INTRODUCTION.

I. LIFE AND WRITINGS.

SOURCES.

1. Our knowledge of the facts of Horace's life is derived in part from a biography, appended to certain manuscripts of his poems, which has been shown by conclusive evidence to be, in substance, the life of the poet which Suetonius wrote in his encyclopedic work, De Viris Illustribus. There are briefer lives in some of the other manuscripts, and scattered notices in the scholia. But all these sources afford-beyond a few dates and facts - little information that we do not already possess, in fuller and more authentic form, in the poet's own writings. To these we must go for an adequate understanding of his mind and character. In the Satires and Epistles, and to a less degree in the Epodes, Horace takes the reader into his confidence and speaks of his circumstances and feelings with singular frankness. The Odes, too, contain much biographical material, but it is of a kind that must be used with caution. As a poet Horace claims the freedom of his craft and frequently puts himself, for poetical effect, in situations which may perhaps reflect his mode of thought and feeling and even shadow forth his personal experiences, but must not be taken literally as autobiography.

BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING.

2. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on the 8th of December, B.C. 65, and died on the 27th of November, B.C. 8.

It is important to observe the significance of these dates. Horace's life began when the Romans were still living under the forms of the Republic; when it closed, the Empire was fully established. When our poet first saw the light, Cicero was planning his canvass for the consulship. His boyhood fell in the stormy decade of the 'First Triumvirate' (B.C. 60-50), which formed the prelude of the Civil War. Horace was old enough to be interested in the later victories of Caesar in Gaul, and the destruction of Crassus with his army at Carrhae in 53 may well have made a deep impression on a lad of twelve. The two decades of civil strife which followed were experiences of his youth and early manhood, and when peace came with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra in B.C. 30, Horace was thirty-five years old. The remaining twenty-two years of his life belong to the first half of the principate of Augustus, the period of the growth and consolidation of his power under the guidance of his two great ministers, Agrippa and Maecenas, whose deaths, B.C. 12 and 8, were closely followed by that of Horace.

3. Horace's birthplace was Venusia, a colony planted for military purposes in the Samnite wars, high up on the northern slope of the Apennine range, in Apulia, near the Lucanian border. It stood on a branch of the Aufidus, in that region a swift mountain stream, among the wooded hills which culminate in the lofty peak of Mt. Voltur. There the poet's father by shrewdness and thrift had not only secured his own freedom - for he was born a slave but had acquired a modest farm and an income which enabled him to educate his son. His occupation was that of a coactor, that is, a collector of money—whether of money due for taxes or for goods sold at auction, the corrupt text of the Suetonian biography leaves us in doubt. It is supposed by some that he had acted in this capacity

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