Horace and His Influence | Page 5

every breeze of the national
passion, of such spiritual capacity as to assimilate the common
thoughts and moods of the time, of such fine perception and of such
sureness of command over word, phrase, and rhythm, as to give
crowning expression to what his soul has made its own.
For abundance of stirring and fertilizing experience, history presents
few equals of the times when Horace lived. His lifetime fell in an age
which was in continual travail with great and uncertain movement.
Never has Fortune taken greater delight in her bitter and insolent game,
never displayed a greater pertinacity in the derision of men. In the
period from Horace's birth at Venusia in southeastern Italy, on
December 8, B.C. 65, to November 27, B.C. 8, when
"Mourned of men and Muses nine, They laid him on the Esquiline,"

there occurred the series of great events, to men in their midst
incomprehensible, bewildering, and disheartening, which after times
could readily interpret as the inevitable change from the ancient and
decaying Republic to the better knit if less free life of the Empire.
We are at an immense distance, and the differences have long since
been composed. The menacing murmur of trumpets is no longer
audible, and the seas are no longer red with blood. The picture is old,
and faded, and darkened, and leaves us cold, until we illuminate it with
the light of imagination. Then first we see, or rather feel, the magnitude
of the time: its hatreds and its selfishness; its differences of opinion,
sometimes honest and sometimes disingenuous, but always maintained
with the heat of passion; its divisions of friends and families; its
lawlessness and violence; its terrifying uncertainties and adventurous
plunges; its tragedies of confiscation, murder, fire, proscription, feud,
insurrection, riot, war; the dramatic exits of the leading actors in the
great play,--of Catiline at Pistoria, of Crassus in the eastern deserts, of
Clodius at Bovillae within sight of the gates of Rome, of Pompey in
Egypt, of Cato in Africa, of Caesar, Servius Sulpicius, Marcellus,
Trebonius and Dolabella, Hirtius and Pansa, Decimus Brutus, the
Ciceros, Marcus Brutus and Cassius, Sextus the son of Pompey,
Antony and Cleopatra,--as one after another
"Strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, And then was heard no
more."
It is in relief against a background such as this that Horace's works
should be read,--the Satires, published in 35 and 30, which the poet
himself calls Sermones, "Conversations," "Talks," or _Causeries_; the
collection of lyrics called Epodes, in 29; three books of Odes in 23; a
book of Epistles, or further Causeries, in 20; the Secular Hymn in 17; a
second book of Epistles in 14; a fourth book of Odes in 13; and a final
Epistle, On the Art of Poetry, at a later and uncertain date.
It is above all against such a background that Horace's invocation to
Fortune should be read:
G_oddess, at lovely Antium is thy shrine_: Ready art thou to raise with

grace divine Our mortal frame from lowliest dust of earth, O_r turn
triumph to funeral for thy mirth_;
or that other expression of the inscrutable uncertainty of the human lot:
F_ortune, whose joy is e'er our woe and shame_, W_ith hard
persistence plays her mocking game_; Bestowing favors all
inconstantly, K_indly to others now, and now to me_. W_ith me, I
praise her; if her wings she lift_ T_o leave me, I resign her every gift_,
A_nd, cloaked about in my own virtue's pride_, W_ed honest poverty,
the dowerless bride_.
Horace is not here the idle singer of an empty day. His utterance may
be a universal, but in the light of history it is no commonplace. It is the
eloquent record of the life of Rome in an age which for intensity is
unparalleled in the annals of the ancient world.
And yet men may live a longer span of years than fell to the lot of
Horace, and in times no less pregnant with event, and still fail to come
into really close contact with life. Horace's experience was
comprehensive, and touched the life of his generation at many points.
He was born in a little country town in a province distant from the
capital. His father, at one time a slave, and always of humble calling,
was a man of independent spirit, robust sense, and excellent character,
whose constant and intimate companionship left everlasting gratitude in
the heart of the son. He provided for the little Horace's education at first
among the sons of the "great" centurions who constituted the society of
the garrison-town of Venusia, afterwards ambitiously took him to
Rome to acquire even the accomplishments usual among the sons of
senators, and finally sent him to Athens, garner of wisdom of the ages,
where the learning of the past was constantly