as a public slave, and on his manumission took the name of Horatius because Venusia belonged to the Horatian tribe. But we do not know that freedmen were ever so named; from the ordinary practice in such cases we should assume that he had belonged to a master named Horatius.

4. Horace himself was born free, that is, he was born after his father's manumission. His mother is nowhere mentioned. It may well be that he inherited from her his poetic nature; but whether because she died in his infancy - which is probable- or from lack of personal force, she appears to have had little or no influence in moulding his character. His father's influence, on the other hand, was of the utmost importance and value, as the poet himself acknowledges with warm gratitude. The elder Flaccus was a shrewd observer of men and manners. Horace was,

it seems, his only son, and the child of his later years, when he had accumulated a fund of experience and practical wisdom, and when he was, moreover, in possession of a competence which enabled him to lay aside his business and give his whole attention to the training of his boy. He naturally knew nothing of ethical theories, and he relied little on precept alone. He sought to awaken his son's moral perception by teaching him to observe good and bad in the world about him, to note the consequences of virtue and of vice in the actual lives of men, and to take to heart these examples and warnings in guiding his own life and guarding his reputation. The ethical code of the Venusian freedman was of a rough-hewn sort. It was a coarse sieve, and allowed some things to pass which do not meet the test of our finer standards. He claimed, in fact, no more for his moral teaching than that it would keep his son from falling into ruinous courses during that critical period when he was not yet able to 'swim without cork.' But so far as it went it was sound and wholesome. And it was effective :

Horace's habitual self-control during the period of his life when we know him best, his dislike of passionate excess either of desire or fear, his temperance in conduct and language, his aversion to the grosser forms of vice, - these were the fruit of inherited traits, fostered and strengthened by wise training. To the same training Horace attributes his habit of critical observation of social phenomena, which led him to write satire.

SCHOOL DAYS AT ROME.

5. Horace's mental development received no less careful attention. There was a school at Venusia, kept by one Flavius and resorted to by the sons of the local aristocracy, -'great lads, from great centurions sprung.' But Horace's father had higher views for his son, who had already, we may suppose, given promise of exceptional ability. Anxious to provide him with the best advantages, he determined to send him to Rome, to receive the education which a knight or a senator gives to his sons.' But unlike a knight or a senator, the obscure freedman had no social connections which would enable him to place his son under the charge of some family or friend; and rather than entrust him to strangers or slaves, he determined to leave his farm and accompany the boy in person to the city. Here, too, he was unremitting in his watchful care. Horace has left us a pleasing picture of the devoted father, going round to all the lessons with his boy, whom he had fitted out with suitable dress and attendant slaves, so that he might hold up his head with the best of his school-fellows.

6. Horace was taken to Rome perhaps in his ninth or tenth year, and remained there possibly until he was twenty; the precise dates are not recorded. Of his teachers only one is known to us, Orbilius Pupillus, of Beneventum, an old cavalry soldier who had resumed his books when his

campaigns were over, and at the age of fifty had set up a school in the capital in the year when Cicero was consul. He was a gruff old fellow, with a caustic tongue, and his ready resort to the rod Horace remembered many years after. The course of study which Horace pursued was presumably the ordinary course of the 'grammatical' and 'rhetorical' schools of the day, which aimed, first, at a mastery of the Latin tongue, and, secondly, at the cultivation of eloquence. With these ends in view the training, after the elements of reading, writing, and reckoning were acquired, was largely literary, and consisted mainly in a thorough study of Latin and Greek literature. Horace read Livius Andronicus-probably his version of the Odyssey -under the rod of Orbilius, and became familiar with the other old Roman poets, for whom he did not conceive, or did not retain, a very high admiration. He also read the Iliad, as he informs us, and no doubt other Greek classics in prose and verse; and these kindled in him a genuine enthusiasm, which kept him a devoted student of Greek letters, particularly of Greek poetry, all his life.

ATHENS.

7. With this taste developed by his studies in Rome, it was natural that Horace should be drawn into the current which at that day carried the more ambitious students to Athens, in quest of what we may call their university training in the schools of philosophy there. Horace attended the lectures of the Academic school, and the acquaintance which he shows with the doctrines of the other sects must have been acquired at this time. For speculative philosophy and the subtleties of dialectics he had little taste. The Roman, as a rule, felt the strongest attraction to philosophy on its ethical side, where it came nearest to the practical problems

of life; and in Horace this ethical tendency was ingrained and was peculiarly strong. It was fostered by his father's training; it no doubt added zest, at this time, to his study of the various ethical systems of the Greeks; it was confirmed as his mind and character matured, and impressed itself strongly on all his writings, even his lyrics. In his later years he protested that his chief desire was to put aside poetry and devote the rest of his days to the study of the philosophy of life.

8. In his philosophical views Horace was, like most of his countrymen who interested themselves in the subject at all, eclectic; he found something to his taste in this creed and in that, but declined to enroll himself as the disciple of any school. Of his religious belief it is not possible to speak definitely, probably it never crystallized into definite shape in his own mind. For a time he was a convert to the doc

trine of Epicurus, probably from reading Lucretius, whose poem was published in his boyhood,- and believed that there were gods, but that their serene existence was never troubled by any concern for the affairs of men. In one of his odes he professes to have been startled out of this 'crazy' creed by the actual occurrence of what the Epicureans averred to be a physical impossibility,— a clap of thunder in a clear sky. It is not likely that this experience had the importance in actual fact which it appears to have in its lyrical setting; Horace's change of view was a matter of growth. But it was real. Otherwise he would surely not have published this poem; and there is, besides, plenty of evidence elsewhere in his works that in his maturer years he recognized a divine providence and control in human affairs. Horace's ethical views, too, were strongly tinged with Epicureanism, but here, as everywhere, he went to no extreme; and, although he combats the Stoic theory and mocks at their ideal sage, he was at heart in sympathy with Stoic

principles in their substance and practical application to life, and he more than once holds up their ideal of virtue for its own sake, -though even virtue itself he will not exempt from his maxim 'nil admirari'.

9. How far Horace pursued his study of the Greek poets along with his philosophy at Athens, we are not informed; we may be sure that he gave them a large share of his attention. The broad and intimate acquaintance with Greek poetry, which is the very life-blood of his own poetic achievement, was not the acquisition of a few years; but his sojourn was long enough for the influences of the place to give a permanent bent to his literary taste. One of Horace's marked characteristics as a poet is his freedom from Alexandrinism, which dominated Roman education and Roman poetry in his youth. Alexandrine learning, filtered through his Roman teachers, furnished him with his technical outfit as a poet, with a knowledge of the forms and categories and of the history of his art, and with the common stock of illustrative material, mythological, astrological, and other. There is evidence also of his diligent study of some of the Alexandrine poets: he is indebted to them for many phrases and figures and turns of thought. This is especially apparent in his love poetry. But the same evidence shows that the Alexandrine poets who exerted this influence on his style were precisely those who, like Callimachus and Theocritus, were freest from the peculiar weakness of their school,— the sacrifice of freshness and good taste to formality and erudition. In the spirit and form of his verse Horace took as his models the older Greek poets; and his loving study of these masters we may confidently date from his residence at Athens, where the older traditions still maintained themselves.

10. The fashion of sending young men to get the finishing touches of their education at Athens had grown up with the generation into which Horace was born. Cicero, who in his