The works of Horace rendered into English prose, with introductions, running analysis, notes and an index

Preface

Ohis version of Horace is a literal rendering of the original, the translators having kept in view the same objects as they had ^efore them in their edition of Virgil in this series.

The °Me of the Satires and Epistles, "the prosaic Muse/' as Horace himself calls it, appears to be not unsuited for actual prose ; but with regard to the Odes, the case is certainly different. Yet, though few prose translations of the Odes have been written in this country, in France there have been many. Perhaps the most notable are the versions by M. Jules Janin and M. Leon Halevy. These are flowing and elegant, but have rather a tendency to paraphrase. It seems that one advantage is gained by adopting the form of rhythmical prose in translating the Odes : greater freedom is thus afforded for the attempt to make some approach towards the expression in another language of the

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PREFACE.

exquisite felicity and delicate lightness of phrase, so difficult to handle without spoiling, which characterise the Odes of Horace above all other poems.

The space given to the Notes has necessarily been somewhat limited : but it is hoped that difficulties of construction have not been passed over, and that the illustrations and references explain sufficiently the very numerous and various allusions which are found in the writings of Horace.

Contents

PAGE

Preface . . . .. • v

General Introduction i

Life by Suetonius 18

Introduction to the Odes . . . . . . .21

Introduction to the Secular Hymn 85

Secular Hymn 87

Introduction to the Epodes . . . . . .89

The Epodes 92

Introduction to the Satires . . . . . .102

Introduction to the Epistles 159

Introduction to the Art of Poetry . . . . .201

Totes. • 219

index . 266

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

THOSE to whom the writings of Horace have given delight (and a great company they are, readers of various ages, countries, tastes, dispositions,) owe a debt of gratitude first of all to Horace's good father, then to the poets Virgil and Varius, and then to his friend and patron Maecenas ; for without all of them the life of Horace had been quite different, and literature had been without one of its most charming authors. No doubt even the childhood of Horace had influence upon his future life. He was born near the source of one of the southern tributaries of the impetuous Aufidus, now called Ofanto, the river of Apulia, often mentioned by him, and so dear to his early recollections, that he exalts it to be a representative stream, as had been used the harmonious names of Maeander and Eurotas, and the other rivers of the poetry of Greece. Venusia, now Venosa, his birth-place, is situate in a beautiful country on the side of the Apennines towards the Adriatic. In this romantic region he wandered as a child near the pointed peaks of the mountain Vultur, or under Acherontia, built like a nest on a steep hill, or amid the woods and glens of Bantia, or by the lowly village of Forentum. The Apennines with their sombre forests of pine, and summits rising over each other, described so well in the Mysteries of Udolpho, had charms for Goethe, though a foreigner ; and a poetic child born amongst them would find them a meet nurse. In the poetry of the ancients there are none of those elaborate and idealized descriptions of scenery found so often in modern writers ; yet Horace, like Virgil, often gives a picture of places by epithets carefully chosen. When his fame as a poet was established, he would look back with a natural gratitude to the scenery of his childhood, and fancy that the gods protected the spirited boy from bears and serpents in his roamings among the hills, and that doves, the birds of Venus, like the robin redbreasts of later stories, threw on the sleeping child leaves of sacred myrtle and holy bay. Venusia had been an important Roman colony for upwards of 300 years, ever since the days of the Samnite wars. Hither fled some of the Roman troops after the defeat at Cannae. Nature never intended Horace for a soldier: but he, who

HOR. I

HORACE.

was born in a military town, became for a short time a tribune or colonel in the Roman army, and often expresses an admiration for Roman courage in war.

Horace nowhere makes mention of his mother, and we do not know whether she was a freed-woman, or free-born ; he only says in one place that he was the child of lowly parents. It is likely enough that she died when he was young; else Horace, whose character is marked by affectionate gratitude, would probably have mentioned her. There is hardly anything more beautiful in the writings of antiquity than the way in which he speaks of that good father, whom he says he would not change for any parent who had held high office in the state. His father spared no expense and pains in his education. By him was the boy guarded from every taint of evil. None of the other Roman poets (except Terence, who was a slave, but born at Carthage, and of what rank there we do not know,) sprang from so humble an origin. His father had been a slave. The man who enfranchised the father little thought what would be the consequence of that enfranchisement. No wonder, as Horace himself tells us, and as Suetonius in his Life of Horace observes, that his father's low estate and calling were made a reproach to the prosperous friend of Augustus and Maecenas. How bravely Horace answered this taunt, every reader of the poet knows. Indeed, he owed all to his father. If he had not given his son such a liberal education, Horace would probably have passed his days in the obscure town of Venusia, engaged there in some petty trade, and been an entertaining companion at the suppers of the centurions and their families. A more striking example cannot be given of what may depend on some humble instrument, who at a certain time behaves with spirit and generosity. Horace mus.t have profited much by the lessons which he had in Livius Andronicus, and the other early poets of Rome, though he did not, when a man, highly esteem those authors who had cost him many a flogging, even as he has caused many a flogging to schoolboys since. His teacher Orbilius was like many a teacher, sour-tempered, free-spoken, given to whipping, one who earned more fame than money, and had reason to complain of the interference of parents. But if Horace, when delivered from the rod of Orbilius the grammarian, had received no more education, he had never been the Lyric poet of Rome. To a school was to be added a University, and kindly Athens, the only city in the world that could do it, was to finish what Rome had begun,

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

and Greek literature was to crown Latin, that he, like his friend Maecenas, might be learned in both tongues. How Horace's father obtained the means to send his son to Athens we may well wonder, when we consider the expense of an education at that fashionable University. Horace, at the time he left Italy for Greece, must have taken leave of the good father, whom he was never to see again.

At Athens Horace became familiar with Greek literature, he was a seeker after truth in the groves of Academus, he tried his hand at Greek verses, Greek Iambics perhaps, or Greek Elegiacs, or Greek Lyrics, till, as he playfully imagines, one night when he was sleeping, behold, the divine founder of Rome, who recognised in him a true son of Italy, no mere imitator or translator of Greek poetry, appeared in a dream that issued after midnight from the gate of horn, and forbade his attempting such a superfluous work. Thus, as the scenery of the Apennines, the liberality of his father, his early residence at Rome, the teaching of severe Orbilius, all tended to make Horace what he was destined to be, so did Athens contribute its share towards this end, both directly and indirectly; directly by teaching him Greek literature and philosophy, indirectly by the circumstances into which he was thrown owing to the public events which were then taking place. There is hardly any one in whose case it is more plainly to be seen how all kinds of different things concur in training a man to be what he is meant to be. Walckenaer and Rigault both remark, that while Horace was a student at Athens the news came of the assassination of Julius Caesar, that at that time Cicero sent his treatise on the Offices to his son, who then was also a student at Athens, in which treatise Cicero expresses his admiration of the act of the conspirators ; that the students were many of them the sons of senators, that the statues of Brutus and Cassius were crowned with flowers together with those of Harmodius and Aristogiton. Horace would be carried away by this enthusiasm. Youth is the age for republican impulses. When Brutus, Cato's son-in-law, came there, he would appear to the young Horace the true representative of republican principles. Even supposing that Horace was at that time an Epicurean, of which however we cannot be certain, his zeal for republicanism would prevent his taking offence at the Stoic opinions of Brutus. How Horace, so young and of such lowly origin, became a military tribune in the army of Brutus is as difficult to understand as many points in history must always be. That in the service of Brutus, in the midst of his militar y life, he had those

1—2

HORACE.

natural spirits and love of fun which were characteristic of his joyous nature, is plain from the seventh Satire of the first book, which is interesting, as being in all probability the earliest remaining production of the poet. The military career of Horace and his republican enthusiasm were soon terminated by the decisive defeat of Philippi, after which, as Tacitus says, the republic, as republic, fought no battles. To Horace the day was not fatal, as to many others : like the lyric poet of Lesbos, the future lyric poet of Italy threw away his shield, which was not well, as he himself confesses. But this short portion of the life of Horace, forming such a contrast to his earlier and latter days, contributed its part towards making him the writer he became. Three times has he mentioned Cato, the father-in-law of Brutus, speaking in one place of his unconquered spirit, in another of his virtue, in a third of his glorious death. The exploits of republican Rome are dear to the poet. The worthies of the ancient commonwealth, Regulus, ^Emilius Paullus, Camillus and Fabricius, are not unsung by him. He has a feeling for the ancient simplicity, and a belief in the morality, of the days of old. No one sets forth more strongly than he does the madness and impiety of civil war. Had he not seen the evil with his own eyes, himself a part of it? A courtier he became afterwards, but still a patriotic poet.

After the battle of Philippi he returned to Italy, with farm lost, humbled in hopes, like a bird whose wings are clipped. These were his dark days. He says that bold poverty drove him to write verses. To poverty we owe Rasselas and the Vicar of Wakefield. The same necessity gave the impulse to the genius of Smollett as a novelist. But of what verses does Horace speak? Indeed it is probable that he is half jesting. This is the opinion of August Arnold in his Life of Horace. Certainly the Epistle in which Horace speaks of these verses drawn forth by poverty is an Epistle full of jests and pleasant irony. It will not do to interpret Horace literally always. The same August Arnold thinks that it was then he enrolled himself in the company or guild of clerks : and Suetonius says that he obtained the place of secretary to a quasstor. With what means, whether the remains of his fortune, or borrowed money, or by some interest, is unknown. Arnold says that it is to his credit that he did not then take up the life of a parasite. A man of his natural wit might have got a livelihood more or less agreeable in this way, and been not unlike the parasites Vibidius and Balatro, whom he himself so graphically describes in the last of the Satires. From the days of his poverty and obscurity he no doubt learnt something, as all wise men do. The remembrance of them would make him more grateful to the friend, who raised him from difficulties to competence and ease. Some of the sterner and more manly passages of his poetry, and those which recommend a spirit undisturbed by all the changes of fortune, owe something to his having known the hardships of adversity.

However, the iron never entered deeply into his joyous soul. If it had, it might have crushed the poetic spirit and light heart within him. The evil days were few. Whether he knew Virgil in earlier days, or had met him at Athens, or whether Virgil, his elder by five years, had seen some of his youthful poems, he found in him and Varius friends in the hour of need. This was the turning-point of his life. Horace tells us shortly how he appeared before the great man on that eventful day so full of fate to Horace, to Maecenas himself, to literature. He was diffident and shy, and his speech was broken and stammering. He told the simple truth of himself, his father, his means. Few were the words of the patron in reply. Maecenas did not give his friendship lightly : but, nine months after, Horace became his friend. What Walter Scott imagines in Kenilworth when describing the meeting of Shakespeare and Leicester, may be applied here : the son of a freedman was honoured with an interview with the Emperor's great minister, so that age would have told the tale; in ours we should say, the immortal had done homage to the mortal. However, Horace owed not only the happiness of his life, but his fame as a poet and writer, to this interview with Maecenas. Some poets, like Dante and Milton, may have been made greater by adversity, when the indignant Muse has drawn spirit and fire from misfortune, but such was not the case of Horace. Indignation could never make verses of the kind he wrote. The one or two Epodes which he probably wrote in the days of his adversity are not to be compared with the happy outpourings of his soul in the days of his prosperity. Juvenal was right, when he says that Horace was comfortable on the day that he burst out in the praises of the God Bacchus. A joyous, not a bitter spirit, was needed for the writer of the Satires and Epistles of Horace. His Sabine farm and his quiet valley inspired those of the Odes which breathe contentment and joy. The times of his adversity lasted about three years; the bright sun of prosperity shone upon him for full thirty years, and few and light were the

HORACE.

clouds that passed over it, till the hour of his last illness, when death came swiftly upon him. Few men ever had a more pleasant life than the poet ; he had a good father, a liberal education, genius, a Muse ready to his call, popularity, independence, contentment, honour, troops of friends. Against this are to be set troubles and difficulties soon over, a certain amount of rivalry and jealousy, and health that was not robust. Though he had not all the conditions of a happy life, which Martial enumerates, yet he had a goodly share of them.

Horace tells us that he wrote for his friends, not for the public. But we are all his friends now. The works of Varius are lost, and there was no opportunity for Virgil in his poems to mention his brother poet. Horace's name does not appear in the verses of Propertius or Tibullus, though to Tibullus Horace has written an Ode and an Epistle. Ovid is the only one of the contemporary poets who mentions him, saying that tuneful Horace charmed his ears by his finished odes sung to the Italian lyre. It is odd that Martial, enumerating the birth-places of famous Latin poets, has omitted Horace, for the Flaccus there spoken of is Valerius Flaccus, a very inferior Flaccus. However, in other places Martial joins Horace's name with Virgil; and it is plain from Persius, who lived only about sixty years after Horace, and from Juvenal and Quintilian, that Horace had soon become a standard author. In the middle ages his fame fell far short of that of Virgil, probably it did not equal even that of Lucan; but since the revival of classical literature Horace has been without comparison the most popular of Latin authors ; indeed there is no Greek so popular, hardly any modern one. Dr Douglas, an eminent physician in the days of George II., collected even then no fewer than 400 editions of Horace. Mr Yonge, in his edition of Horace, says that the list of these editions given 50 years ago by Mitscherlich extends over a hundred pages. Great has been the learning and ingenuity devoted to the elucidation of the text and meaning of Horace. Bentley's famous edition is in its way the most remarkable of all editions of Horace. None of the productions of Bentley display greater merits and greater faults than his edition of Horace, never were his ability and his arrogance more clearly seen ; but scholars have said that almost as much is to be learnt from the mistakes of Bentley as from the careful judgment of other editors. The edition appeared on the 8th of December, the birthday of Horace, 1777 years after that event. Mr Yonge says that he

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

has lived at Eton in a Horatian atmosphere, and Eton men seem to regard Horace as an Etonian, an opinion in which other schools can hardly be expected to agree. Many who have little liking for the classics, and have an unpleasant recollection of their early drudgery in them, make an exception in favour of Horace, the one author in Greek and Latin whom they still read. And many scholars, who have not a few favourites among the ancient writers, give their dearest affection to Horace. With some men, as with the Abbe de Chaupy, and with the witty Galiani, this love has risen to a passion of enthusiasm. The latter went so far as to write a treatise on the principles of the Laws of Nature and Nations, deduced from the poems of Horace. The Abbe de Chaupy, says Rigault, used to thank those who spoke well of Horace. Old women that he disliked were to him so many Canidias ; a young lady that pleased him was a Lalage. Malherbe said that he made Horace his breviary. If Horace's wit endears him to Frenchmen, his strong common sense no less recommends him to Englishmen. And German editions of the poet are almost innumerable. Horace is especially the poet of the man of the world, of the gentleman: but on so many points do his writings touch, that they have an interest for those whose life is more laborious and eventful. Condorcet had a Horace with him in the dungeon at Paris where he died ; De Witt, the Pensionary of Holland, a man of capacity and integrity, is said, when the mob were about to murder him and his brother, to have repeated the verses of the Ode of Horace, which in Stoic style describe the righteous and resolute man as unshaken from his purpose by the fury of citizens who bid him do what is wrong. Lessing counted Horace as one of those spirits to whose name he, like the Abbe de Chaupy, was unwilling that any taint of dishonour should attach. Hooker, as Yonge tells us from Walton's Life, in the preface to his edition of Horace, was found in the fields tending his few sheep with a Horace in his hand. Many can remember with what enthusiasm Dr Butler at Shrewsbury and Dr Keate at Eton used to teach Horace. Yonge in his notes gives us many passages in modern writers suggested by Horace. It is true that Niebuhr, lecturing in the year 1827, speaks as if the admiration of Horace was a feeling that then wavered ; and Niebuhr himself does scanty justice to his poetry, and still less to his character. A writer who is so singular in his views as to account Catullus the greatest poet of Rome, would not estimate Horace fairly; the wild and impulsive Catullus, with the

HORACE.

loud wailings of his passion, moves him more than the mild and quiet Horace. But, in comparison with Horace, Catullus is little read and enjoyed. Allusions to Horace are expected to be at once recognized. In the short compass of the first Epistle of the first book there are many passages that have become almost proverbial. Adaptations of his lines, some dignified, some jocular, have been made continually. Thus, as Lord Lytton says in his Introduction to the Odes, Mr Pitt never moved the House of Commons more than when to England contending with Napoleon he applied the passage of Horace which compares Rome in her struggle with Hannibal to the oak, "which lopped by axes rude receives new life, yea from the very steel." When Dr Goodall, Provost of Eton, was asked what he thought of omnibuses, which had then just been introduced into London, he replied " Horace has settled this by saying ' Omnibus hoc vitium est.'" And again, being asked to take some trifle at dinner, he said "No thank you, 'hae nugse seria ducunt in mala.' "

What then are the causes of this marvellous popularity? The question has often been discussed, only too fully. Indeed there was no reason to say very much on the point, for the qualities of a writer who pleases so many must lie on the surface. It is said that his distinguishing characteristic is good common sense ; and indeed, whether he is serious or jesting, he never forgets common sense. But this alone makes no poet popular. Boileau is considered the very impersonification of common sense. Yet Boileau is not popular as Horace is. So to common sense must be added his wit, a wit fine, good-natured, pleasant, not overstrained, sensible. Never was anything more untrue than what Niebuhr says of him : "He looks upon everything as a folly, and tries to sneer at everything, treating what is most venerable with irreverence ; this becomes at last a bad habit in him." On the contrary, Horace gives honour where honour is due, he does not sneer at patriotism, temperance, modesty, courage, simplicity, kindness, contentment ; he reverences virtue, the laws of his country, the temples of the gods, the memory of the great men of Rome ; so far from sneering becoming a bad habit with him, in his later writings he shows more and more a serious and chastened temper. In him, as in Sydney Smith, is the union of wit and wisdom. He teaches the truth while he laughs. His irony does not weary his hearers as that of Socrates is said to have done, of whom it has been amusingly, though of course unjustly

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

said "that he was put to death because he was such a bore." Horace plainly knew his own faults, and practised real self-examination, and does not blame himself, as we often do, for faults which we have not, while we ignore those which we have. To his wisdom and wit we must add, as another cause of his popularity, the form of his poetry. The ancients, inferior to the moderns in ideas, are superior in form. In this is a justification of their being used as a means of education. This is true of Horace in an eminent degree. In his Epodes and even in his Satires there is less neatness and terseness of expression than in the Odes and Epistles, in which writings all is put together as in mosaic. The very objection urged with truth against Horace, that he is common-place, lets us see one of the causes of his popularity. He says common things a little better than others say them, and, though often only a little above mediocrity, is still just above it. As we rightly honour a man, who "though he has done no remarkable single act, yet is remarkable for the steady and unbroken performance of many daily duties," so we are fond of the poet, who, though he has not been caught up into paradise, nor been in hell, though he does not fill us with the terrors of the imagination, or aeiight us with the magic forms of wonder, yet speaks happily and pleasantly of the ordinary sorrows and homely joys of life, whom we feel to be a genial companion, a trifler in small things, but no trifler in what is really good and grave. Wit, wisdom, terseness, grace, are the main causes of his popularity. Most of us like him best in his lighter vein, as Blair remarked long ago. He was free from Lucretius' awkwardness of form, Catullus' extravagance, Propertius' affectation, Virgil's solemnity, Ovid's conceits, Tibullus' excess of sadness, Lucan's pedantry, Persius' obscurity, Juvenal's bad taste. He has no fellow in literature. There was something in him that no Greek author, no modern has ; Providence made but one Horace ; we love him, and the reason why we cannot fully tell.

The man Horace is more interesting than his writings, or, to speak more correctly, the main interest of his writings is in himself. We might call his works " Horace's Autobiography." To use his own expression about Lucilius, his whole life stands out before us as in a picture. Of none of the ancients do we know so much, not of Socrates, or Cicero, or St Paul. Almost what Boswell is to Johnson, Horace is to himself. We can see him, as he really was, both in body and soul. Everything about him is familiar to us. His faults are known to us, his very foibles and awkwardnesses.

HORACE.

Yet in his account of himself there is nothing morbid. Like Walter Scott, he had a thoroughly healthy mind. In one epistle he speaks of himself as if he were not so-minded. But this was plainly only a passing malady of soul. He seems almost as a personal friend to each of us. What would we not give to spend one evening with him, to take a walk over his Sabine farm with him, to sit by his fountain, to hear him tell a tale, or discuss a point ? We feel bound to defend him, as we would defend an absent friend.

Now the gravest charge brought against him is that of having been a servile flatterer in the court of a cruel and cold-hearted tyrant, of having been a coward who ran away in battle, a traitor to liberty, one who for a farm sold his independence, one who, knowing the sorrows and seeing the wounds of his country, "did not choose to let his heart bleed," but drowned his cares in cups of wine. If this charge against him be just, we are bound to answer it. Yet we must be on our guard against exaggeration on the other side. Our poet was no prophet or martyr, he was no Cato or Socrates, he was not made of the stuff of which those are made who die for an idea, whether it be a real idea or a phantasy. As we think of his life of 57 years, during full 30 of which he was an author, it is striking to consider the events that happened in that time. W T hen he was born, Pompey was warring in the east. The name of the republic was still great. When he was three years old, the conspiracy of Catiline was put down. When he wandered as a child in the deep valleys of the Apennines, Julius Caesar was subduing Gaul. W T hen he died, the generation was fast passing away that remembered the days of republican liberty, and the Roman world was under the well-established power of Augustus. Goethe, quoted by Niebuhr, said that there never was a more senseless act than the assassination of Julius Caesar. Rebellions against Augustus were quite as senseless. Horace was young when he served in the last army of the republic, but his strong common sense must have opened his eyes to the character of those who served with him, and he must have known quite well that at any rate after the battle of Philippi the republic was an idle dream. A person of his character adapted himself to circumstances. We perhaps judge severely of the principal persons of those times, because we know what sad years of despotism followed, and can see clearly how rapidly the new system was undermining all manly virtues. But one alive then, unable to see all that was to follow, but who had wit-

GENERAL INTRODUCTION. n

nessed the evils and miseries of civil dissension, might fairly have regarded Augustus as the saviour of the state. Tacitus gives an epitome of the two opposite views of the character of Augustus. The unfavourable view represents him as ambitious, hypocritical, cruel, false even to his friends, the destroyer of religion by accepting equal honours with the gods, and as deliberately choosing Tiberius for his successor, that his own fame might gain by the contrast. It is likely that the historian inclines to this view, for he states it last and most fully. But Tacitus was a different man from Horace, and lived after, not during the reign of Augustus. And the opposite view, stated moderately by. Tacitus, represents Augustus' earlier conduct as almost necessary ; there was no resource for Rome but in the government of one who established peace, enlarged the boundaries of the empire, administered justice, restrained licence, and adorned the capital with magnificent structures of marble. Horace,.in his praises of Augustus, speaks of him, as Virgil does, not as the subverter of the republic, but as the legitimate successor of the long line of the great men of Rome. That Horace's eulogies of Augustus are greatly exaggerated cannot be denied. But it was hard for a man like Horace to be proof against the repeated kindnesses of the Emperor, kindnesses substantial and most pleasantly conferred. Augustus' personal character and manners were simple, like those of Horace himself. Perhaps we are apt to be misled by the word Emperor. Augustus had no splendid court. His repasts were plain and homely. He was fond of fishing, and of playing with little children. He was a man that loved his joke. He was very liberal in his gifts. Suetonius expressly says that he was greatly beloved by many. On the whole he was a steady friend to those that he liked. He could forgive those who insulted him. Livy the historian praised Pompey, and Augustus' only revenge was to call him the Pompeian historian. According to Suetonius, the Emperor made advances to the son of the freedman, which he on his part was not eager to accept. When he declined them, the Emperor was not offended. The epistles of Augustus were extant in the time of Suetonius, but nothing of them is left now, except a few extracts preserved by Suetonius. The tone of them is kind and playful. As Augustus grew older, he certainly did not become a worse man, and the Emperor was very different from the triumvir. No Roman ever had received so many outward honours as Augustus. Thrice he closed the portals of Janus. The standards of Rome, taken by the Parthians from Crassus and Antony, were-