Horace (Martin)/Chapter 2

by Theodore Martin

CHAPTER II.

RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI.—EARLY POEMS.

Availing himself of the amnesty proclaimed by the conquerors, Horace found his way back to Rome. His father was dead; how long before is not known. If the little property at Venusia had remained unsold, it was of course confiscated. When the lands of men, like Virgil, who had taken no active part in the political conflicts of the day, were being seized to satisfy the rapacity of a mercenary soldiery, Horace's paternal acres were not likely to escape. In Rome he found himself penniless. How to live was the question; and, fortunately for literature, "chill penury" did not repress, but, on the contrary, stimulated his "noble rage."

"Bated in spirit, and with pinions clipped,Of all the means my father left me stripped,Want stared me in the face, so then and thereI took to scribbling verse in sheer despair."

Despoiled of his means, and smarting with defeat, Horace was just in the state of mind to strike vigorously at men and manners which he did not like. Young, ardent, constitutionally hot in temper, eager to assert, amid the general chaos of morals public and private, the higher principles of the philosophic schools from which he had so recently come, irritated by the thousand mortifications to which a man of cultivated tastes and keenly alive to beauty is exposed in a luxurious city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yet scarcely valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to the besetting temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to write it in a merciless spirit. As he says of himself (Odes, I. 15),

"In youth's pleasant spring-time, The shafts of my passion at random I flung,And, dashing headlong into petulant rhyme, I recked neither where nor how fiercely I stung."

Youth is always intolerant, and it is so easy to be severe; so seductive to say brilliant things, whether they be true or not. But there came a day, and it came soon, when Horace saw that triumphs gained in this way were of little value, and when he was anxious that his friends should join with him in consigning his smart and scurril lines (celeres et criminosos Iambos) to oblivion. The amende for some early lampoon which he makes in the Ode just quoted, though ostensibly addressed to a lady who had been its victim, was probably intended to cover a wider field.

Personal satire is always popular, but the fame it begets is bought dearly at the cost of lifelong enmities end many after-regrets. That Horace in his early writings was personal and abusive is very clear, both from his own language and from a few of the poems of this class and period which survive. Some of these have no value, except as showing how badly even Horace could write, and how sedulously the better feeling and better taste of his riper years led him to avoid that most worthless form of satire which attacks where rejoinder is impossible, and irritates the temper but cannot possibly amend the heart. In others, the lash is applied with no less justice than vigour, as in the following invective, the fourth of the Epodes:—

"Such hate as nature meant to be'Twixt lamb and wolf I feel for thee,Whose hide by Spanish scourge is tanned,And legs still bear the fetter's brand!Though of your gold you strut so vain,Wealth cannot change the knave in grain.How! see you not, when striding downThe Via Sacra^[1] in your gownGood six ells wide, the passers thereTurn on you with indignant stare?'This wretch,' such gibes your ear invade,'By the Triumvirs'^[2] scourges flayed,Till even the crier shirked his toil,Some thousand acres ploughs of soilFalernian, and with his nagsWears out the Appian highway's flags;Nay, on the foremost seats, despiteOf Otho, sits and apes the knight. What boots it to despatch a fleetSo large, so heavy, so complete,Against a gang of rascal knaves,Thieves, corsairs, buccancers, and slaves,If villain of such vulgar breedIs in the foremost rank to lead?'"

Modern critics may differ as to whom this bitter invective was aimed at, but there could have been no doubt on that subject in Rome at the time. And if, as there is every reason to conclude, it was levelled at Sextus Menas, the lines, when first shown about among Horace's friends, must have told with great effect, and they were likely to be remembered long after the infamous career of this double-dyed traitor had come to a close. Menas was a freedman of Pompey the Great, and a trusted officer of his son Sextus.^[3] He had recently (B.C. 38) carried over with him to Augustus a portion of Pompey's fleet which was under his command, and betrayed into his hands the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. For this act of treachery he was loaded with wealth and honours; and when Augustus, next year, fitted out a naval expedition against Sextus Pompeius, Menas received a command. It was probably lucky for Horace that this swaggering upstart, who was not likely to be scrupulous as to his means of revenge, went over the very next year to his former master, whom he again abandoned within a year to sell himself once more to Augustus. That astute politician put it out of his power to play further tricks with the fleet, by giving him a command in Pannonia, where he was killed, B.C. 36, at the siege of Siscia, the modern Sissek.

Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as a writer of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of his models Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully—for bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man—he showed in other compositions signs of the ire poetic spirit, which afterwards found expression in the consummate grace and finish of his Odes. To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from internal evidence, appears to have been written B.C. 40, when the state of Italy, convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fill him with despair. Horace had frequent occasion between this period and the battle of Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed the long struggle for supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to his countrymen against the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray, which might have been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, and spreading the lustre of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose this poem written when the tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusian campaign had arrived in Rome,—the reduction of the town of Perusia by famine, and the massacre of from two to three hundred prisoners, almost all of equestrian or senatorial rank,—we can well understand the feeling under which the poem is written.

To the Roman People.

Another age in civil wars will soon be spent and worn,And by her native strength our Rome be wrecked and overborne,That Rome, the Marsians could not crush, who border on our lands,Nor the shock of threatening Porsena with his Etruscan bands,Nor Capua's strength that rivalled ours, nor Spartacus the stern,Nor the faithless Allobrogian, who still for change doth yearn.Ay, what Germania's blue-eyed youth quelled not with ruthless sword,Nor Hannibal by our great sires detested and abhorred,We shall destroy with impious hands imbrued in brother's gore,And wild beasts of the wood shall range our native land once more.A foreign foe, alas! shall tread The City's ashes down,And his horse's ringing hoofs shall smite her places of renown,And the bones of great Quirinus, now religiously enshrined,Shall be flung by sacrilegious hands to the sunshine and the wind.And if ye all from ills so dire ask how yourselves to free,Or such at least as would not hold your lives unworthily,No better counsel can I urge, than that which erst inspiredThe stout Phocæans when from their doomed city they retired,Their fields, their household gods, their shrines surrendering as a preyTo the wild boar and the ravening wolf;^[4] so we, in our dismay, Where'er our wandering steps may chance to carry us should go,Or wheresoe'er across the seas the fitful winds may blow.How think ye then? If better course none offer, why should weNot seize the happy auspices, and boldly put to sea?But let us swear this oath;—"Whene'er, if e'er shall come the time,Rocks upwards from the deep shall float, return shall not be crime;Nor we be loath to bask our sails, the ports of home to seek,When the waters of the Po shall lave Matinum's rifted peak.Or skyey Apenninus down into the sea be rolled,Or wild unnatural desires such monstrous revel hold,That in the slag's endearments the tigress shall delight,And the turtle-dove adulterate with the falcon and the kite,That unsuspicious herds no more shall tawny lions fear,And the he-goat, smoothly sleek of skin, through the briny deep career!"This having sworn, and what beside may our returning stay,Straight let us all, this City's doomed inhabitants, away,Or those that rise above the herd, the few of nobler soul;The craven and the hopeless here on their ill-starred beds may loll.Ye who can feel and act like men, this woman's wail give o'er,And fly to regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore! The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles,To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles!Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with sheaves,And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all her leaves;Where the olive buds and burgeons, to its promise ne'er untrue,And the russet fig adorns the tree, that graffshoot never knew;Where honey from the hollow oaks doth ooze, and crystal rillsCome dancing down with tinkling feet from the sky-dividing hills;There to the pails the she-goats come, without a master's word,And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd.There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make,Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake;There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any starWith fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar.Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching rainsBy watery Eurus swept along ne'er devastate the plains,Nor are the swelling seeds burnt up within the thirsty clods,So kindly blends the seasons there the King of all the Gods.That shore the Argonautic bark's stout rowers never gained,Nor the wily she of Colchis with step unchaste profaned;The sails of Sidon's galleys ne'er were wafted to that strand,Nor ever rested on its slopes Ulysses' toilworn band: For Jupiter, when he with brass the Golden Age alloyed,That blissful region set apart by the good to be enjoyed;With brass and then with iron he the ages seared, but ye,Good men and true, to that bright home arise and follow me!

This poem, Lord Lytton has truly said, "has the character of youth in its defects and its beauties. The redundance of its descriptive passages is in marked contrast to the terseness of description which Horace studies in his Odes; and there is something declamatory in its general tone which is at variance with the simpler utterance of lyrical art. On the other hand, it has all the warmth of genuine passion, and in sheer vigour of composition Horace has rarely excelled it."

The idea of the Happy Isles, referred to in the poem, was a familiar one with the Greek poets. They became in time confounded with the Elysian fields, in which the spirits of the departed good and great enjoyed perpetual rest. It is as such that Ulysses mentions them in Tennyson's noble monologue:—

"It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down,It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."

These islands were supposed to be in the far west, and were probably the poetical amplification of some voyager's account of the Canaries or of Madeira. There has always been a region beyond the boundaries of civilisation to which the poet's fancy has turned for ideal happiness and peace. The difference between ancient and modern is, that material comforts, as in this epode, enter largely into the dream of the ancient, while independence, beauty, and grandeur are the chief elements in the modern picture:—

"Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,Breadth of Tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the crag;Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree,Summer Isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea."

To the same class of Horace's early poems, though probably a few years later in date, belongs the following eulogium of a country life and its innocent enjoyments (Epode 2), the leading idea of which was embodied by Pope in the familiar lines, wonderful for finish as the production of a boy of eleven, beginning

"Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound."

With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction at over-execitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely and uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for him at least, its quietude does not bring peace. It is not, therefore, at all out of keeping, although critics have taken exception to the poem on this ground, that Horace makes Alphius rhapsodise on the charms of a rural life, and having tried them, creep back within the year to his money-bags and his ten per cent. It was, besides, a favourite doctrine with him, which he is constantly enforcing in his later works, that everybody envies his neighbour's pursuits—until he tries them.

Alphius.Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled, Who, living simply, like our sires of old,Tills the few acres, which his father tilled, Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;

The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars, Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas;He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars, Noy at a great man's door consents to freeze.

The tender vine-shoots, budding into life, He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed,Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife, And grafting shoots of promise in their stead;

Or in some valley, up among the hills, Watches his wandering herds of lowing kine,Or fragrant jars with liquid honey fills, Or shears his silly sheep in sunny shine;

Or when Autumnus o'er the smiling land Lifts up his head with rosy apples crowned,Joyful he plucks the pears, which erst his hand Graffed on the stem they're weighing to the ground;

Plucks grapes in noble clusters purple-dyed, A gift for thee, Priapus, and for thee,Father Sylvanus, where thou dost preside, Warding his bounds beneath thy sacred tree.

Now he may stretch his careless limbs to rest, Where some old ilex spreads its sacred roof;Now in the sunshine lie, as likes him best, On grassy turf of close elastic woof.

And streams the while glide on with murmurs low, And birds are singing 'mong the thickets deep,And fountains babble, sparkling as they flow, And with their noise invite to gentle sleep,

But when grim winter comes, and o'er his grounds Scatters its biting snows with angry roar,He takes the field, and with a cry of hounds Hunts down into the toils the foaming boar;

Or seeks the thrush, poor starveling, to ensnare, In filmy net with bait delusive stored,Entraps the travelled crane, and timorous hare, Rare dainties these to glad his frugal board.

Who amid joys like these would not forget The pangs which love to all its victims bears,The fever of the brain, the ceaseless fret, And all the heart's lamentings and despairs?

But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside, The cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills,Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills,

Who piles the hearth with logs well dried and old Against the coming of her wearied lord,And, when at eve the cattle seek the fold, Drains their full udders of the milky hoard;

And bringing forth from her well-tended store A jar of wine, the vintage of the year,Spreads an unpurchased feast,—oh then, not more Could choicest Lucrine oysters give me cheer,

Or the rich turbot, or the dainty char, If ever to our bays the winter's blastShould drive them in its fury from afar; Nor were to me a welcomer repast

The Afric hen or the Ionic snipe, Than olives newly gathered from the tree,That hangs abroad its clusters rich and ripe, Or sorrel, that doth love the pleasant lea,

Or mallows wholesome for the body's need, Or lamb foredoomed upon some festal dayIn offering to the guardian gods to bleed, Or kidling which the wolf hath marked for prey.

What joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep, Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come;To see the wearied oxen, as they creep, Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home

Or, ranged around the bright and blazing hearth, To see the hinds, a house's surest wealth,Beguile the evening with their simple mirth, And all the cheerfulness of rosy health!

Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent Upon a country life, called in amainThe money he at usury had lent;— But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again.

In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see that Horace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaborate picture of the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Horace had obviously watched closely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at a later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of the most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of contrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of their life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city life of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6), after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and the fast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not from such as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the seas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and direful Hannibal," concluding in words which contrast by their suggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparison with the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:—

"But they, of rustic warriors wightThe manly offspring, learned to smile The soil with Sabine spade,And faggots they had cut, to bearHome from the forest, whensoe'er An austere mother bade;

"What time the sun began to changeThe shadows through the mountain range, And took the yoke awayFrom the o'erwearied oxen, andHis parting ear proclaimed at hand The kindliest hour of day."

Another of Horace's juvenile poems, unique in subject and in treatment (Epode 5), gives evidence of a picturesque power of the highest kind, stimulating the imagination, and swaying it with the feelings of pity and terror in a way to make us regret that he wrote no others in a similar vein. We find ourselves at midnight in the gardens of the sorceress Canidia, whither a boy of good family—his rank being clearly indicated by the reference to his purple toga and bulla—has been carried off from his home. His terrified exclamations, with which the poem opens, as Canidia and her three assistants surround him, glaring on him, with looks significant of their deadly purpose, through lurid flames fed with the usual ghastly ingredients of a witch's fire, carry us at once into the horrors of the scene. While one of the hags sprinkles her hell-drops through the adjoining house, another is casting up earth from a pit, in which the boy is presently imbedded to the chin, and killed by a frightful process of slow torture, in order that a love philtre of irresistible power may be concocted from his liver and spleen. The time, the place, the actors are brought before us with singular dramatic power. Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the spells she deemed all-powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress of skill superior to her own, gives great reality to the scene; and the curses of the dying boy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a touch of beautiful pathos, bring it to an effective close.

The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholars have run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild and ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which the commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the original of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of witchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like their modern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame Quickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up an effective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the current stories of such creatures and their doings presented to his hand? The popular belief in their power, the picturesque conditions under which their spells were wrought, the wild passions in which lay the secret of their hold upon the credulity of their victims, offered to the Roman poet, just as they did to our own Elizabethan dramatists, a combination of materials most favourable for poetic treatment. But that Horace had, as many of his critics contend, a feeling of personal vanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge, is an assumption wholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any time or under any circumstances, to have had any relations of a personal nature with a woman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have been to use her and her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not only saw through the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her miserable impotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems to be impossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and not come to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of a garden god, set up in the garden which Mæcenas had begun to lay out on the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-ground of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt of thieves and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, littered with skulls and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Sagana are again introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which they pour the blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously torn limb-meal,

"So to evoke the shade and soulOf dead men, and from these to wringResponses to their questioning."

They have with them two effigies, one of wax and the other of wool—the latter the larger of the two, and overbearing the other, which cowers before it,

"Like one that standsBeseeching in the hangman's hands. On Hecate one, TisiphoneThe other calls; and you might seeSerpents and hell-hounds thread the dark, Whilst, these vile orgies not to mark,The moon, all bloody red of hue,Behind the massive tombs withdrew."

The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames their ghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink in terror to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of the beldams make the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling up his horrors with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of some terrible climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can carry them—Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth, and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:—

"While you With laughter long and loud might view Their herbs, and charmed adders wound In mystic coils, bestrew the ground."

And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was an old mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, and Horace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as though he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his former calumnies about her.

"My youth has fled, my rosy hue Turned to a wan and livid blue; Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair;No respite have I from despair. The days and nights, they wax and wane, Yet bring me no release from pain;Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp, The spasm, which holds me in its grasp."

Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign magical influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all the mischief he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name what penance he will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers will appease her wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of as the chaste and good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star, his lyre is at her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as her life is pure, but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, the poet takes care to insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her in conclusion, thus:—

"Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wontAmong the tombs of paupers huntPor ashes newly laid in ground,Love-charms and philtres to compound,Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands."

Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. The man who,

"Branding her name with ill renown,Made her the talk of all the town,"

is not so lightly to be forgiven.

"You'd have a speedy doom? But no,it shall be lingering, sharp, and slow."

The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus, are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself—his efforts will be vain:—

"Then comes my hour of triumph, thenI'll goad you till you writhe again;Then shall you curse the evil hourYou made a mockery of my power."

She then triumphantly reasserts the powers to which she lays claim. What! I, she exclaims, who can waste life as the waxen image of my victim melts before my magic fire^[5]—I, who can bring down the moon from her sphere, evoke the dead from their ashes, and turn the affections by my philtres,—

"Shall I my potent art bemoanAs impotent 'gainst thee alone?"

Surely all this is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's "Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons. His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this sense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of a class; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the 8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner-party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a certain point,—"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous than that of African vipers, had swept across them."

1. The Sacred Way, leading to the Capitol, a favourite lounge.
2. When a slave was being scourge, wonder the orders of the Triumviri Capitales, a public crier stood by, and proclaimed the nature of his crime.
3. Shakespeare has introduced him in "Antony and Cleopatra" along with Menecrates and Varrius, as "friends to Sextus Pompeius."
4. The story of the Phocæans is told by Herodotus (Ch. 165). When their city was attacked by Harpagus, they retired in a body to make way for the Persians, who took possession of it. They subsequently returned, and put to the sword the Persian garrison which had been left in it by Harpagus. "Afterwards, when this was accomplished, they pronounced terrible imprecations on any who should desert the fleet; besides this, they sank a mass of molten iron, and swore that they would never return to Phocæa until it should appear again."
5. Thus Hecate in Middleton's "Witch" assures to the Duchess of Glo'ster "a sudden and subtle death" to her victim:—
   "His picture made in wax, and gently moltenBy a blue fire, kindled with dead men's eyes,Will waste him by degrees."—
   

   An old delusion. We find if in Theocritus, where a girl, forsaken by her lover, resorts to the same desperate restorative (Idylls ii. 28)—

   "As this image of wax I melt here by aidance demonic,Myndian Delphis shall so melt with love's passion anon."
   

   Again Ovid (Heroides vi. 91) makes Hypsipyle say of Medea:

   "The absent she binds with her spells, and figures of wax she devises,And in their agonised spleen fine-pointed needles she thrusts."