to reach a wider circle of appreciative readers. But Horace did not persist in an undertaking which his good sense presently convinced him was as futile as it was unpatriotic. 15. At the time when Horace began his literary career, Vergil, who was five years his senior, had published some youthful verses and was beginning to be known as a sweet singer of pastoral scenes by the publication of his earliest. Eclogues. The epic poet of the day was Varius Rufus, who won credit and favor by his poem on the death of Julius Caesar. He was a few years older than Vergil, who lived to rival him in epos; but that was many years later. Asinius Pollio, who as governor of Cisalpine Gaul had recently won Vergil's gratitude by timely assistance, and who was afterwards eminent as an orator and a critic and patron of literature, had at this time attained some distinction as a writer of tragedy. Various other fields were diligently cultivated by writers of less note, or less known to us. Looking over the ground Horace thought he saw a field suited to his powers in Lucilian satire, which Varro Atacinus and some others had undertaken to revive, but in Horace's opinion without success. THE SATIRES. 16. The word satura appears to have meant originally a medley. It was used as the name of a variety performance on the rude stage of early times, consisting of comic songs and stories, with dance and gesticulation, to the accompaniment of the pipe. It found its way into literature as the title of a collection of what we should call 'miscellanies in verse:' Ennius (B.C. 239-169) employed it for this purpose, and his example was followed by Lucilius. The Saturae of Lucilius, who had been dead about sixty years when Horace began to write satire, were a series of tracts on every topic that it came into his head to discuss, -personal, social, political, philosophical, literary, philological. In form they were equally varied, sometimes didactic, sometimes narrative, or dramatic, or epistolary; and they were written in a variety of metres. More than two thirds, however, of the thirty books were in dactylic hexameters, which Lucilius appears to have finally settled upon as most suitable for his purpose; and this metre was used exclusively by his successors. And in spite of its heterogeneous variety of subjects, there were two features which gave distinctive character to Lucilius' work. One of these was the footing of personal and familiar intercourse on which he placed himself with his reader; his tone was the tone of conversation and his words the utterance of his own mind and heart, as if on the impulse of the moment. The other was that he entered on a field which Roman literature had not yet ventured to tread, but which thenceforth became the peculiar province of satura, as it had been of the Old Comedy of the Greeks, the criticism of contemporary manners and men. 17. By inheritance and training a critical observer of the life about him, Horace justly deemed himself fitted to take up the task of Lucilius, whom he greatly admired in everything but the roughness of his literary workmanship. The unreserved personalities in which Lucilius indulged were no longer permissible in Horace's day, and he avoided them except in a few of his earlier satires. Politics, too, were forbidden ground. In other respects he adopted the method of his master, but in a kindlier spirit and rarely with any exhibition of personal feeling. His manner is that of the accomplished man of the world in familiar conversation, easy and self-possessed, witty but never flippant, discussing with keen insight and a quick sense of humor, but with the abundant charity of a man who knows his own shortcomings, and with a ground-tone of moral earnestness, the various 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. éñadev). This term was later extended in meaning, so that Horace's collection of seventeen poems, all but one composed of epodiccouplets, 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. The 21. Gaius Maecenas came of noble Etruscan stock. 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 |