Where she had meant to hide, in vain!
How arch her struggles o'er the token
From yielding which she can scarce refrain!
iii. LIFE AND MORALITY
But Horace's Epicureanism never goes to the length of Omar's. He would have shrunk from the Persian as extreme:
"Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare,
Tomorrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair,
Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where."
The Epicureanism of Horace is more nearly that of Epicurus himself, the saintly recluse who taught that "to whom little is not enough, nothing is enough," and who regarded plain living as at the same time a duty and a happiness. The lives of too liberal disciples have been a slander on the name of Epicurus. Horace is not among them. With degenerate Epicureans, whose philosophy permitted them "To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty," he had little in common. The extraction from life of the honey of enjoyment was indeed the highest purpose, but the purpose could never be realized without the exercise of discrimination, moderation, and a measure of spiritual culture. Life was an art, symmetrical, unified, reposeful,—like the poem of perfect art, or the statue, or the temple. In actual conduct, the hedonist of the better type differed little from the Stoic himself.