Chapter 5 Horace and Ancient Rome

That Horace refers to being pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satire provokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and a justification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that he finally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are all indications of the prominence to which he rose.

That Virgil and Varius, poets of recognized worth, and their friend Plotius Tucca, third of the whitest souls of earth, introduced him to the attention of Maecenas, and that the discriminating lover of excellence became his patron and made him known to Augustus, are evidences of the appeal of which he was capable both as poet and man. In the many names of worthy and distinguished men of letters and affairs to whom he addresses the individual poems, and with whom he must therefore have been on terms of mutual respect, is seen a further proof. Even Virgil contains passages disclosing a more than ordinary familiarity with Horace's work, and men like Ovid and Propertius, of whose personal relations 076 with Horace nothing is known, not only knew but absorbed his poems.

If still further evidence of Horace's worth is required, it may be seen in his being invited to commemorate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius, the royal stepsons, against the hordes of the North, and the greatness of Augustus himself, ever-present help of Italy, and imperial Rome; and in the Emperor's expression of disappointment, sometime before the second book of Epistles was published, that he had been mentioned in none of the "Talks." And, finally, if there remained in the minds of his generation any shadow of doubt as to the esteem in which he was held by the foremost men in the State, who were in most cases men of letters as well as patrons of letters, it was dispelled when, in the year 17, Horace was chosen to write the Secular Hymn, for use in the greatest religious and patriotic festival of the times.

These facts receive greater significance from an appreciation of the poet's sincerity and independence. He will restore to Maecenas his gifts, if their possession is to mean a curb upon the freedom of living his nature calls for. He declines a secretaryship to the Emperor himself, 077 and without offense to his imperial friend, who bids him be free of his house as if it were his own.

But Horace must submit also to the more impartial judgment of time. Of the two innovations which gave him relief against the general background, one was the amplification of the crude but vigorous satire of Lucilius into a more perfect literary character, and the other was the persuasion of the Greek lyric forms into Roman service. Both examples had their important effects within the hundred years that followed on Horace's death.

The satire and epistle, which Horace hardly distinguished, giving to both the name of Sermo, or "Talk," was the easier to imitate. Persius, dying in the year 62, at the age of twenty-eight, was steeped in Horace, but lacked the gentle spirit, the genial humor, and the suavity of expression that make Horatian satire a delight. In Juvenal, writing under Trajan and Hadrian, the tendency of satire toward consistent aggressiveness which is present in Horace and further advanced in Persius, has reached its goal. With Juvenal, satire is a matter of the lash, of vicious cut and thrust. Juvenal may tell the 078 truth, but the smiling face of Horatian satire has disappeared. With him the line of Roman satire is extinct, but the nature of satire for all time to come is fixed. Juvenal, employing the form of Horace and substituting for his content of mellow contentment and good humor the bitterness of an outraged moral sense, is the last Roman and the first modern satirist.

The Odes found more to imitate them, but none to rival. The most pronounced example of their influence is found in the choruses of the tragic poet Seneca, where form and substance alike are constantly reminiscent of Horace. Two comments on the Odes from the second half of the first century are of even greater eloquence than Seneca's example as testimonials to the impression made by the Horatian lyric. Petronius, of Nero's time, speaks of the poet's curiosa felicitas, meaning the gift of arriving, by long and careful search, at the inevitable word or phrase. Quintilian, writing his treatise on Instruction, sums him up thus: "Of our lyric poets, Horace is about the only one worth reading; for he sometimes reaches real heights, and he is at the same time full of delightfulness and grace, and both in variety of imagery and in words is most happily 079 daring." To these broad strokes the modern critic has added little except by way of elaboration.

The Life of Horace, written by Suetonius, the secretary of Hadrian, contains evidence of another, and perhaps a stronger, character regarding the poet's power. We see that doubtful imitations are beginning to circulate. "I possess," says the imperial secretary, "some elegies attributed to his pen, and a letter in prose, supposed to be a recommendation of himself to Maecenas, but I think that both are spurious; for the elegies are commonplace, and the letter is, besides, obscure, which was by no means one of his faults."

The history of Roman literature from the end of the first century after Christ is the story of the decline of inspiration, the decline of taste, the decline of language, the decline of intellectual interest. Beneath it all and through it all there is spreading, gradually and silently, the insidious decay that will surely crumble the constitution of the ancient world. Pagan letters are uncreative, and, with few exceptions, without imagination and dull. The literature of the new religion, beginning to push green shoots from the ruins of the times, is a mingling 080 of old and new substance under forms that are always old.

In the main, neither Christian nor pagan will be attracted by Horace. The Christian will see in his gracious resignation only the philosophy of despair, and in his light humors only careless indulgence in the vanities of this world and blindness to the eternal concerns of life. The pagan will not appreciate the delicacy of his art, and will find the abundance of his literary, mythological, historical, and geographical allusion, the compactness of his expression, and the maturity and depth of his intellect, a barrier calling for too much effort. Both will prefer Virgil-Virgil of "arms and the man," the story-teller, Virgil the lover of Italy, Virgil the glorifier of Roman deeds and destiny, Virgil the readily understood, Virgil who has already drawn aside, at least partly, the veil that hangs before the mystic other-world, Virgil the almost Christian prophet, with the almost Biblical language, Virgil the spiritual, Virgil the comforter.

Horace will not be popular. He will remain the poet of the few who enjoy the process of thinking and recognize the charm of skillful expression. Tacitus and Juvenal esteem him, 081 the Emperor Alexander Severus reads him in leisure hours, the long list of mediocrities representing the course of literary history demonstrate by their content that the education of men of letters in general includes a knowledge of him. The greatest of the late pagans,-Ausonius and Claudian at the end of the fourth century; Bo?thius, philosopher-victim of Theodoric in the early sixth; Cassiodorus, the chronicler, imperial functionary in the same century,-disclose a familiarity whose foundations are to be looked for in love and enthusiasm rather than in mere cultivation. It may be safely assumed that, in general, appreciation of Horace was proportionate to greatness of soul and real love of literature.

The same assumption may be made in the realm of Christian literature. Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianity against paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiast and martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications of familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, 082 the intense, the irascible, Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christian poets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the late sixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still a native tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a love for him.

The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of the centuries called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to the name of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they must at any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light was not totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters was due to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leaving the era of ancient Rome.

Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have considered only his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admiration which represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was another phase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though its first cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was the phase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations had probably appeared in his 083 own life-time. It was the immortality of the text-book and the commentary.

Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the Institutes is an indication that the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latter half of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next, gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where little boys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lamp shining upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discolored by soot from the wicks,

totidem olfecisse lucernas,

Quot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset

Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni.

(VII. 225 ff.)

The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as well as lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. The first critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appeared as early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut, disappointed in the military career, he turned to the collection, study, and critical editing of Latin authors, among whom, besides Horace, were Virgil, Lucretius, Persius, 084 and Terence. His method, comprising careful comparison of manuscripts, emendations, and punctuation, with annotations explanatory and aesthetic, all prefaced by the author's biography, won him the reputation of the most erudite of Roman men of letters. It is in no small measure due to him that the tradition of Horace's text is so comparatively good.

There were many other critics and interpreters of Horace. Of many of them, the names as well as the works have been lost. Modestus and Claranus, perhaps not long after Probus, are two names that survive. Suetonius, as we have seen, wrote the poet's Life, though it contains almost nothing not found in the works of Horace themselves. In the time of Hadrian appeared also the edition of Quintus Terentius Scaurus, in ten books, of which the Odes and Epodes made five, and the Satires and Epistles five, the Ars Poetica being set apart as a book in itself. At the end of the second or the beginning of the third century, Helenius Acro wrote commentaries on certain plays of Terence and on Horace, giving special attention to the persons appearing in the poet's pages, a favorite subject on which a considerable body of writing sprang up. Not long afterward appeared 085 the commentary of Pomponius Porphyrio, originally published with the text of Horace, but later separately. In spite of modifications wrought in the course of time, only Porphyrio's, of all the commentaries of the first three hundred years, has preserved an approximation to its original character and quantity. Acro's has been overlaid by other commentators until the identity of his work is lost. The purpose of Porphyrio was to bring poetic beauty into relief by clarifying construction and sense, rather than to engage in learned exposition of the subject matter.

Finally, in the year 527, the consul Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius, with the collaboration of one Felix, revised the text of at least the Odes and Epodes, and perhaps also of the Satires and Epistles. That there were many other editions intervening between Porphyrio's and his, there can be little doubt.

This review of scant and scattered, but consistent, evidence is proof enough of Horace's hold upon the intellectual and literary leaders of the ancient Roman world. For the individual pagan who clung to the old order, he represented more acceptably than anyone else, or anyone else but Virgil, the ideal of a glorious 086 past, and afforded consequently something of inspiration for the decaying present. Upon men who, whether pagan or Christian, were possessed by literary enthusiasms, and upon men who delighted in contemplation of the human kind, he cast the spell of art and humanity. Those who caught the fire directly may indeed have been few, but they were men of parts whose fire was communicated.

As for the influence exercised by Horace upon Roman society at large through generation after generation of schoolboys as the centuries passed, its depth and breadth cannot be measured. It may be partly appreciated, however, by those who realize from their own experience both as pupils and teachers the effect upon growing and impressionable minds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflect upon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients, by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle of discipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself. 087