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:
Goddess, at lovely Antium is thy shrine:
Ready art thou to raise with grace divine
Our mortal frame from lowliest dust of earth,
Or turn triumph to funeral for thy mirth;