phases of every-day life. He laughs at vice and folly; but satire is essentially didactic, and ridicule is the weapon of a serious purpose. Horace never speaks from the platform, or with any assumption of superior virtue; he talks as one of the crowd who has stopped to reflect on their common weaknesses, and he disarms resentment by sometimes turning the laugh against himself. There are some who esteem these 'talks' (sermones), as he himself preferred to call them, the greatest of Horace's achievements. Certainly there are few works of classical antiquity in which literary art has brought us so near to ancient life. The satires were written from time to time in the decade following Horace's return to Rome (B.C. 41-31), and became more or less widely known before they were issued in collected form. The collection consisted of two books, of which the first was published about 35 or 34, and the second about 30, B.C. THE EPODES. 18. Horace constructed the hexameter of his satires with some care, and succeeded in reconciling with the easy conversational tone a smoothness of rhythm which marked a great advance on the strong but rugged verses of his model Lucilius. But he hardly cared to claim for his satires the dignity of poetry. They are in their nature, he protests, and except for a certain recurrence of rhythm, mere prose discourse. And meanwhile he was trying his hand at poetry based on Greek models, and was in fact touched with the ambition to strike out a new path for Latin literature in this field. His first effort was to reproduce in Latin the iambic rhythm which tradition said had been forged, as a weapon of wrath, by Archilochus of Paros, the fact being that Archilochus, who lived in the seventh century B.C., had developed and perfected the rhythm which had existed long before him. The form which Horace adopted was a couplet, the second verse of which, as a sort of refrain, was called by metrical writers epõdus (èπwdós, adjective; cf. éradev). This term was later extended in meaning, so that Horace's collection of seventeen poems, all but one composed of epodic couplets, has come down to us under the title of Epodes (Epodon liber). Horace himself called them only Iambi, which expresses their prevailing character and is sufficiently accurate, although other metres are combined with the iambic in some instances. 19. The composition of the Epodes probably began as early as that of the Satires, possibly earlier, and was continued through the same period. The sixteenth of the series, which displays at once remarkable mastery of form and immaturity of thought, was written in the first years after the poet's return from Philippi; the ninth celebrates the victory at Actium. The book was published about the same time as the second book of the Satires, B.C. 30. 20. Horace says truly that he reproduced the spirit as well as the rhythms of Archilochus; in some of his epodes he has certainly used the iambus as a weapon of wrath.' In others again he has descended to a depth of coarseness from which his later lyrics are, for the most part, happily free. These, the survivors perhaps of a larger number of their kind, belong, we must suppose, to his earliest efforts, and tell of a dark period in his mental history, the first years after his return from Philippi, — when life went hard with him, and he was embittered and demoralized by associations which later, under more congenial influences, he was able to throw off. The most fortunate of these influences was his acquaintance with Varius and Vergil, who inspired him with warm admiration and regard; and it was these friends who performed for him the inestimable service of introducing him to Maecenas. MAECENAS. 21. Gaius Maecenas came of noble Etruscan stock. The Cilnii, once a powerful family of Arretium, were the most distinguished of his ancestors, and Tacitus (Ann. VI. 11) calls him Cilnius Maecenas; but there is reason to believe that this was not his gentile name. He was born on the 13th of April in some year not far from 70 B.C., so that he was Horace's senior by a few years. From our earliest knowledge of him he appears as the trusted friend and confidential minister of the triumvir Octavian, who sent him on several occasions to negotiate with Antony, at Brundisium in B.C. 40, at Athens in 38, at Tarentum in 37. In B.C. 36, during his absence in the war with Sextus Pompeius, and again in 31, on setting out for the final struggle with Antony, Octavian left Maecenas behind to watch over Rome and Italy with the power, if not the name, of the city prefect of regal times. This was as near as Maecenas ever came to holding public office. He studiously refrained from seeking or accepting political preferment, which would have raised him to the senatorial order, and remained all his life an untitled 'knight.' He was a man in whom the most opposite qualities appeared to be reconciled. His capacity was unquestioned, and on occasion he could display all necessary industry and vigor; but ordinarily he lived a life of almost ostentatious indolence, and was self-indulgent to the point of effeminacy. Devoid of personal ambition and apparently indifferent to politics, he was yet publicspirited and patriotic, and by sheer force of sagacity and tact he exercised for many years a powerful and a wholesome influence in shaping the policy of the government. His self-indulgence appears to have been due to his health, which was always delicate. He was subject to fever and sleeplessness, which increased as he grew older; we have the elder Pliny's word for it that in the last three years of his life he did not sleep at all. Maecenas married Terentia, a sister (by adoption) of Licinius Murena, who was executed for conspiracy against the emperor in B.C. 23. She was a beautiful woman, who counted, the gossips said, Augustus himself among her lovers; and her husband oscillated between furious jealousy and complete subjection to her fascination. He incurred the emperor's displeasure, when her brother's conspiracy was detected, by letting her draw the secret from him. These jars produced no permanent estrangement between Augustus and his minister, but there were other circumstances which inevitably caused Maecenas' influence to wane. When the rule of Augustus had become firmly established and began to take on the character of an hereditary monarchy, the members of his own family naturally came into greater prominence in his councils. Among these was Agrippa, who had married his daughter Julia. Maecenas was outside the circle and his relation with his chief could not be the same as before. 22. Maecenas was a man of cultivated mind and taste, with a genuine appreciation of literature and enjoyment of the conversation of men of letters. He even wrote indifferent verses himself. But he showed his love of literature in a much better way by bestowing upon it a liberal, and what was more to the purpose, a discriminating patronage. He did this in part as a measure of policy; he saw that literature might serve a useful purpose in reconciling the nation to the new order of things. It was rare good fortune for Octavian to have a minister who not only saw the wisdom of this policy, but had the taste and the tact to carry it out with success; it was something more than good fortune for Maecenas that he won the gratitude and admiration of the two greatest poets of the age, and that his name from that day to this has been a synonym for patron of letters. 23. Horace was introduced to Maecenas apparently in B.C. 39; but it was not till nine months after the first meeting that he was definitely admitted to his circle. It was probably in B.C. 37 that Maecenas invited him, with Vergil and Varius, to accompany him on the journey to Brundisium, which he has humorously described in the fifth Satire. The acquaintance between the two men ripened gradually into a warm attachment. Maecenas found in Horace a man after his own heart, whose society gave him great content, and whose good sense and sound moral fibre were proof alike against servility and presumption. He won Horace's gratitude by very substantial favors; he won his affection by the tact and sincerity which made it plain that these favors were the gifts of a friend and not of a mere patron, and that only friendship was exacted in return. Others were quick enough to point out the social inequality of the two men, and Horace was once more forced to hear ill-natured remarks about 'the freedman's son'; but he comforted himself with the knowledge that however it might have been on the former occasion, when he was tribune in the army of Brutus, humble birth was not a matter to be considered against personal qualities in the choice of a friend, and that the distinguished favor which he enjoyed was not purchased by any unworthy compliances on his part. The balance of obligation, in a material point of view, was enormously against him ; but he was ready, and frankly avowed his readiness, to resign all these advantages rather than surrender his own independence. And Maecenas accepted him on these terms. THE SABINE FARM. 24. Chief of all the benefits that came to Horace from this friendship was the gift of a farm in the Sabine hills, which he received from Maecenas about 33 B.C., not long after the publication of the first book of Satires. The |