The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

Plate LXII. BA’ALBEK: THE TEMPLE OF BACCHUS, EAST PORTICO

Horace had less of the courtier’s suppleness and required winning to the imperial cause. It took two efforts of Mæcenas to secure him and we have letters preserved in which Augustus very good-humouredly confesses his disappointment that Horace has refused a secretaryship. Horace was the son of a freedman, as he was not in the least ashamed to confess. But his father had managed to secure for Quintus the education of a gentleman under Greek teachers in Rome, himself attending the boy to school in place of the rascally pedagogue slaves who usually undertook that office. Horace had further enjoyed a University education at Athens, where he had fallen under the spell of Brutus, for whom he fought at Philippi. He was, and remained, a Republican by instinct, but Mæcenas won him over to the cause of Cæsarism. He made his reputation with the Satires, a species of composition which may be termed truly Italian. The satire is a conversational medley written in the language of prose with the rhythm of poetry. In this Horace was imitating the old Roman master Lucilius. It is much to the credit of his critical discernment that Mæcenas was able to descry the brilliant abilities of Horace in this very uninspiring medium. For though his Satires were sometimes bitterly satirical in the modern sense of the word, Horace’s chief literary asset was the charm of a sunny, genial character. He had in addition a gift for composition and an industry which brought him almost but not quite to the level of original genius. It seems to have been Mæcenas who set him to the writing of lyrical odes. Biting satires might have been the most effective literary weapon in republican days, but the glorification of the new regime required something of a loftier strain. Vergil was engaged upon its epic, Horace was instructed to write its occasional verse. The Greek lyrists of the older period had as yet remained unimitated in Latin. Accordingly just as when the young Vergil had wanted to sing of kings and battles “Apollo had plucked his ear and admonished him that a shepherd should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song,” so Horace was deliberately set down to the task of celebrating the new Rome in the style of Sappho and Alcæus and Anacreon. That he accomplished his task so superbly is a proof of his energy and versatility. He himself, a gentle valetudinarian whose idea of a banquet was a mess of cabbage and pot-herbs, had to strike the lyre of revelry and sing of wine and love. He sang without conviction, without a spark of Sapphic fire or a note of natural music, but the noble rhetoric of the Roman schools in the golden age supported him. He laboured for the right word never in vain. No writer has ever equalled his matchless gift for making truisms sound true. No other writer has been able to assert that “it is sweet and comely to die for the fatherland,” or that “life is short” with an equal air of genuine wisdom. Latin with its terse precision is the ideal language for the expression of platitudes. His patriotic eloquence is Roman rhetoric of the best kind. But perhaps his real strength lies in drama. It is strange that Latin of the classical period failed at producing a native drama so completely as it did. Perhaps it was because the writers of that age were so completely under Greek influences that their natural Italian genius for the theatre was stifled under the load of a classical convention. Certainly Horace had the gift, and in such passages as the dramatic duologue (Ode ix. of Book III.) Donec gratus eram tibi, or the Epode of the witches (v.) At, o deorum, or the still more famous Epistle about the bore, he exhibits himself, like Browning, as a dramatist gone astray. Regarded from the purely lyrical point of view, the Century Hymn, which he wrote to order as Rome’s laureate in succession to Vergil, is perhaps his greatest achievement. The Secular Games of 17 B.C. were intended to bring visibly before men’s eyes the glories of the new monarchy and incidentally to carry in their train the salutary but unpopular measures of the Julian moral reform. So the choir of noble youths and maidens were taught to sing in their prayer to Diana:

diua, producas subolem patrumque
prosperes decreta super iugandis
feminis prolisque nouæ feraci
lege marita,[48]

Plate LXIII. BA’ALBEK: THE CIRCULAR TEMPLE

where the goddess is besought to increase the population of Rome and favour the senate’s decrees about marriage. The fourth book of the Odes was added after a long interval at the direct request of Augustus. It is intended to bring the achievements of Augustus and his family, particularly the triumphs of Tiberius and Drusus, into favourable comparison with the heroic stories of republican history. It is most melancholy to observe that Mæcenas, to whom Horace was genuinely attached and whose name constantly occurs in his earlier writings, here drops out of the poet’s verse because he had fallen out of Cæsar’s favour.

Although Horace is in his Odes as classical and conventional as all the Roman writers of his age, his Satires and Epistles are more intimate than any other Latin work of the great period. In them we get real glimpses of life at Rome, or on a country estate. We cannot fail to be struck with its idleness and emptiness. In the city he saunters from the forum to the baths, from the baths to the dinner-table with time and boredom for his only enemies. In the country he sometimes, it is true, toys with husbandry, or shows a faint interest in landscape-gardening or loiters among his books, but the life is to the last degree super-civilised and unreal. The very ideas of hope and progress were alien to the ancient world. The eyes of the Romans were always turned behind them, so that they could not see the greatness of the vista that was now opening for them in front.