The works of Horace

Front matter

Class "PAl Book

SMITHSONIAN DEPOSIT

Gbnbt -..v.

Preface

The text of the present edition has been corrected throughout, principally by that of Orelli, and the notes have been carefully revised and emended. Much additional matter has also been introduced, not only in the shape of new notes, but also of Excursions. The latter have been taken from the larger edition, and will be found to contain much interesting information respecting the vineyards and wines of the ancients. Milman's Life of Horace has also been appended, from the splendid edition of the poet, which has recently appeared under the supervision of that scholar, and likewise a biographical sketch of Maecenas.

The larger edition contained a list of the authorities whence much subsidiary matter was obtained for the notes. This list was omitted in the previous edition of the smaller work, as the latter professed to be a mere abridgment, and as it was at that time the intention of the editor to publish a new edition of the larger Horace. This intention being, however, now abandoned, it has been thought advisable to transfer the list of authorities from the larger edition to the present one, the last thirteen works enumerated therein being those from which materials have been more immediately obtained for the improvement of the present volume. The list is as follows :

Vlll PREFACE.

1. Horatius, cum Annotationibus Mu-

reti Venet., 1555.

2. Horatii Opera, Grammaticorum XL.

Commentariis . ... . Basil, 1580.

3. Horatii Opera, ed. Bentleius . . Cantab., 1711.

4. Horatii Poemata, ed. Cuningamius . London, 1721, 2 vols.

5. Horatius, ed. Sanadon . . . Paris, 1729, 2 vols.

6. Horatius, ed. Watson . . . London, 1743, 2 vols.

8. Horatii Epistolse ad Pisones et Augus-

tum (Hurd) London, 1776, 3 vols.

9. Horatii Opera, ed. Valart . . . Paris, 1770.

10. Horatius, ed. Wakefield . . . London, 1794, 2 vols.

11. Horatii Opera, ed. Mitscberlich . Lips., 1800, 2 vols.

12. Horatius, ed. Bond .... Paris, 1806.

13. Horace, translated by Francis, with

the notes of Du Bois . . . London, 1807, 4 vols.

14. Horatii Carmina, ed. Jani . . Lips., 1809, 2 vols.

15. Horatius, In Us. Delph. . . . London, 1810.

16. Horatii Opera, ed. Fea . . . Romse, 1811, 2 vols.

17. Horatii Eclogae, cum notis Baxteri,

Gesneri, et Zeunii . . . Lips., 1815.

18. Horatius, ed. Wieland . . . Lips., 1816, 3 vols.

19. Horatii Opera, ed. Kidd . . . Cantab., 1817.

20. Horatii Opera, ed. Hunter . . Cupri, 1819.

21. Horatius, ed. Gargallo . . . Mediol., 1820.

22. Horatius, ed. Fea, cum addit. Bothii Heidelb., 1821, 2 vols.

23. Horatii Opera, ed. Jseck . . . Vinar., 1821.

24. Horatii Eclogae, cum notis Baxt.,

25. Horatius, ed. Batteux, cum addit.

Achaintre . . . . . Paris, 1823, 3 vols.

26. Horatii Carmina, ed. Knox . . London, 1824.

27. Horatii Epistola ad Pisones, ed. Ayl-

mer London, 1824.

28. Horatii Opera, ed. Doriug . . Glasgow, 1826.

29. Horatius, ed. Bip., cum addit. Gence. Paris, 1828.

30. Horatii Epist. Libri Primi 2da, ed.

Obbarius Halbers., 1828.

31. Horatius, ed. Filon .... Paris, 1828.

32. Marklandi in Horat. Nota? (Class.

Journ., vol. xiii., p. 126, seqq.).

PREFACE.

IX

, Bentleii Curae Novissimse ad Horat (Mus. Crit., vol. i., p. 194, seqq.).

Horatius, ed. Braunhard .

. Lips.,

1831-8,

4 vols.

Horatius, ed. Heindorf

Lips.,

Horatius, ed. Orelli

. Turici,

1843-4,

2 vols.

Horatius, ed. Orelli (ed. Min.) .

Turici,

1844,

2 vols.

Horatius, ed. Schmid

Halb.,

Horatius, ed. Peerlkamp .

Leid.,

Horatius, ed. Dillenberger

Bonnae,

Horatius, ed. Keightley .

London,

Horatius, ed. Girdlestone, &c. .

London,

Horatius, ed. Milman

London,

Episteln des Horaz

Braunsch.

, 1843-6,

3 vols.

Jacobs, Lectiones Venusinae

Leipz.,

Tate's Horatius Restitutus

London,

The present edition, it will be perceived, is an expurgated one, every thing being thrown out that could offend the most fastidious delicacy. In this respect, the edition here offered to the student will be found decidedly superior to that recently put forth in England by the Rev. Messrs. Girdlestone and Osborne, and in which many passages have been allowed to remain that are utterly at variance with the idea of an expurgated text.

It only remains for the editor to express his sincere obligations to his learned friend, Professor Drisler, for his kind and careful co-operation in bringing out the present work — a co-operation rendered doubly pleasing by the consciousness, on the part of the editor, of its having been the means of rendering the present volume far more useful to the student than it would otherwise have been.

Charles Anthon.

Columbia College, March 15th, 1849.

LIFE OF HORACE,

BY MIL MAN.

Chapter I. Introduction Birth, Parentage, Education Of Horace Athens

PHILIPPI RETURN TO ROME.

The Poetry of Horace is the history of Rome during the great change from a republic to a monarchy, during the sudden and almost complete revolution from centuries of war and civil faction to that peaceful period which is called the Augustan Age of Letters. His life is the image of his eventful times. In his youth he plunges into the fierce and sanguinary civil war ; and afterward subsiding quietly into literary ease, the partisan of Brutus softens into the friend of Maecenas, and the happy subject, if not the flatterer, of Augustus. Nor is his personal history merely illustrative of his times in its broader outlines ; every part of it, which is revealed to us in his poetry, is equally instructive. Even the parentage of the poet is connected with the difficult but important questions of the extent to which slavery in the Roman world was affected by manumission, and the formation of that middle class (the libertini), with their privileges, and the estimation in which they were held by society. His birth-place in the romantic scenery, and among the simple virtues of the old Italian yeomanry ; his Roman education ; his residence at Athens ; his military services ; the confiscation of his estate ; his fortunes as a literary adventurer, cast upon the world in Rome ; the state of Roman poetry when he commenced his career ; the degree in which his compositions were Roman and original, or but the naturalization of new forms of Grecian poetry ; the influence of the different sects of philosophy on the literature and manners of the age ; even the state religion, particularly as it affected the higher and more intellectual orders, at this momentous crisis when Christianity was about to be revealed to mankind — every circumstance in the life of the poet is an incident in the history of man. The influences which formed his moral and poetical character are the prevalent modes of feeling and thought among the people, who had achieved the conquest of the world, and, weary of their own furious contentions, now began to slumber in the proud consciousness of universal empire In him, as in an individual example, appears the change which took place in the fortunes, position, sentiments, occupations, estimation, character, mode of living, when the Roman, from the citizen of a free and turbulent republic, became the subject of a peaceful mon-

Xll LIFE OF HORACE.

archy, disguised indeed, but not, therefore, the less arbitrary ; while his acquaintance, and even his intimate friends, extending through almost every gradation of society, show the same influences, as they affect persons of different characters, talents, or station. Horace is exactly in that happy intermediate rank which connects both extremes. His poems are inscribed to Agrippa or Maecenas, even to the emperor himself, to his humbler private friend, or to his bailiff. He unites, in the same way, the literary with the social life; he shows the station assumed by or granted to mere men of letters, when the orator in the senate or in the forum ceded his place to the agreeable writer ; the man who excited or composed at his will the strong passions of the Roman people, had lost his occupation and his power, which devolved, as far as the literary part of his fame, upon the popular author. The mingling intellectual elements blend together, even in more singular union, in the mind of the poet. Grecian education and tastes have not polished off the old Roman independence; the imitator of Greek forms of verse writes the purest vernacular Latin ; the Epicurean philosophy has not subdued his masculine shrewdness and good sense to dreaming indolence. In the Roman part of his character he blends some reminiscence of the sturdy virtue of the Sabine or Apulian mountaineers with the refined manners of the city. All the great men of his day are the familiars of the poet ; not in their hours of state alone, but in the ease of social intercourse : we become acquainted with their ordinary manners and habits ; and are admitted to the privacy of Maecenas, of Augustus himself, of Virgil, and of Varius. Thus the Horatian poetry is more than historical, it is the living age itself in all its varied reality. Without the biography of the poet, even without that of some of his contemporaries, the poetry of Horace can not be truly appreciated, it can hardly be understood ; and by the magic of his poetry the reader is at once placed in the midst of Roman society in the Augustan age.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on the 8th of December, in the year U.C. 689, B.C. 65, during the consulship of L. Cotta and L. Manlius Torquatus. His father (such was the received and natural theory) owed his freedom to one of the illustrious family of the Horatii, whose name, according to general usage, he was permitted to assume. Recent writers, 1 however, have shown from inscriptions that Venusia, the town in the territory of which Horace was born, belonged to the Horatian tribe at Rome ; and that the father of Horace may have been a freedman of the town of Venusia. The great family of the Horatii, so glorious in the early days of the republic, certainly did not maintain its celebrity in the later times. With one solitary exception, a legate of C. Calvisius in Africa {Cic, ad Fam., xii., 30), it might seem to have been extinct. "if the freedman of an Horatius, the father of the poet does not appear to have

1. G. F. Grotefend in "Ersch und Gruber's Encyclopaedic," Horatius; and G. J. Grotefend in the Darmstadt Lit. Journal. Franke, Fasti Horatiani, note 1.

LIFE OF HORACE. Xlll

kept up that connection, or civil relationship, -which bound the emancipated slave, by natural ties of affection and gratitude, to the family of his generous master. The theory of this assumption of a Roman name was, that the master, having bestowed civil life on the freedman, stood, in a certain sense, in the place of a parent. He still retained some authority, and inherited the freedman's property in case of his dying intestate. On the other hand, the freedman was under the obligation of maintaining his patron, or even the father and mother of his patron, if they fell into indigence. 1 But there is no allusion in the poet's works to any connection of this kind. At all events, the freedman has thrown a brighter and more lasting lustre around that celebrated name than all the virtues and exploits of the older patriots who bore it. We know no reason for his having the praenomen Quintus, nor the agnomen, by which he was familiarly known, Flaccus. The latter name was by no means uncommon ; it is found in the Calpurnian, the Cornelian, the Pomponian, and the Valerian families. Horace was of ingenuous birth, which implies that he was born after his father had received his manumission. The silence of the poet about his mother leads to the supposition that she died in his early youth.

The father of Horace exercised the function of collector of payments at auction. 3 The collector was a public servant. This comparatively humble office was probably paid according to the number of sales, and the value of the property brought to market j and in those days of confiscation, and of rapid and frequent changes of property, through the inordinate ambition or luxury of some, the forfeitures or ruin of opulent landholders, and the extinction of noble families in the civil wars, the amount and value of the property brought to sale (sub hasta) was likely to enable a prudent public officer to make a decent fortune. This seems to have been the case with the elder Horace, who invested his acquisitions in a house and farm in the district of Venusia, on the banks of the River Aufidus, close upon the doubtful boundaries of Lucania and Apulia. There he settled down into a respectable small farmer. In this house the poet was born, and passed his infant years. One incident, mentioned in Ode iii., 4, 9-20, can not but remind the English reader of the old ballad of the

1. Compare Pliny, H. N., xxxi., 2, for an instance of the literary son of a distinguished man in those times paying a tribute of gratitude to his civil parent. Laurea Tullius, the poet, was a freedman of the great orator. A warm spring had broken out in the Academic Villa of Cicero, which was supposed to cure diseases in the eyes. The poetical inscription by L. Tullius (of which the feeling is better than the taste) described the spring as providentially revealed, in order that more eyes might be enabled to read the widely-disseminated works of his master. The freedman and freedwoman were admitted into the family mausoleum with those who had emancipated them. See several inscriptions, especially a very beautiful one, Gruter, p. 715 ; Ciampini, p. 173.

2. " Coactor exauctionum." — Suet, in Vit. Another reading, ezaclionum, would make him a collector of the indirect taxes, farmed by the publicani ; the Roman municipalities in Italy being exempt from all direct taxation.

XIV LIFE OF HORACE.

Children in the Wood, " and Robin Redbreast piously did cover them with leaves."

The names and situation of the towns in this romantic district (the Basilicata) still answer to the description of the poet, the high-hung chalets of Acerenza, the vast thickets of Banzi, and the picturesque peaks of Mount Voltore. There are no monuments to mark the site of Bantia ; bones, helmets, pieces of armor, and a few bad vases, have been picked up near Acerenza. 1 The poet cherished through life his fond reminiscences of these scenes, the shores of the sounding Aufidus (to whose destructive floods he alludes in one of his latest odes), and the fountain of Bandusia. 3 He delights also in reverting to the plain life and severe manners of the rustic population. Shrewd, strenuous, and frugal, this race furnished the best soldiers for the Roman legion ; their sun-burned wives shared in their toils (Epod. ii., 41-2). They cultivated their small farms with their own labor and that of their sons (Sat. ii., 2, 114). They worshipped their rustic deities, and believed in the superstitions of a religious and simple people, witchcraft and fortune-telling (Sat. i., 9, 29, 30). The hardy but contented Ofella (Sat. ii., 2, 112, seqq.) was a kind of type of the Sabine or Apulian peasant.

At about ten or twelve years old commenced the more serious and important part of the Roman education. It does not appear how Horace acquired the first rudiments of learning ; but, as he grew to Youth, the father, either discerning some promise in the boy, or from paternal fondness, determined to devote himself entirely to the education of his son. He was by no means rich, his farm was unproductive, yet he declined to send his son to Venusia, to the school of Flavius, to which resorted the children of the rural and municipal aristocracy, the consequential sons of consequential fathers, with their satchels and tablets on their arms, and making their regular payments every month. 3 He took the bold step of removing him at once to Rome, to receive the liberal education of a knight's or a senator's son ; and, lest the youth should be depressed by the feeling of inferiority, provided him with whatever was necessary to make a respectable appearance, dress and slaves to attend him, as if he had been of an ancient family. But, though the parent thus removed his son to the public schools of the metropolis, and preferred that he

2. The biographers of Horace had transferred this fountain to the neighborhood of the poet's Sabine villa. M. Capmartin de Chaupy proved, by a bull of Pope Paschal II., that it was to be sought in the neighborhood of Venusia. Some modern writers are so pertinaciously set on finding it in the Sabine district, that they have supposed Horace to have called some fountain in that valley by the name endeared to him by his youthful remembrances. But do we know enough of the life of Horace to pronounce that he may not have visited, even more than once, the scenes of his childhood, or to decide that he did not address the famous ode to the Venusian fountain? {Capmartin de Chaupy, Maison d' Horace, torn, ii., p. 363.) 3. Sat. i., 6, 71, seqq.

LIFE OF HORACE. XV

should associate with the genuine youthful nobility of the capital rather than the no less haughty, but more coarse and unpolished gentry (the retired centurions) of the provinces, he took great care that while he secured the advantages, he should be protected from the dangers of the voluptuous capital. Even if his son should rise no higher than his own humble calling as a public crier or collector, his good education would be invaluable ; yet must it not be purchased by the sacrifice of sound morals. He attended him to the different schools ; watched with severe but affectionate control over his character ; so that the boy escaped not merely the taint, but even the reproach of immorality. 1 The poet always speaks of his father with grateful reverence and with honest pride.

His first turn for satire was encouraged by his father's severe animadversions on the follies and vices of his compatriots, which he held up as warning examples to his son. 2 To one of his schoolmasters the poet has given imperishable fame. Orbilius, whose flogging propensities have grown into a proverb, had been an apparitor, and afterward served in the army ; an excellent training for a disciplinarian, if not for a teacher ; but Orbilius got more reputation than profit from his occupation. 3 The two principal, if not the only authors read in the school of Orbilius, were Homer in Greek, and Livius Andronicus in Latin. 4 Homer was, down to the time of Julian, an indispensable part of Greek, and already of Roman education. 5 Orbilius was, no doubt, of the old school ; a teacher to the heart of rigid Cato ; an admirer of the genuine Roman poetry. Livius Andronicus was not only the earliest writer of tragedy, but had translated the Odyssey into the Saturnian verse, the native vernacular metre of Italy. 6 Orbilius may not merely have thought the Euemerism of Ennius, or the Epicurianism of Lucretius, unfit for the study of Roman youth, but have considered Accius, Pacuvius, or Terence too foreign and Grecian, and as having degenerated 'from the primitive simplicity of the father of Roman verse. The more modern and Grecian taste of Horace is constantly contending with

3. " Docuit majore fama quam emolumento." — Sueton., de Grammat.

4. Bentley doubted whether any patrician schoolmaster, at that time, would use the works of a poet so antiquated as Livius Andronicus. He proposed to read Lsevius, the name of an obscure writer of love- verses ('EpwroTraiyvia), to whom he ascribes many of the fragments usually assigned to Livius, and which bear no marks of obsolete antiquity. But, with due respect to the great critic, the elder Horace might have objected still more strongly to the modern amatory verses of Lsevius than to the rude strains of Livius.

5. Epist. ii., 2, 41-2. Compare Quint., i., 8 ; Plin., Epist. ii., 15 ; Statins, Sylv., v., 3. D. Heinsius quotes from Theodoret, tovtwv St o'i i:\eloToi ovde tt)v h?)viv taaai tt)v 'A%tAAfw? . Even as late as that father of the Church it was a mark of ignorance not to have read Homer.

6. Cicero thought but meanly of Livius : " Nam et Odyssea Latina, est sic tanquam opus aliquod Daedali, et Liviana? fabulaa non satis dignae quas iterum legantur."— Brutus, c. 18.

XVI LIFE OF HORACE.

this antiquarian school of poetry, and his unpleasing remembrance of the manner in which the study of Livius was enforced by his early teacher may have tended to confirm his fastidious aversion from the ruder poetry.

Horace, it may be concluded, assumed the manly robe (toga virilis) in his sixteenth or seventeenth year. It is probable that he lost his excellent and honored father before he set out to complete his education at Athens. But of what stirring events must the boy have been witness during his residence at Rome ! He might possibly, soon after his arrival (B.C. 52), have heard Cicero speak his oration for Milo. Into the subsequent years were crowded all the preparations for the last contest between Pompey and Caesar. The peaceful studies of the Roman youth must have been strangely interrupted by these political excitements. What spirited boy would not have thrown aside his books to behold the triumphant entrance of Caesar into Rome after the passage of the Rubicon ? And while that decisive step was but threatened, how anxiously and fearfully must Rome have awaited her doom — ignorant who was to be her master, and how that master would use his power ■ whether new proscriptions would more than decimate her patrician families, and deluge her streets with blood ; whether military license would have free scope, and the majesty of the Roman people be insulted by the outrages of an infuriated soldiery ! No man was so obscure, so young. or so thoughtless, but that he must have been deeply impressed with the insecurity of liberty and of life. During the whole conflict, what must have been the suspense, the agitation, the party violence, the terror, the alternate elevation and prostration of mind ! In the unruffled quiet of his manhood and age, how often must these turbulent and awful days have contrasted themselves, in the memory of Horace, with his tranquil pursuits of letters, social enjoyment, and country retirement.

It was about the time of (probably the year after) the battle of Pharsalia (for the state of Greece, just at the period of the final conflict, must have been insecure, if not dangerous) that the youthful Horace left his school at Rome to study in Athens. If his father was dead, the produce of the Venusian estate would no doubt suffice for his maintenance ; if still living, the generous love of the parent would not hesitate at this further expense, if within his power. During many centuries of the Roman greatness, down to the time when her schools were closed by Justinian, Athens was the university, as it has been called, of the world, where almost all the distinguished youth, both of the East and West, passed a certain period of study in the liberal arts, letters, and philosophy. This continued even after the establishment of Christianity. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus studied together, and formed their youthful friendships ; as Horace did, no doubt, with some of the noble or distinguished youth of the day. On this point, however, his poems are silent, and contain no allusions to his associates and rivals in study. The

LIFE OF HORACE. XVll

younger Quintus Cicero was at this time likewise a student at Athens, but there is no clew to connect these two names. 1

The advantages which Horace derived from his residence in Athens may be traced in his familiarity with Attic literature, or, rather, with the whole range of Greek poetry, Homeric, lyric, and dramatic. In the region of his birth Greek was spoken almost as commonly as Latin f and Horace had already, at Rome, been instructed in the poetry of Homer. In Athens, he studied, particularly, the comic writers ; the great models of that kind of poetry which consists in shrewd and acute observation on actual human life, on society, manners, and morals, expressed in terse, perspicuous, and animated verse, which he was destined, in another form, to carry to such unrivalled perfection in his own language. But he incurred a great danger, that of sinking into a third or fourth rate Greek poet, if, in a foreign language, he could have attained even to that humble eminence. He represents the genius of his country under the form of Romulus, remonstrating against this misdirection of his talents. Romulus, or, rather, the strong sense of Horace himself, gave good reason for this advice. 3 The mine of Grecian poetry was exhausted ; every place of honor was occupied ; a new poet, particularly a stranger, could only be lost in the inglorious crowds. But this is not all. It is a law of human genius, without exception, that no man can be a great poet except in his native speech. Inspiration seems impatient of the slower process of translating our thoughts into a second language. The expression must be as free and spontaneous as the conception ; and, however we may polish and refine our native style, and substitute a more tardy and elaborate for an instantaneous and inartificial mode of composition, there is a facility, a mastery, a complete harmony between " the thoughts that breathe and the words that burn," which can never be attained except in our mother tongue.

The death of Caesar, and the arrival of Brutus at Athens, broke up the peaceful studies of Horace. It had been surprising if the whole Roman youth, at this ardent and generous period of life, breathing the air of Pericles, Aristides, and Demosthenes, imbibing the sentiments of republican liberty from all which was the object of their study, had not thrown themselves at once into the ranks of Brutus, and rallied round the rescued but still imperilled freedom of Rome. Horace was at once advanced to the rank of military tribune, and the command of a legion. Excepting at such critical periods, when the ordinary course of military promotion was superseded by the exigencies of the times, when it was no doubt difficult for Brutus to find Roman officers for his newly-raised troops, the son of a freedman, of no very robust frame, and altogether inexperienced in war, would not have acquired that rank. His appointment, as he acknowledges, on account of his ignoble birth excited jealousy. 4

1. Weichert de L. Vario, &c, p. 328. 2. Sat. i, 10, 30.

XV111 LIFE OF HORACE.

Yet he acquired the confidence of his commanders, and, unless he has highly colored his hard service, was engaged in some difficulties and perils. 1 It is probable that while in the army of Brutus he crossed over into Asia. Though it is not quite clear that he was present at Clazomenae when the quarrel took place between Persius and Rupilius Rex, which forms the subject of Sat. i., 7, and his local knowledge of Lebedos, which has been appealed to, is not absolutely certain f yet some of his descriptive epithets appear too distinct and faithful for mere borrowed and conventional poetic language. He must have visited parts of Greece at some period of his life, as he speaks of not having been so much struck by the rich plain of Larissa, or the more rugged district of Lacedaemon, as by the headlong Anio and the grove of Tibur. 3

The battle of Philippi closed the military career of Horace. His conduct after the battle, his flight, and throwing away his shield, have been the subject of much grave animadversion and as grave defence. Lessing wrote an ingenious essay to vindicate the morals and the courage of Horace. 4 Wieland goes still further in his assertion of the poet's valor : " Horace could not have called up the remembrance of the hero (Brutus), by whom he was beloved, without reproaching himself for having yielded to the instinct of personal safety instead of dying with him ; and, according to my feeling, non bene is a sign of regret which he offers to the memory of that great man, and an expression of that shame of which a noble spirit alone is capable." 5 The foolish and fatal precipitancy with which Brutus and Cassius, upon the first news of defeat, instead of attempting to rally their broken troops, and to maintain the conflict for liberty, took refuge in suicide, might appear, to the shrewd good sense of Horace, very different from the death of Cato, of which he has expressed his admiration. And Wieland had forgotten that Horace fairly confesses his fears, and attributes his escape to Mercury, the god of letters. 6 Lessing is no doubt right that the playful allusion of the poet to his throwing away his shield has been taken much more in earnest than was intended ; and the passage, after all, is an imitation, if not a translation, from Alcasus. In its most literal sense, it amounts to no more than that Horace fled with the rest of the defeated army, not that he showed any want of valor during the battle. He abandoned the cause of Brutus when it was not merely desperate, but extinct. Messala had refused to take the command of the broken troops, and had passed over to the other side ; a few only, among whom was the friend of Horace, Pompeius Varus, threw themselves into the fleet of Sextus Pompeius, a pirate rather than a political