The page is often golden with homely precept or tale of the sort which for all time has been natural to farmer folk. There is the story of the country mouse and the town mouse, the fox and the greedy weasel that ate until he could not pass through the crack by which he came, the rustic who sat and waited for the river to get by, the horse that called man to aid him against the stag, and received the bit forever. The most formal and dignified of the Odes are not without the mellow charm of Italian landscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first six Odes of the third book, often called the Inaugural Odes, we get such glimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius on election day, the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships under the open sky, the restless Adriatic, the Bantine headlands and the low-lying Forentum of the poet's infancy, the babe in the wood of Voltur, the Latin hill-towns, the craven soldier of Crassus, and the stern patriotism of Regulus. Without these the Inaugurals would be but barren and cold, to say nothing of the splendid outburst against the domestic degradation of the time, so full of color and heat and picturesqueness:
'Twas not the sons of parents such as these
That tinged with Punic blood the rolling seas,
Laid low the cruel Hannibal, and brought
Great Pyrrhus and Antiochus to naught;
But the manly brood of rustic soldier folk,
Taught, when the mother or the father spoke
The word austere, obediently to wield
The heavy mattock in the Sabine field,
Or cut and bear home fagots from the height,