Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

Besides (so his irritated thoughts ran on), how could Florus expect a man who lived in Rome to write imaginative poetry? How tiresome the days were there! Whenever he went out, some one wanted his help in a dull business matter or dragged him off to a public reading by some equally dull author. Even if he tried to visit his friends, one lived on the Quirinal and one on the Aventine, and the walk between lay through noisy streets filled with clumsy workmen, huge wagons, funeral processions, mad dogs, dirty pigs, and human bores. No notes from the lyre could make themselves heard amid such confusion.

Suddenly his feeling quickened: how good it was to be away just now in this autumnal season, when Rome laboured under leaden winds fraught with melancholy depression, and when his head always gave him trouble and he especially needed quiet and freedom! The afternoon sun enveloped him in a delicious warmth, the shadows on the grass danced gayly, as a faint breeze stirred the branches above his head, the merry little stream near by seemed to prattle of endless content.

The frown above Horace's eyes disappeared, and with it his inner annoyance. Florus was a dear fellow, after all, and although he intended to write him a piece of his mind, he would do it in hexameters, more for his amusement than for his edification. It would be a pretty task for the morning hours to-morrow. Now he meant to be still, and forget his writing tablets altogether. He was glad that his house was empty of guests, much as he had enjoyed the preceding week when a lively company had come over from Tibur, in whose retreat they were spending September, to hunt him out. They had had charming dinners together, falling easily into conversations that were worth while, and by tacit consent forgetting the inanities of town gossip. But at present he liked the quiet even better. He had been walking about his little place more regularly, laughing at his steward who often grew impatient over the tiny crops, and assuring himself of the comfort of the few slaves who ran the farm. And on more extended walks he had felt once more, as he had so often in these long years, the charm of the village people near him, with their friendly manners, their patient devotion to work, and their childlike enjoyment of country holidays.

Certainly, as he grew older and his physical energy diminished (he had not been really well since he was a very young man, and now before his time he felt old), he appreciated more and more his good fortune in owning a corner of the earth so situated. He remembered with amusement that in earlier days he sometimes used to feel bored by the solitude of his farm, at the end of his journey from Rome, and wonder why he had left the lively city. But that was when he was young enough to enjoy the bustle of the streets, and, especially in the evenings, to join the crowds of pleasure-seekers and watch the fortune-tellers and their victims. That he could mingle inconspicuously with the populace he had always counted one of the chief rewards of an inconspicuous income. Now, the quiet of the country and the leisure for reading seemed so much more important. He was not even as anxious as he used to be to go to fashionable Tibur or Tarentum or Baiæ in search of refreshment. How pleased Virgil would have been with his rustic content!

The sudden thought brought a smile to his eyes and then a shadow. Virgil had been dead more than ten years, but his loss seemed all at once a freshly grievous thing. So much that was valuable in his life was inextricably associated with him. Horace's mind, usually sanely absorbed in present interests, began, because of a trick of memory, to turn more and more toward the past. Virgil had been one of the first to help him out of the bitterness that made him a rather gloomy young man when the Republic was defeated, and his own little property dissipated, and had introduced him to Mæcenas, the source of all his material prosperity and of much of his happiness. And indeed he had justified Virgil's faith, Horace said to himself with a certain pride. He had begun as the obscure son of a freedman, and here he was now, after fifty, one of the most successful poets of Rome, a friend of Augustus, a person of importance in important circles, and withal a contented man.

This last achievement he knew to be the most difficult, as it was the most unusual. And there in the clarifying sunshine he said to himself that the rich treasure of his content had been bought by noble coin: by his temperance and good sense in a luxurious society, by his self-respecting independence in a circle of rich patrons, and perhaps, above all, by his austerely honest work among many temptations to debase the gift the Muses had bestowed upon him. He had had no Stoic contempt for the outward things of this world. Indeed, after he had frankly accepted the Empire he came to feel a pride in the glory of Augustus's reign, as he felt a deep, reconciling satisfaction in its peace, its efforts at restoring public morals, its genuine insistence on a renewed purity of national life. The outward tokens of increasing wealth charmed his eyes, and he took the keenest pleasure in the gorgeous marble pillars and porticoes of many of the houses he frequented, in the beautiful statues, the bronze figures, the tapestries, the gold and silver vessels owned by many of his friends, and in the rich appointments and the perfect service of their dining-rooms, where he was a familiar guest. But he had never wanted these things for himself, any more than he wished for a pedigree and the images of ancestors to adorn lofty halls. He came away from splendid houses more than willing to fall back into plainer ways. Neither had he ever been apologetic toward his friends. If they wanted to come and dine with him on inexpensive vegetables, he would gladly himself superintend the polishing of his few pieces of silver and the setting of his cheap table. If they did not choose to accept his invitations, why, they knew how much their standards amused him. As for his more august friends, the Emperor himself, Mæcenas, and Messala, and Pollio, he had always thought it a mere matter of justice and common courtesy to repay their many kindnesses by a cheerful adaptability when he was with them, and by a dignified gratitude. But not even the Emperor could have compelled him to surrender his inner citadel.

Perhaps, after all, that was why Augustus had forced him back to the lyre, in support of his reforms and in praise of the triumphal campaigns of Tiberius and Drusus. An honest mind betokened honest workmanship, and upon such workmanship, rather than upon a subsidised flattery, the imperial intruder wished to stake his repute.

However lightly Horace may from time to time have taken other things, he never trifled with his literary purpose after it had once matured. Even his first satiric efforts had been honestly made; and when he found his true mission of adapting the perfect Greek poetry to Latin measures, there was no airy grace of phrase, no gossamer-like slightness of theme, which did not rest upon the unseen structure of artistic sincerity. That was why in rare solemn moments he believed that his poetry would live, live beyond his own lifetime and his age, even, perhaps, as long as the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgin should ascend to the Capitol in public processional. He had said laughingly of his published metrical letters that they might please Rome for a day, travel on to the provinces, and finally become exercise-books for school-boys in remote villages. But his odes were different. They were not prosaic facts and comments put into metre: they were poetry. If he were only a laborious bee compared with the soaring swans of Greek lyric, at least he had distilled pure honey from the Parnassian thyme. Now that he had determined to touch the lyre no more, he felt more than ever sure that his lyre had served Rome well. How much better, indeed, than his sword could have served her, in spite of the military ambitions of his youth. What a fool he had been to believe that the Republic could be saved by blood, or that he could be a soldier!

All these things Horace was meditating beneath his ilex tree, being moved to evaluate his life by the chance appeal of his memory to that dead friend whose "white soul" had so often, when he was alive, proved a touchstone for those who knew him. He was sure that in the larger issues Virgil would have given him praise on this afternoon; and with that thought came another which was already familiar to him. It was less probing, perhaps, but more regretfully sad. If only his father could have lived to see his success! His mother he had not known at all, except in his halting, childish imagination when, one day in each year, he had been led by his father's hand to stand before the small, plain urn containing her ashes. But his father had been his perfect friend and comrade for twenty years. He had been able to talk to him about anything. Above all the reserves of maturer life, he could remember the confidence with which as a child he had been used to rush home, bursting with the gossip of the playground, or some childish annoyance, or some fresh delight. He could not remember that he was ever scolded during his little choleric outbursts or untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really happier. Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing; and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel his cheeks grow cool again. In looking back, Horace knew that no philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control and to mental temperance as had the common, kindly, shrewd man who had once been a slave, and whose freedom had come to him only a few years before the birth of his son.

And how ambitious the freedman had been for the education of his son! Horace could understand now the significance of two days in his life which at their occurrence had merely seemed full of a vivid excitement. One had come when he was ten years old, but no lapse of years could dull its colours. On the day before, he had been wondering how soon he would be allowed to enter the village school, and become one of the big boys whom he watched every morning with round eyes as they went past his house, their bags and tablets hanging from their arms. But on that great day his father had lifted him in his arms—he was a little fellow—and looking at him long and earnestly had said, "My boy, we are going to Rome next week, so that you may go to school. I have made up my mind that you deserve as good an education as the son of any knight or senator." Horace had cried a little at first in nervous excitement, and in bewilderment at his father's unwonted gravity. But all that was soon forgotten in the important bustle of preparations for a journey to the Capital. The whole village had made them the centre of critical interest. Once a bald, thick-set centurion had met them on the street, and stopped them with an incredulous question. When he was informed that it was true that the boy was to be taken to Rome, he had laughed sneeringly and said, "How proud you will be of his city education when you find that he comes back to your little government position, and can make no more money than you have." Horace had looked wonderingly into his father's face, and found it unannoyed and smiling. And even as a child he had noticed the dignity with which he answered the village magnate: "Sir, I wish to educate my son to know what is best to know, and to be a good man. If in outward circumstances he becomes only an honest tax-collector, he will not for that reason have studied amiss, nor shall I be discontented."