Horace will not be popular. He will remain the poet of the few who enjoy the process of thinking and recognize the charm of skillful expression. Tacitus and Juvenal esteem him, the Emperor Alexander Severus reads him in leisure hours, the long list of mediocrities representing the course of literary history demonstrate by their content that the education of men of letters in general includes a knowledge of him. The greatest of the late pagans,—Ausonius and Claudian at the end of the fourth century; Boëthius, philosopher-victim of Theodoric in the early sixth; Cassiodorus, the chronicler, imperial functionary in the same century,—disclose a familiarity whose foundations are to be looked for in love and enthusiasm rather than in mere cultivation. It may be safely assumed that, in general, appreciation of Horace was proportionate to greatness of soul and real love of literature.
The same assumption may be made in the realm of Christian literature. Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianity against paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiast and martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications of familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the intense, the irascible, Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christian poets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the late sixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still a native tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a love for him.
The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of the centuries called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to the name of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they must at any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light was not totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters was due to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leaving the era of ancient Rome.
Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have considered only his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admiration which represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was another phase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though its first cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was the phase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations had probably appeared in his own life-time. It was the immortality of the text-book and the commentary.
Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the Institutes is an indication that the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latter half of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next, gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where little boys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lamp shining upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discolored by soot from the wicks,
totidem olfecisse lucernas,
Quot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset
Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni.
(VII. 225 ff.)
The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as well as lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. The first critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appeared as early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut, disappointed in the military career, he turned to the collection, study, and critical editing of Latin authors, among whom, besides Horace, were Virgil, Lucretius, Persius, and Terence. His method, comprising careful comparison of manuscripts, emendations, and punctuation, with annotations explanatory and aesthetic, all prefaced by the author's biography, won him the reputation of the most erudite of Roman men of letters. It is in no small measure due to him that the tradition of Horace's text is so comparatively good.