustan peace. Horace’s famous drinking song—Nuncest bibendum44—was composed on receipt of the news that Cleopatra was dead and Egypt taken; even his sophisticated soul thrilled at the thought of the Empire victorious and expanding as never before. He warned his readers that new laws could not take the place of old morals; mourned the spread of luxury and adultery, of frivolity and cynical unbelief. “Alas!” he says, referring to the latest war, “the shame of our scars and crimes, and of brothers slain! What have we of this hard generation shrunk from? What iniquity have we left untouched?”45 Nothing could save Rome but a return to the simplicity and steadfastness of ancient ways. The skeptic who found it difficult to believe anything bent his hoary head before the ancient altars, acknowledged that without a myth the people perish, and lent his pen graciously to the ailing gods.
There is nothing in the world’s literature quite like these poems—delicate and yet powerful, exquisite and masculine, subtle and intricate, hiding their art with perfect art, and their toil with seeming ease. This is music in another scale than Virgil’s, less melodious and more intellectual, meant not for youths and maidens but for artists and philosophers. There is rarely any passion here, or enthusiasm, or “fine writing”; the diction is simple even where the sentence stands on its head. But in the greater odes there is a pride and majesty of thought, as if an emperor were speaking and not in letters but in bronze:
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.
Non omnis moriar.46
I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze,
Loftier than the royal peak of pyramids;
No biting storm can bring it down,
No impotent north wind, nor the unnumbered series
Of the years, nor the swift course of time.
I shall not wholly die.
The slandered crowd ignored the Odes, the critics denounced them as tiresome artifice, the puritans declaimed against the songs of love. Augustus pronounced the poems immortal, asked for a fourth group that would celebrate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany, and chose Horace to write the carmen saeculare for the Secular Games. Horace complied, but without inspiration. The effort of the Odes had exhausted him. In his final work he relaxed into the conversational hexameters of the Satires, and wrote his Epistles as from an easy chair. He had always wanted to be a philosopher; now he abandoned himself to wisdom, even while remaining a causeur. Since a philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian, Horace, old at forty-five, was ripe to discuss God and man, morals and literature and art.
The most famous of these letters, named by later critics “The Art of Poetry,” was addressed Ad Pisones—to some uncertain members of the Piso clan; it was no formal treatise, but a bit of friendly advice on how to write. Choose a subject suited to your powers, Horace says; beware of laboring like a mountain and producing a mouse.47 The ideal book is that which at the same time instructs and entertains; “he who has mingled the useful with the pleasant wins every vote”—omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.48 Avoid words that are new, obsolete, or “sesquipedalian”—foot-and-a-half words. Be as brief as clarity allows. Go straight to the heart of the matter—in medias res. In writing poetry do not imagine that emotion is everything. It is true that you must feel an emotion yourself if you wish the reader to feel it (si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi).49 But art is not feeling; it is form (here again is the challenge of the classic to the romantic style).IV To achieve form, study the Greeks day and night; erase almost as much as you write; delete every “purple patch” (purpureus pannus); submit your work to a competent critic, and beware of your friends. If it survives all this, put it away for eight years; if then you do not perceive the uses of oblivion, publish it, but remember that it can never be recalled except by time: verba volant, scripta manent. If you write drama let the action, not your words, tell the story and delineate the characters. Do not represent horror on the stage. Obey the unities of action, time, and place: let the story be one and occur within a brief time in one place. Study life and philosophy, for without observation and understanding even a perfect style is an empty thing. Sapere aude: dare to know.
Horace himself had obeyed all these precepts but one—he had not learned to weep. Because his feelings were too thin, or had been stifled into silence, he seldom rose to the high art that gives form to sincere sympathy, or to “emotion remembered in tranquillity.” He was too urbane. Nil admirari, “to marvel at nothing,”50 was poor advice; to the poet everything should be a miracle, even when, like the sunrise or a tree, it greets him every day. Horace observed life, but not too deeply; he studied philosophy, but kept so persistently an “even mind”51 that only his Odes rise above a “golden mediocrity.”52 He honored virtue like a Stoic, and respected pleasure like an Epicurean. “Who, then, is free?” he asks, and answers, like Zeno, “The wise man, he who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor bonds affright, who defies his passions, scorns ambition, and is in himself a whole.”53 One of his noblest poems sings a Stoic strain:
Iustum et tenacem propositi virum
si fractus inlabatur orbis
impavidum ferient ruinae—
“If a man is just and resolute, the whole world may break and fall upon him and find him, in the ruins, undismayed.”54 But despite all this he calls himself, with engaging honesty, “a pig from Epicurus’ sty.”55 Like Epicurus he placed more store on friendship than on love; like Virgil he lauded the reforms of Augustus, and remained a bachelor. He did his best to preach religion, but he had none. Death, he felt, ends all.56
His last days were clouded with this thought. He had his share of pains—stomach trouble, rheumatism, and much else. “The years as they pass,” he mourned, “rob us of all joys, one by one.”57 And to another friend: “Alas, O Postumus, the fleeting years slip by; nor shall piety hold back our wrinkles, or pressing age, or indomitable death.”58 He recalled how, in his first satire, he had hoped, when his time came, to quit life contentedly, “like a guest who has had his fill.”59 Now he told himself: “You have played enough, eaten enough, drunk enough; it is time for you to go.”60 Fifteen years have passed since he had told Maecenas that he would not long survive the financier.61 In 8 B.C.. Maecenas died, and a few months later Horace followed him. He left his property to the Emperor, and was laid to rest near Maecenas’ tomb.