The Second Book
of the
Epistles of Horace.
EPISTLE I.
TO AUGUSTUS.[1]
He honors him with the highest compliments; then treats copiously of poetry, its origin, character, and excellence.
Since you alone support so many and such weighty concerns, defend Italy with your arms, adorn it by your virtue, reform
- ↑ Augustus had written to Horace to reproach him for not having addressed any part of his works to him. Know, says he, that I am angry with you; or are you apprehensive it shall injure your reputation with posterity, that you have been one of my friends ? These reproaches, probably, occasioned this Epistle, which is justly ranked among the best performances of our author, aud not unworthy of a prince of superior genius, delicate taste, and more than common erudition. It may be divided into four parts. In the first, the poet examines the comparison between ancients and moderns, which had been a matter of dispute in almost all ages. He then shows, that novelty is the mother of all polite arts, especially of poetry, that divine art, which deserves the greatest praises and greatest rewards. In the third part he treats of the theater, and the difficulty of succeeding there. In the last, he would inform princes how much they are interested to animate an emulation among Epic and Lyric poets, who have it in their power to make them immortal. These different parts are enlivened by a continual criticism upon the manner in which the Romans judged of poets, and by many reflections, equally useful and agreeable, upon the origin and progress of poetry.
The date of this Epistle is determined by so many facts, and so strongly marked, that it is unaccountable how it hath been mistaken. It mentions the divine honors paid to Augustus in 726: the sovereign authority which he received from the senate in 727: the reduction of the Parthians in 734: the laws which he made for the reformation of manners in 737: the conquests of Tiberius and Drusus in 739, 742, 743, and shutting the temple of Janus in 744, when this letter was written, and when Horace was in his fifty-second year, about two years before his death. Fran.
