evidence for any Numida or Bassus connected with the poet, and there is not a touch in the poem which suggests reality—the very region of Numida's travels is ultima Hesperia', that is, anywhere or nowhere-it would seem a safe supposition that the whole picture is fictitious, Numida, Bassus, Damalis and Lamia all puppets dubbed with names for convenience. As for the name Lamia, we know that it lay near to the poet's hand. It may be asked perhaps what it matters whether these persons were real or not, the meaning and colour of the poem remaining the same. The point is, however, not absolutely without interest, as may be shown more conveniently hereafter'. The fourth and only other use of the name occurs in what is apparently the most careless and trivial piece in the collection3. As it is but three stanzas, I subjoin it entire : Musis amicus tristitiam et metus rex gelidae metuatur orae, quid Tiridaten terreat, unice securus. O quae fontibus integris gaudes, apricos necte flores, necte meo Lamiae coronam, Pimplea dulcis! nil sine te mei prosunt honores: hunc fidibus novis, hunc Lesbio sacrare plectro teque tuasque decet sorores. From the accident that the political events alluded to were uncertain in date, the poem has been the subject of a discussion which does not here concern us3. Written earlier or written later, it is not without its small difficulty as to "the point of connection between the first and last parts" of it, the question why Lamia should be so emphatically pronounced a proper theme for the Muse and her friend in their singular indifference to political anxieties. Without professing a positive answer, I think that here again the consul and praefectus with his possible relations have been of little service. It is not enough to say that he or some Aelius Lamia known to Horace 1 See the essay, Venus and Myrtale. I. 26. 2 3 See Orelli's notes, Wickham, Introd. to Od. I-III. §8, and sup. Essay III. may have been a somewhat melancholy youth who would benefit by the contagious example of gaiety. This fact is neither likely to have been generally notorious nor given by the poem, which indeed determines scarcely anything, except perhaps that Horace in his true and proper person is the speaker. Believing the key to the poem to be at present lost and very likely not recoverable, I would only note that there may be a certain significance in the phrases fidibus novis...Lesbio plectro. If these words are not idle, and neither the style of Horace nor the brevity of these verses would make us suppose so, it is the example of Alcaeus and the Greek 'EрwτIKоì which suggests the recommendation of Lamia to the Muse. Long ago the internal evidence of the metre led a great critic to the conclusion, that this piece was probably among the earlier attempts of the poet in imitation of the Alcaic stanza1; and it may be conjectured that our difficulties might disappear, if we knew, as the Roman reader probably knew, the precise original which Horace has in view. Was it one of those poems, which Horace elsewhere describes as typical of the Lesbian soldier and singer, poems in which Alcaeus charmed away the distresses of his adventurous life with singing the praises of the beautiful young page, who seems to have played Patroclus to this lyric Achilles ?— qui ferox bello tamen inter arma, sive iactatam religarat udo litore navim, Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illi semper haerentem puerum canebat Certainly such a poem would not admit of serious translation from the conditions of Alcaeus to those of Horace. It would scarcely have suited the humour of the retired clerk of the treasury at his quiet farm to pose in the old-fashioned armour of such a fighting troubadour as the exile of Lesbos. But the very contrast of characters might give piquancy to an 1 See Lachmann's argument, cited by Orelli and Wickham. The word novis itself assists the inference. imitation which was something of a parody; and if the Lamia for whom Horace twines the lyric wreath must be a real person, I see no reason why he may not be the only real Lamia-as I have tried to show-to whom Horace introduces us, his slave and (the Epistle justifies the word) his friend, the Lamia in his own household. Doubtless this not very gay personage is an odd representative of 'beauteous Lycus, black of hair and eye', but Horace, when he wrote the Odes, was at least as odd a representative of Alcaeus1; the Sancho and the Quixote seem not ill matched, and the parallel very much in the spirit of the jesting touch, borrowed from the life of the Greek master, with which the Roman Alcaeus adorns the recollection of his own military career— tecum Philippos et celerem fugam Moreover, thanks to the fidelity with which Demetrius Poliorcetes continued to fling the spoil of cities into the lap of his 'Vampire' long after her wrinkles were visible to every eye but his, the name of Lamia was of as high fame in the literature of 'erotica' as Lais or Phryne itself, and the coincidence with that of the slave adds a fresh touch of humorous incongruity. There is thus a point in the insistent emphasis of hunc fidibus novis, hunc Lesbio plectro, and a meaning in the assurance that to celebrate Lamia is a 'becoming' task. 'If you take me for your Alcaeus', the poet would say to the erotic Muse, 'my attendant-whose name at least is known to you-must do for your Lycus, and then together we will forget politics as the old Greek forgot war.' This he may have meant; whether he actually did, it would be rash to pronounce till a roll of Alcaeus shall be found in some library of the Levant. 1 On the part which Horace assigns himself in the Three Books, see the essay Venus and Myrtale. QVAM TIBERIS LAVIT. THOSE-they are probably now a majority even among reading people who have not read the once familiar piece of verse in which Addison celebrated the victory of Blenheim, will nevertheless perhaps remember the criticism of it in Macaulay's essay, and, in particular, his acute remark upon the passage in which the guiding genius of Marlborough is compared to the angel who 'directs the storm'. Macaulay points out that the great impression produced by this simile upon the generation to whom it was first addressed may be attributed not more to its really skilful rhetoric than to an allusion introduced very unskilfully in a prosaic parenthesis. The storm which the angel directs is Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia passed. To us, unless we have read ourselves, as Macaulay had, into the mental attitude of 1704, this means nothing; in 1704 it meant everything. It called up instantly the most awful picture of violence that the reader knew or could conceive, and for the time served the purpose of Addison better than if he could have commanded the sound and fury of Milton's Hell. It is an illustration, adds the critic truly but with only partial truth, of the advantage which, in rhetoric and poetry, the particular has over the general. An advantage very dearly bought, when "the particular" is handled after the manner of Addison. It is true that no small excision here or addition there would make The Campaign fit to live through ages in the living interest of men. The best work in it, the storm itself, is not of that quality; but, such as it is, it is half-killed for us by the very parenthesis which was once so vital. Even the verse of Paradise Lost would be numbed by thrusting into it (Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia passed). Clearly, for a writer who looks to posterity, allusion, effective as it is for the moment, is a very dangerous aid. Only the most clear and catholic judgment, only that intuition which, whatever else is held or dropped, grasps firmly what is permanent and for all time, the intuition which belongs to a great literary epoch and together with the patient perfection of form produces the quality which we call 'classical', will enable a writer to be allusive, and secure the gain of the moment, and yet sacrifice nothing to allusion, and so not incur the loss of the future. Such an intuition and such patience the Augustan writers had. They teem with allusion; it is scarcely possible to read a page or dig up a stone relating to the Augustan epoch without striking on an illustration, on something which throws light beyond itself. In the Eclogues, the Georgics, the Aeneid, the Satires, Epodes, Odes, Epistles, in all the writings of Ovid and Propertius, the reign of Augustus, its wars, politics, even its scandal, is never out of mind. The epic itself is a vast parable of the New Ilion, that rebuilding of the Roman polity under the auspices of Iulus, which was the idea and practical guide of the living generation. As for Horace, the thing most certain about his work is that we shall never fully understand it, as it was understood by contemporaries. In what shape comest thou' cries the prophet-poet, 'O long-expected saviour of Rome? Art thou now on earth, in human form disguising the son of gentle Maia, and submitting to the name of Caesar's avenger?' Not till quite recently was it suspected that in giving to Octavian the character of Mercurius, Horace was not only making a plausible comparison, but reflecting an actual cult, one of the many in which the political aspirations of the time were breathed into the forms of a moribund religion. And yet, although the records of Augustus have long ago suffered such ruin as Horace could scarcely have conceived, the Odes' are still living literature after such a lapse of time as the boldest claimant of 'immortality' might be afraid to foresee, |