than the country, where snakes do not bite nor men do violence and the simple singer cries "A miracle!" because a solitary wolf runs away, is the real ager Sabinus. The country is Arcady, as we are expressly told', and the shepherd is the eternal shepherd, a charming figure, virtuous, loving, blessed, but-as Horace hints in the 'Lalage' by borrowing for the friend whom the swain addresses the name of the sly and town-loving Fuscus just a little too lovely for this earth. It is still the fashion, inherited from the " Amores Horatiani", to entitle I. 17 "An invitation from Horace to his mistress" or "An invitation to his Sabine farm", but the intrusion of this figure (if we took our inscriptions seriously) would make strange work. The real Marlowe could not be more out of place in Come live with me.' A mistress! Why in Arcady the very goats are ‘husband and wife's! The shepherd's Tyndaris is to sing of 'Penelope and siren Circe striving about one man' of the contention, that is to say, between the wife and the false enchantress in which victory fell to the lawful possessor, a pretty subject for a lady entertained by an obstinate bachelor. Lalage's lover talks the purest Arcadian, "Set me where the treeless plain" etc., "Set me where the car of day" and so forth. When the poet would paint realities, not to say himself, he has another style than this. Imagine Horace, the humorous and critical, sweetly ranting about poles and tropics! Well may Mr Munro think that if Horace must match love-poems against Catullus, it is not with Integer vitae that he should cap Acmen Septimius*. The spirit of humour forbid! One is life, the other a play of beautiful puppets, with the real Horace turning the wheel and twinkling just perceptibly at the real Fuscus. But comparisons are-like the husband of the she-goats. 1 1. 17. 1. 2 See the references to Fuscus in Wickham on 1. 22. 3 I. 17. 7. 4 Elucidations of Catullus, p. 236. Mr Munro, I should perhaps add, thinks that, though Horace has not outdone Catullus, he meant to do so, and is severe upon him accordingly. I cannot believe that Horace was so deceived, or would have dreamed of a comparison between the poems, unless it were to heighten by contrast the playful effect of his own delicate rhodomontade. In a different style but scarcely more autobiographical is the celebrated recantation (I. 16). The speaker is one who having lampooned a lady in his youth has lived to grow wiser, and to desire reconciliation with the injured fair. It is not necessary to suppose that the personages are lovers, or ever were; the stiff rhetoric is that of gallantry not affection. Horace had written lampoons, some of which he afterwards published; and in 35—34, which according to the arrangement of the Odes would be the supposed date of the recantation, he had touched la trentaine and was therefore old enough for the part; but that is all. From the style of the allusions it seems improbable that the speaker or the person addressed were to be recognized, and for references to any lampoon in particular the poem has been searched in vain. The only effect of it is to hint in a vague way that the author of the Odes has left the author of the Epodes behind him and desires that he may be thought of as little as possible. But there is in these Books (I. 33) one allusion to love, or at least to woman, which professes to be from the author's own story; and it deserves a careful examination. Albi, ne doleas plus nimio memor insignem tenui fronte Lycorida Cyri torret amor, Cyrus in asperam quam turpi Pholoe peccet adultero; saevo mittere cum ioco. ipsum me, melior cum peteret Venus,— libertina, fretis acrior Hadriae curvantis Calabros sinus. This poem, addressed to a famous brother-poet upon a supposed incident in his life and citing upon it the past experiences of the writer himself, bears as strong marks of personal identity between poet and speaker as the private sphere of the subject well allows. It would of course be vain to exercise our imagination upon Glycera and Myrtale; the names declare themselves fictitious, the persons may be; but to read ipsum me without thinking of Horace is as impossible as to read Albi without thinking of Tibullus, and the last stanza, whether true or not of the actual Flaccus, refers plainly to the author of the Odes. Perhaps its full significance in this light has not been sufficiently recognized. It is strange that in commentaries on the Odes of love the existence of such an institution as matrimony or of such a deity as 'Apposirn Oúpavía seems to be almost forgotten. "Mistress" "attachment" "liaison" are the whole staple of the vocabulary, and this is the more curious, because the inconveniences to which it leads have been fully perceived. The author of the Three Books poses, and that not in one or two casual moments but in the beginning, end, and throughout, as the preacher—if it be permissible to borrow a not unfit term, we might say the 'prophet'—of moral reform. "We are a wicked generation, justly plagued for our transgressions" is the first note of his song1. "Luxury and wantonness, wantonness and luxury, these are the curses of Rome❞—such is the burden, repeated in all varieties, from the burning wrath of Delicta maiorum to the sharp rebuke of Uxor pauperis and the quiet gravity of Inclusam Danaen. And yet this Ezekiel not only is in practice a Béranger, but has so little respect for his robe, that he scarcely waits to kick it off before falling into a more congenial dance. No wonder that modern spectators should have stared, and sometimes frowned. The only wonder is that Augustus, the moral legislator, should have so warmly applauded the acting of a iπокρɩтηs who does not impose for a moment upon us. We can see, even when the robe is on, that it does not fit; we do not miss the contrasts, even within the limits of a single piece, between the "official frigidity" and the "licentious vigour". Yet the emperor who, if he was himself the hypocrite that some think, at least knew how a great part should be played and played it earnestly and effectively for fifty years, pursued the poet with offers of friendship and insisted 1 I. 2, 1. 3; cf. III. 24. that he must write the hymn of the new Saeculum, in which the boys and maidens of the nation, by the lips of their highest representatives, implored the Gods of purity to bless the reforming work of the imperial Apollo. No doubt the Romans differed widely from us as to what a man might decently do, though not, before the Christian era, quite so widely as haste and prejudice sometimes assume1. But this is no excuse, and is allowed to be none, for such breaches of taste as we suppose in the Odes. The author who assumes on one page to tax the world with iniquity becomes for literary purposes a law to himself, and if, on the next, he talks the language of a careless sinner, cannot plead that, in general, none is bound to profess himself a saint. Perhaps no great man of letters ever had less perception of fitness than Dryden, and it would be an insult to the coadjutors of Augustus to compare them for moral earnestness with the courtiers of Charles II. But even Dryden differentiates, and in his graver works contrives to be decent. This double part in the Odes, the discord between the natural Horace and the political Horace, is often noted as an artistic defect. Nor is the assumption of its existence satisfactory as a theory in literary history. Before we regret or set ourselves to explain the separation, we should not only be quite sure that it exists, but should carefully measure it. Yet it is in vain that the poet proclaims himself 'the priest of the Muses', and declares that he sings 'to maidens and to boys', in vain that in poem after poem he writes of love and says nothing of himself or writes of himself and says nothing of love: he was a bachelor, we say, he describes himself in the Satires as no stricter than the average, Suetonius says he was thought to be even more loose, he published the Epodes,-ergo. But in a court of literature neither the Satires, nor Suetonius, nor the Epodes, whatever they may really prove, are evidence as against the author of the Odes; upon such presumptions · the Night Thoughts might be turned into profanity or the Essay on Man into ribaldry. Nevertheless the Odes are read as the work of a professed libertine, and every lady hitched into the verse 1 On one source of error see Munro, Elucidations of Catullus, pp. 75 foll. is at once asked for her marriage-lines'. Nay, she is not believed if she produces them. In 1. 30 a certain Glycera summons Venus to enter a house or shrine prepared for her, and in her train among others fervidus tecum puer et solutis Gratiae zonis properentque Nymphae et parum comis sine te Iuventas Now we know that in ancient symbolism the conjunction of Aphrodite, Hermes, and the Charites signified marriage, and that this prayer therefore declares itself to be that of a married woman addressed, apparently on her marriage, to the Venus of matrimony. Orelli knows this, at least he cites from the Plutarchian Maxims on Marriage a passage which proves it1; but this does not hinder him from bringing Horace upon the scene without a hint from himself, and inscribing the poem 'Glycerae amicae', nor has it prevented others from gravely investigating the probable time and circumstance of this 'attachment'. When it fares so with a Glycera who is warranted respectable, it is not likely to go better with a Glycera who leaves her character to our charity, and the lady of the poem now before us has sometimes received little mercy. But she will stand crossexamination very well. Being Glycera, she is not Tibullus' Delia nor Tibullus' Nemesis and is not liable either to the hard or the soft impeachments which are made against those ladies. Her name as far as it goes is in her favour, for as it is honourable in 1. 30, it is not in itself discreditable in I. 33. She has broken a promise to Tibullus, she has preferred a younger rival, and Tibullus is desperate. In a modern poem commencing thus, what should we suppose? Surely that the lady has placed between herself and the forlorn one the strongest of bars. And this natural supposition is really required, if the consolation 1 οἱ παλαιοὶ τῇ ̓Αφροδίτῃ τὸν Ἑρμῆν συγκαθίδρυσαν, ὡς τῆς περὶ τὸν γάμον ἡδονῆς μάλιστα λόγου δεομένης, τήν τε Πείθω καὶ τὰς Χάριτας, ἵνα πείθοντες διαπράττωνται παρ' ἀλλήλων ἃ βούλονται, μὴ μαχόμενοι μηδὲ φιλονεικοῦντες. The bridal associations of the Greek nympha imply the same. See the Epithalamium of Catullus (61. 29). |