It was my lot to have Rome for my nurse,[1] and to be instructed [from the Iliad] how much the exasperated Achilles prejudiced the Greeks. Good Athens[2] give me some additional learning: that is to say, to be able to distinguish a right line from a curve, and seek after truth in the groves of Academus.[3] But the troublesome times removed me from that pleasant spot; and the tide of a civil war carried me away, unexperienced as I was, into arms, [into arms] not likely to be a match for the sinews of Augustus Cæsar. Whence, as soon as [the battle of] Philippi dismissed me in an abject condition, with my wings clipped, and destitute both of house and land, daring poverty[4] urged me on to the composition of verses: but now, having more than is wanted, what medicines would be efficacious enough to cure my madness, if I did not think it better to rest than to write verses.
The advancing years rob us of every thing: they have taken away my mirth, my gallantry, my revelings, and play: they are now proceeding to force poetry from me. What would you have me do?
In short, all persons do not love and admire the same things.
- ↑ Horace went to Rome in 696, when he was about seventeen or eighteen years of age, and read humanity under Orbilius Pupillus. San.
- ↑ He went to Athens in 709, when he was nineteen years old, to study philosophy. His reading Homer, and his father’s instructions, had already much improved him, but at Athens he acquired something more; for he not only studied other parts of philosophy there, but learned morality by reasoning and principles. San.
- ↑ The name of Academus is one of those which the sciences have consecrated to immortality with the greatest justice. He was a rich Athenian, who in his regard for philosophy, left to the philosophers, for holding their assemblies, a fino house at Athens, adorned with a magnificent gallery, a number of statues, and a park, planted with trees. Plato had his school there, from whom the philosophers of his sect were called Academicians. Horace characterizes this school by what distinguished it from all others; its not boasting that it had found truth, but onlv professing to search for it, “quærere verum.” Torr.
- ↑ We must not understand these words literally, as if Horace never wrote verses before the battle of Philippi, but that he did not apply his genius to poetry, as to a profession, before that time. The satire “Proscripti Ragis Rapili,” was apparently written while he was in Brutus’s army. This frank confession of his misfortunes has much sincerity, and he makes it more willingly, since it turns to the glory of Augustus. Dac.
