8001. a year. But he had fallen into bad hands. His guide, philosopher and friend, a' professor' named Gorgias, was one of the lecturers in the Gymnasium. This man turned out to be a debauched scoundrel, and Cicero, whose habits were predominantly of a festive nature, was promptly removed from his demoralising influence.

We have now, perhaps, been able to form some idea of the associations and training which helped to mould young Horace for any future he might have to face. All in a moment there came a great crisis in his fortunes. In March B.C. 44 Julius Caesar was murdered. Some months later Marcus Brutus appeared in Athens. Ostensibly he had come for purposes of study, but his real business there was to hunt up Roman officers for the command of his new levies. The patrician youth of the capital were all aglow to prove themselves worthy emulators of Pericles and Demosthenes, of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. That liberty was long since dead in all but name, they were hardly yet of an age to realise. Attracted no doubt by what he saw in Horace, with whose literary tastes he had much in common, Brutus offered this lad of two-and-twenty, short in inches, inclined to corpulence, ignorant of drill, innocent of the art of war, the high post of military tribune with the command of a legion. The offer was accepted, and the undergraduate blossomed suddenly into what we may picture to ourselves as a Brigadier-General. With our poet's career as an officer in the army we are not here concerned, but it is not without interest to note that it was during Brutus' campaign in Asia, and shortly before the battle of Philippi, that he fired off his first literary squib for the amusement of his brother officers on the staff. This somewhat feeble skit was included in the earliest of his published collections, and forms now the seventh satire of Book I.

The defeat at Philippi sealed the fate of the Republic. It was already consumed with internal decay. In five hundred years the City-state had conquered the world, but it lacked the political capacity to rule it, and to adapt its old time-worn institutions to new and altogether different conditions. During the winter of B.C. 42, and under cover probably of an amnesty extended to those surviving combatants who were ready to make their submission to the Triumvirs, Horace found his way back to Rome.

It was probably during the year B.C. 39 that our poet was introduced by Virgil and Varius to Maecenas. With respect to his life between his return to the capital and this red-letter day in his checkered fortunes we know little except by inference. He tells us that he was so poor that he was driven to make a living by writing verses. What verses they were he leaves us to guess.

From the brief biography of him which is attributed to Suetonius we learn further that he became a 'scribe' in the Quaestor's office, or, to use more modern language, a salaried clerk in the Roman Treasury, and this statement, it may be added, is confirmed in his satires. It is not likely that Horace, the most fastidious of critics, included all the firstlings of his poetic flock in his published collections, but his earliest extant compositions raise two interesting problems. (1) How did an unknown adventurer in Rome attract the notice of the literary magnates whom Maecenas had gathered round his table? And (2) what had Horace been writing to become so unpopular as it is evident that he had in fact become, especially among the Grub Street coteries of Roman society? Let us first briefly note the circumstances in which the defeat at Philippi had placed him.

When Horace found himself again in Rome, the cause in defence of which he had so eagerly joined the Regicide was lost. Victory rested with the three conspirators against the Republic, and their hands were red with the blood of many of his personal friends. The father who with equal wisdom and devotion had piloted him through the perils of youth was no more. The old Venusian home had just been confiscated and sold up. Buried in the grim and depressing solitude of a great city, a disillusioned Pompeian, a soured patriot, a political renegade, he was left without position, without prospects, and without money.

Never, probably, did Horace utter a truer word than when in one of his letters he described himself as 'solibus aptum,' one made for the warm sunshine. The shock of a sudden reverse of fortune, falling upon a constitution at no time very robust, and now somewhat impaired by a campaign on Asiatic soil, seems to have made havoc of his native friendliness and geniality, and to have left him irritable, bitter, resentful, and reckless. Looking back in the epodes and epistles on this dark winter of his discontent, Horace has compared himself to a sleuth-hound running down his quarry, to a bull with threatening horns, to a fierce wolf with hungry fangs. 10 To translate these images into humbler prose, our lampooner was in the very temper for what he calls the swift iambics of Archilochus, the literary vitriol of his trade. The society around him, honeycombed as it was with scandals and personal animosities, offered an attractive field to a ready pen and a mordant wit, and it would seem that he was not slow to seize the opportunity which was thus afforded him.

But the epodes, even the earliest of them, are evidence that if Horace could write personal lampoons he could produce work of a higher grade as well. Compositions, for example, like the seventh or the sixteenth epode could hardly be recited without

10 Epode vi.-II, Epis. ii. 29.

compelling those who listened to them to recognise the great poetical promise of which they gave evidence. At any rate the recitation of some lyric, or lyrics, that he had composed made a favourable impression on no less a personage than Virgil, who may accordingly be said to have discovered Horace in much the same sense that Coleridge discovered Wordsworth.

That Maecenas should have taken as long as nine months to think matters over before he finally decided on taking the young literary recruit under his wing is a fact of some significance. So shrewd a man of affairs, with a recommendation before him from great poetical celebrities such as Virgil and Varius, must have had good reason for his hesitation. It may be that, while they looked only to the poet in Horace, Maecenas looked deeper. Where they saw only talent, he saw a disappointed republican, a lampooner whose bitter personalities were making him many enemies, and the master of a literary weapon which might endanger the all-important cause of peace and order. But it is evident that what most impressed him, and what really determined the day in Horace's favour, was the rare attractiveness of his character on its moral and social side. Be this as it.may, we can now discern an answer to our inquiries. Obviously there were already two markedly distinct qualities in Horace's recitations. There was the genuine poetic quality which so attracted Virgil, and in virtue of which the epodes were one day to ripen and mellow into the odes, and there was also the critical and satiric quality which made its early victims so resentful, but which in due time passed out of the Archilochian iambic and became wedded to the dactylic hexameter, a measure which Horace learnt to mould with such wonderful success, and to make a vehicle for the expression both of his social sketches and of his talks with absent friends.

suggestive to our We instinctively

Satire, it should be remembered, is a term English ears of something caustic and severe. associate it with invective. It sends our thoughts back to writers like Dryden, Swift, and Carlyle. But this is to travel far away from our Latin satirist." The term which Horace himself prefers for the compositions in question is not satires at all, but sermones ; that is to say, conversational discourses. In his day political satire was out of the question, and a thing far too dangerous for him to touch. He fell back, therefore, on these 'talks,' or social and moral miscellanies. It was a field for which he felt himself well suited, and a field, too, in which he had no living rival to fear in the race for popularity and fame. These satires, in fact, are just familiar talks to the world in general about social types

11 Satura, in Latin, means a mixture. The term was transferred from the stage, where it denoted variety-performances, to literature.

and incidents in which it would be likely to feel lively interest, and they are full of biographical portraiture, as were the satires of Lucilius." They were intended to give readers the same kind of pleasure that we ourselves derive from a good comedy, a good novel, or a witty article. They present their author to us as in close personal contact with the social life of the day. Mainly in Rome, but occasionally in his new country home, Horace is at once an amused spectator, a light-hearted actor in the human drama, and a genial critic of infirmities, follies, and vices, not a few of which become distressingly apparent to him as he turns to glance at his own picture in the glass. So far are these social sketches from being a vehicle for moral indignation, that, as anyone will testify who is familiar with Horace's rich gallery of caricatures, they bubble over with raillery and fun. For it is not by the intrinsic wickedness of vice that their author is moved to mild reproof. It is by its coarse vulgarity, its short-sightedness, its woeful lack of sense. The appeal of the satirist is not to men's consciences, but to the external standard set by honour and good form' as embodied in the ideal urbanus or well-bred man of the world. This point of view may not be that of our own day. But we may doubt if it be possible to enjoy Horace quite as he meant to be enjoyed, unless we are content to measure his morality by the Roman standard of his age. And we do that age no grave injustice when we limit its normal idea of virtue, at any rate in the capital itself, to the exercise of a prudent moderation in vice.

Some five years intervened between the publication of the first ten satires, in about B.c. 35, and of the eight others which succeeded them. The two sets enable us to follow Horace in his literary progress, and they reveal to us an illuminating contrast. In the earlier set the writer is already the publicly recognised friend of Maecenas, whom he had been invited to accompany on his mission to Brundusium, but he has not yet received from him the gift which was to prove the delight and joy of his life, namely, the farm on the Sabine hills. We see him as still a literary aspirant, forging his way amid a host of enemies, rivals, and detractors, whom he is anxious to conciliate and smooth down. Outside his great patron's circle few people seem to have a good word for him. To some he is a malicious lampooner, to others an impudent belittler of his famous forerunner and professed model, Lucilius; to all a slave-born upstart, a literary adventurer who has now by some incomprehensible freak of fortune found or forced his way into the most exclusive house in Rome.

And already there may be seen emerging into light the two sides of Horace's character. He loves good society, and, at the

12 II. Sat. i. 30.

same time, he loves solitary meditation. After a light breakfast he lies in his room till past nine reading, writing, thinking. He is master of his own time. He strolls about Rome looking at the shops, asking prices, listening, not without real curiosity and interest, to the quack fortune-tellers of the market-place. He is poor, but not in actual want. He can afford, for example, to humour his fancy for a change of air by jogging off on his bobtailed mule to Tibur or to Tarentum. For the attractions of birth, wealth, place, or title he does not greatly care. The things that he does value are character, moral independence, friendships with prominent men, and sound health. For all vulgar pushing snobs, social limpets, and literary impostors he feels the most profound contempt. Free from the baser vices, and anxious to correct the more venial ones to which he so unreservedly pleads guilty, he is continually taking counsel with himself, reviewing his life, studying books, taking his moral temperature, listening to the candid friend,' trying to win the affection and approbation of those whose reputation and standing make their affection and approbation worth the winning.'

13

In the later set of satires we find that there has been a great advance all along the line. Horace is getting on for five-andthirty. His probationary period is now over. To use a familiar colloquialism, he has arrived.' He writes and criticises with a tone of authority, and as one who occupies a recognised literary position. A devout believer in the gospel of facts, he is coming round to a loyal confidence in the head of the State, and even wishes himself an epic poet that he might the more worthily sing Caesar's praises. Always eager to conciliate, he has dropped the personalities of his early style, and has thrown his compositions into a semi-dramatic mould. Years of study-including a study of the great Greek comedians-the sunshine of success, the sense of pecuniary independence, the mellowing and refining influence of surroundings both socially and intellectually congenial, have combined to bring about a great change in him, and have raised to an extraordinary degree the level of his literary art. On the other hand, his increasing intimacy with Maecenas has proved to be in some ways a real and serious hindrance to his work. He has become a power in Rome, an envied and much-pestered man." What with gossip-mongers teasing him for confidential information, sycophants waylaying him for favours, and place-hunters for the use of his growing influence, he can no longer call his soul his

He has lost all that privacy and leisure which his sensitive nature needed for meditation, study, and composition. His patron, Maecenas, appreciating to the full the significance of these vexations, has behaved with his accustomed generosity. Less than 13 I. Sat. iv. 129; vi. 122. 14 II. Sat. vi. 40 et seq.