Horace (Martin)/Chapter 1

by Theodore Martin

CHAPTER I.

BIRTH.—EDUCATION.—CAMPAIGN WITH BRUTUS AND CASSIUS.

Like the two greatest lyrists of modern times, Burns and Béranger, Horace sprang from the ranks of the people. His father had been a slave, and he was himself cradled among "the huts where poor men lie." Like these great lyrists, too, Horace was proud of his origin. After he had become the intimate associate of the first men in Rome—nay, the bosom friend of the generals and statesmen who ruled the world—he was at pains on more occasions than one to call attention to the fact of his humble birth, and to let it be known that, had he to begin life anew, he vas so far from desiring a better ancestry that he would, like Andrew Marvell, have made "his destiny his choice." Nor is this done with the pretentious affectation of the parvenu, eager to bring under notice the contrast between what he is and what he has been, and to insinuate his personal deserts, while pretending to disclaim them. Horace has no such false humility. He was proud, and he makes no secret that he was so, of the name he had made,—proud of it for himself and for the class from which he had sprung. But it was his practice, as well as his settled creed, to rate at little the accidents of birth and fortune. A stronger and higher feeling, however, more probably dictated the avowal,—gratitude to that slave-born father whose character and careful training had stamped an abiding influence upon the life and genius of his son. Neither might he have been unwilling in this way quietly to protest against the worship of rank and wealth which he saw everywhere around him, and which was demoralising society in Rome. The favourite of the Emperor, the companion of Mæcenas, did not himself forget, neither would he let others forget, that he was a freedman's son; and in his own way was glad to declare, as Béranger did of himself at the height of his fame,

"Je suis vilain, et très vilain."

The Roman poets of the pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlike Horace, were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his great predecessors in lyric poetry, were men of old and noble family. Virgil, born five years before Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of good property. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six, fourteen, and twenty years his juniors, were all of equestrian rank. Horace's father was a freedman of the town of Venusia, the modern Venosa. It is supposed that he had been a publicus servus, or slave of the community, and took his distinctive name from the Horatian tribe, to which the community belonged. He had saved a moderate competency in the vocation of coactor, a name applied both to the collectors of public revenue and of money at sales by public auction. To which of these classes he belonged is uncertain—most probably to the latter; and in those days of frequent confiscations, when property was constantly changing hands, the profits of his calling, at best a poor one, may have been unusually large. With the fruits of his industry he had purchased a small farm near Venusia, upon the banks of the Aufidus, the modern Ofanto, on the confines of Lucania and Apulia. Here, on the 8th of December, B.C. 65, the poet was born; and this picturesque region of mountain, forest, and river, "meet nurse of a poetic child," impressed itself indelibly on his memory, and imbued him with the love of nature, especially in her rugged aspect, which remained with him through life. He appears to have left the locality in early life, and never to have revisited it; but when he las occasion to describe its features (Odes, III. 4), he does this with sharpness and truth of touch, which show how closely he had even then begun to observe. Acherontia, perched nest-like among the rocks, the Gantine thickets, the fat meadows of low-lying Forentum, which his boyish eye had noted, attest to this hour the vivid accuracy of his description. The passage in question records an interesting incident in the poet's childhood. Escaping from his nurse, he has rambled away from the little cottage on the slopes of Mount Vultur, whither he had probably been taken from the sultry Venusia to pass his villeggiatura during the heat of summer, and is found asleep, covered with fresh myrtle and laurel leaves, in which the wood-pigeons have swathed him.

"When from my nurse erewhile, on Vultur's steep, I stray'd beyond the bound Of our small homestead's ground,Was I, fatigued with play, beneath a heap Of fresh leaves sleeping found,—

"Strawn by the storied doves; and wonder fell On all, their nest who keep On Acherontia's steep,Or in Forentum's low rich pastures dwell, Or Bantine woodlands deep,

"That safe from bears and adders in such place I lay, and slumbering smiled, O'erstrewn with myrtle wild,And laurel, by the god's peculiar grace No craven-hearted child."

The incident thus recorded is not necessarily discredited by the circumstance of its being closely akin to what is told by Ælian of Pindar, that a swarm of bees settled upon his lips, and fed him with honey, when he was left exposed upon the highway. It probably had some foundation in fact, whatever may be thought of the implied augury of the special favour of the gods which is said to have been drawn from it at the time. In any case, the picture of the strayed child, sleeping unconscious of its danger, with its hands full of wild-flowers, is pleasant to contemplate.

In his father's house, and in those of the Apulian peasantry around him, Horace became familiar with the simple virtues of the poor, their industry and independence, their integrity, chastity, and self-denial, which he loved to contrast in after years with the luxury and vice of imperial Rome. His mother he would seem to have lost early. No mention of her occurs, directly or indirectly, throughout his poems; and remarkable as Horace is for the warmth of his affections, this could scarcely have happened had she not died when he was very young. He appears also to have been an only child. This doubtless drew him closer to his father, and the want of the early influences of mother or sister may serve to explain why one misses in his poetry something of that gracious tenderness towards womanhood, which, looking to the sweet and loving disposition of the man, one might otherwise have expected to find in it. That he was no common boy we may be very sure, even if this were not manifest from the fact that his father resolved to give him a higher education than was to be obtained under a provincial schoolmaster. With this view, although little able to afford the expense, he took his son, when about twelve years old, to Rome, and gave him the best education the capital could supply. No money was spared ta enable him to keep his position among his fellow-scholars of the higher ranks. He was waited on by several slaves, as though he were the heir to a considerable fortune. At the same time, however, he was not allowed either to feel any shame for his own order, or to aspire to a position which his patrimony was unable to maintain. His father taught him to look forward to some situation akin to that in which his own modest competency had been acquired; and to feel that, in any sphere, culture, self-respect, and prudent self-control must command influence, and afford the best guarantee for happiness. In reading this part of Horace's story, as he tells it himself, one is reminded of Burns's early lines about his father and himself:—

"My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border,And carefully he bred me up in decency and order.He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing,For without an honest manly heart no man was worth regarding."

The parallel might be still further pursued. "My father," says Gilbert Burns, "was for some time almost the only companion we had. He conversed familiarly on all subjects with us as if we had been men, and was at great pains, while we accompanied him in the labours of the farm, to lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend to increase our knowledge, or confirm us in virtuous habits." How closely this resembles the method adopted with Horace by his father will be seen hereafter.^[1]

Horace's literary master at Rome was Orbilius Pupillus, a grammarian, who had carried into his school his martinet habits as an old soldier; and who, thanks to Horace, has become a name (plagosus Orbilius, Orbilius of the birch) eagerly applied by many a suffering urchin to modern pedagogues who have resorted to the same material means of inculcating the beauties of the classics. By this Busby of the period Horace was grounded in Greek, and made familiar, too familiar for his liking, with Ennius, Nævius, Pacuvius, Attius, Livius Andronicus, and other early Latin writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to one who had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorous style of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care that he should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, in which music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But, what was of still more importance during this critical period of the future poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he enjoyed the advantages of his father's personal superintendence and of a careful moral training. His father went with him to all his classes, and, being himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour, he gave the boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attention to the follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around him, showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates of reason and common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences to the good name and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions. The method he pursued is thus described by Horace (Satires, I. 4):—

"Should then my humorous vein run wild, some latitude allow.I learned the habit from the best of fathers, who employedSome living type to stamp the vice he wished me to avoid.Thus temperate and frugal when exhorting me to be,And with the competence content which he had stored for me, 'Look, boy!' he'd say, 'at Albius' son—observe his sorry plight!And Barrus, that poor beggar there! Say, are not these a sight,To warn a man from squandering his patrimonial means?'When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans;'Sectanus, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswearIntrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere;'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught.The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be sought,The sages will explain; enough for me, if I upholdThe faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old,And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name.When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your frame,You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he wonAnd moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done,Hard it might be—'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can quote'—And then as model pointed to some public man of note.Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can youOne moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too,Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?'And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint,So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taintThey see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from thoseAm all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes."

Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the kindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical and didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the rugged maxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly but echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his own Ofellus, and the elders of the race—not, let us hope, altogether bygone—of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as "Religious men, who give to God and men their dues,"—the Apulian freedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered from books, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace to his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that father's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as occurring in a poem addressed to Mæcenas, a man of ancient family and vast wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poet which was afterwards to ripen into a lifelong friendship.

"Yet if some trivial faults, and these but few,My nature, else not much amiss, imbue(Just as you wish away, yet scarcely blame,A mole or two upon a comely frame),If no man may arraign me of the viceOf lewdness, meanness, nor of avarice;If pure and innocent I live, and dearTo those I love (self-praise is venial here),All this I owe my father, who, though poor,Lord of some few lean acres, and no more,Was loath to send me to the village school,Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule,—Centurions, and the like,—were wont to swarm,With slate and satchel on sinister arm,And the poor dole of scanty pence to payThe starveling teacher on the quarter-day;But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome,There to be taught all arts that grace the homeOf knight and senator. To see my dress,And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no lessThan patrimonial fortunes old and greatHad furnished forth the charges of my state.When with my tutors, he would still be by,Nor ever let me wander from his eye;And, in a word, he kept me chaste (and thisIs virtue's crown) from all that was amiss,Nor such in act alone, but in repute,Till even scandal's tattling voice was mute.No dread had he that men might taunt or jeer,Should I, some future day, as auctioneer,Or, like himself, as tax-collector, seekWith petty fees my humble means to eke.Nor should I then have murmured. Now I know,More earnest thanks, and loftier praise I owe.Reason must fail me, ere I cease to ownWith pride, that I have such a father known; Nor shall I stoop my birth to vindicate,By charging, like the herd, the wrong on Fate,That I was not of noble lineage sprung:Far other creed inspires my heart and tongue.For now should Nature bid all living menRetrace their years, and live them o'er again,Each culling, as his inclination bent,His parents for himself, with mine content,I would not choose whom men endow as greatWith the insignia and seats of state;And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes,Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise,In thus refusing to assume the careOf irksome state I was unused to bear."

The education, of which Horace's father had laid the foundation at Rome, would not have been complete without a course of study at Athens, then the capital of literature and philosophy, as Rome was of political power. Thither Horace went somewhere between the age of 17 and 20. "At Rome," he says (Epistles, II. ii. 23),

"I had my schooling, and was taughtAchilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought;At classic Athens, where I went ere long,I learned to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong,And search for truth, if so she might be seen,In Academic groves of blissful green."(C.)

At Athens he found many young men of the leading Roman families—Bibulus, Messalla, Corvinus, the younger Cicero, and others—engaged in the same pursuits with himself, and he contracted among them many enduring friendships. In the political lull which ensued between the battle of Pharsalia (B.C. 48) and the death of Julius Cæsar (B.C. 44), he was enabled to devote himself without interruption to the studies which had drawn him to that home of literature and the arts. But these were destined before long to be rudely broken. The tidings of that startling event had been hailed with delight by the youthful spirits, some of whom saw in the downfall of the great Dictator the dawn of a new era of liberty, while others hoped from it the return to power of the aristocratic party to which they belonged. In this mood Brutus found them when he arrived in Athens along with Cassius, on their way to take command of the Eastern provinces which had been assigned to them by the Senate. Cassius hurried on to his post in Syria, but Brutus lingered behind, ostensibly absorbed in the philosophical studies of the schools, but at the same time recruiting a staff of officers for his army from among the young Romans of wealth and family whom it was important he should attach to his party, and who were all eagerness to make his cause their own. Horace, infected by the general enthusiasm, joined his standard; and, though then only twenty-two, without experience, and with no special aptitude, physical or mental, for a military life, he was intrusted by Brutus with the command of a legion. There is no reason to suppose that he owed a command of such importance to any dearth of men of good family qualified to act as officers. It is, therefore, only reasonable to conclude, that even at this early period he was recognised in the brilliant society around him as a man of mark; and that Brutus, before selecting him, had thoroughly satisfied himself that he possessed qualities which justified so great a deviation from ordinary rales, as the commission of so responsible a charge to a freedman's son. That Horace gave his commander satisfaction we know from himself. The line (Epistles, I. xx. 23), "Me primis urbis belli placuisse domique,"—

"At home, as in the field, I made my way,And kept it, with the first men of the day,"—

can be read in no other sense. But while Horace had, beyond all doubt, made himself a strong party of friends who could appreciate his genius and attractive qualities, his appointment as military tribune excited jealousy among some of his brother officers, who considered that the command of a Roman legion should have been reserved for men of nobler blood—a jealousy at which he said, with his usual modesty, many years afterwards (Satires, I. vi. 45), he had no reason either to be surprised or to complain.

In B.C. 43, Brutus, with his army, passed from Macedonia to join Cassius in Asia Minor, and Horace took his part in their subsequent active and brilliant campaign there. Of this we get some slight incidental glimpses in his works. Thus, for example (Odes, II. 7), we find him reminding his comrade, Pompeius Varus, how

"Full oft they sped the lingering day"Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay,With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair."

The Syrian spikenard, Malobathrum Syrium, fixes the locality. Again, in the epistle to his friend Bullatius (Epistles, I. 11), who is making a tour in Asia, Horace speaks of several places as if from vivid recollection. In his usual dramatic manner, he makes Bullatius answer his inquiries as to how he likes the places he has seen:—

"You know what Lebedos is like; so bare,With Gabi or Fidenæ 'twould compare;Yet there, methinks, I would accept my lot,My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot,Stand on the cliff at distance, and surveyThe stormy sea-god's wild Titanic play."(C.)

Horace himself had manifestly watched the angry surges from the cliffs of Lebedos. But a more interesting record of the Asiatic campaign, inasmuch as it is probably the earliest specimen of Horace's writing which we have, occurs in the Seventh Satire of the First Book. Persius, a rich trader of Clazomene, has a lawsuit with Rupilius, one of Brutus's officers, who went by the nickname of "King." Brutus, in his character of quæstor, has to decide the dispute, which in the hands of the principals degenerates, as disputes so conducted generally do, into a personal squabble. Persius leads off with some oriental flattery of the general and his suite. Brutus is "Asia's sun," and they the "propitious stars," all but Rupilius, who was

"That pest,The Dog, whom husbandmen detest."

Rupilius, an old hand at slang, replies with a volley of rough sarcasms, "such as among the vineyards fly," and

"Would make the passer-byShout filthy names, but shouting fly"—

a description of vintage slang which is as true to-day as it was then. The conclusion is curious, as a punning allusion to the hereditary fame of Brutus as a puller-down of kings, which it mast have required some courage to publish, when Augustus was omnipotent in Rome.

"But Grecian Persius, after heHad been besprinkled plenteouslyWith gall Italic, cries, 'By allThe gods above, on thee I call,Oh Brutus, thou of old renown,For putting kings completely down,To save us! Wherefore do you notDespatch this King here on the spot?One of the tasks is this, believe,Which you are destined to achieve!'"

This is just such a squib as a young fellow might he expected to dash off for the amusement of his brother officers, while the incident which led to it was yet fresh in their minds. Slight as it is, one feels sure its preservation by so severe a critic of his own writings as Horace was due to some charm of association, or possibly to the fact that in it he had made his first essay in satire.

The defeat of Brutus at Philippi (B.C. 42) brought Horace's military career to a close. Even before this decisive event, his dream of the re-establishment of liberty and the old Roman constitution had probably begun to fade away, under his actual experience of the true aims and motives of the mass of those whom Brutus and Cassius had hitherto been leading to victory, and satiating with plunder. Young aristocrats, who sneered at the freedman's son, were not likely to found any system of liberty worthy of the name, or to use success for nobler purposes than those of selfish ambition. Fighting was not Horace's vocation, and with the death of Brutus and those nobler spirits, who fell at Philippi rather than survive their hopes of freedom, his motive for fighting was at an end. To prolong a contest which its leaders had surrendered in despair was hopeless. He did not, therefore, like Pompeius Varus and others of his friends, join the party which, for a time, protracted the struggle under the younger Pompey. But, like his great leader, he had fought for a principle; nor could he have regarded otherwise than with horror the men who had overthrown Brutus, reeking as they were with the blood of a thousand proscriptions, and reckless as they had shown themselves of every civil right and social obligation. As little, therefore, was he inclined to follow the example of others of his distinguished friends and companions in arms, such as Valerius Messalla and Ælius Lamia, who not merely made their peace with Antony and Octavius, but cemented it by taking service in their army.

1. Compare it, too, with what Horace reports of
   "Ofellus the hind,Though no scholar, a sage of exceptional kind,"
   

   in the Second Satire of the Second Book, from line 114 to the end.