Modus agri non ita magnus,
Hortus ubi, et tecto vicinus jugis aquæ fons,
Et paulum silvæ super his.[[618]]
He coveted not his neighbour’s field,[[619]] even though it disfigured his own. He never prayed that chance might throw in his way a buried vase of silver.[[620]] The calm of his life contrasted favourably with the hundred affairs—not so much his own as of other people—which tormented him at Rome;[[621]] the importunities of his friends that he would use his influence in their behalf with Mæcenas;[[622]] the growing envy to which his good fortune subjected him:[[623]] his only cares were to store up provisions for his frugal maintenance during the year,[[624]] so that he might live in sweet forgetfulness of how he lived.[[625]] His days were divided between the books of the ancients,[[626]] the philosophy of Plato, and the lively scenes of Menander.[[627]]
The pleasing labours of the farm served him by way of exercise, although his town habits and awkwardness, and perhaps his short and stout figure, panting and perspiring under the heat and exertion, sometimes provoked good-humoured laughter.[[628]] At times, although he confessed how dangerous was the siren voice of sloth, he would spend hours of musing idleness on the margin of his favourite stream, listening to its murmurs, and to the music of the shepherd’s reed as it echoed through the Arcadian glen.[[629]] The evenings were devoted to social converse with honest and virtuous friends, from which scandal and gossip were banished; the conversation usually turning on moral and philosophical discussion,[[630]] whilst its seriousness was occasionally relieved by witty anecdotes and pointed fables, of which those of the town and country mice, and of the madman who, when cured, complained that his friends had destroyed all the happiness of his dreamy life, furnish examples. At these petits soupers, which he called “suppers of the gods,” the guests drank as much or as little as they pleased of his old wine, and enjoyed perfect freedom from the absurd laws which Roman custom permitted the chairman (arbiter bibendi) on such occasions to impose.
Sometimes, when the heat of summer was intense, he retired to the lofty Præneste (Palestrina,) where the climate was always cool and refreshing.[[631]] At some period of his life, also, he became possessed of a villa at Tibur (Tivoli,) of which the shady groves and roaring waterfalls furnished him a delightful refreshment after “the smoke, and magnificence, and noise of Rome.” Here he wrote many of his satires, and thus achieved the reputation as a satirist of which he had laid the foundation already; and was enabled to boast that, though earnestly desirous of peace with the world, it were better not to provoke him; that he who dared to offend him should smart for it, and be the laughing-stock of the whole city.[[632]]
The composition and arrangement of the second book of Satires probably occupied the thirtieth, thirty-first, and thirty-second years of the poet’s life,[[633]] and it was not published until the following year. This date will allow time for the expiration of more than seven or eight years since his intimacy with Mæcenas commenced.[[634]] The Satires were followed by the publication of the Epodes, very soon after the battle of Actium,[[635]] for the ninth is evidently an epinician ode on the occasion of that victory. Many of them contain noble sentiments, patriotic advice, burning indignation against the oriental self-indulgence of Antony,[[636]] the servility of Rome, its civil strife, and the degeneracy of the age; and remind us that, before Horace became an Epicurean and a courtier, he had fought against a tyrant in the ranks of freedom.[[637]] The first Epode was written just before the battle of Actium; the second and third at the period when he first exchanged the life of a fashionable man about town for that of a country gentleman. We see in one the delight which he derived from the consciousness that his estate was his own; that he had no pecuniary embarrassments any longer; his anticipations of the happiness to be enjoyed in the regularly-recurring labours of rural life; in the absence of all care; in the kind-hearted anticipations of humble domestic felicity; the superiority of a healthful meal to all the luxuries that wealth could purchase. In the other, notwithstanding all these professions of sentiment, he shows that his refined urbanity is shocked by the grossness of rural habits. His delicate nose cannot endure the smell of garlic: to him it is nothing less than poison, such as Canidia or Medea might have used. It is more deadly than the malaria of Apulia, or the envenomed robe steeped in the blood of Nessus. Nay, in the same spirit Johnson said that “He who would make a pun would pick a pocket,” he does not scruple to affirm that a garlic-eater would commit parricide.
The seventh Epode is a burst of indignant expostulation against the fratricidal madness which, at the bidding of an unprincipled woman, armed Romans against each other in that tragical episode, the Perugian war, when the first struggle took place between the civilians and the soldiers for political influence and power. In the Epodes the spirit is that of the satirist exaggerated. The outward form which he had modelled by a careful study of the Archilochian verse, prepared him for the cultivation of that poetry in which he stands pre-eminent. It was the state of transition through which he passed before he became a lyric poet.
With their publication concludes the first period of Horace’s literary life. It was now flowing on calmly and peaceably, undisturbed by anxiety either about himself or his country. Although the civil wars were not yet ended, or the peace of the world solemnly and finally proclaimed, until the temple of Janus was closed,[[638]] the course of Octavius to universal empire lay plain and open before him. Rome was at his feet, and owed to him its safety and prosperity.
Public and private well-doing developed a new phase of Horace’s genius. His muse soared to heights which had only been attempted by Pindar and the other Greek lyric poets. It cannot, of course, be supposed that he lived to the age of thirty-five years without having written many of those odes, which are so full of a youthful sprightliness and burning passion; but it is certain that many more were written, and the first three books published, during the period of eight years included between his thirty-fifth and forty-second years;[[639]] some when he was approaching, others when he had passed, his eighth lustre. In these three books it is probable that Horace intended all the products of his lyric muse should be comprised: to this purpose the last ode of the third book[[640]] seems to point. He considered his work done; and he was not insensible to the successful manner in which he had accomplished it. With conscious pride, and in a prophetic spirit, he exclaimed—