Accordingly, of all those infinitely varied chords of deep emotion and imaginative tenderness, of which occasional traces are to be found in the literature of antiquity, and with which modern poetry, from Dante to Tennyson, is familiar, no hint is to be found in his pages. His deepest feeling is at best but a ferment of the blood; it is never the all-absorbing devotion of the heart. He had learned by his own experience just enough of the tender passion to enable him to write pretty verses about it, and to rally, not unsympathetically, such of his friends as had not escaped so lightly from the flame. Therefore it is that, as has been truly said, "his love-ditties are, as it were, like flowers, beautiful in form and rich in hues, but without the scent that breathes to the heart." We seek in them in vain for the tenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, which are the soul of all true love-poetry.
At the same time, Horace had a subtle appreciation of the beauty and grace, the sweetness and the fascination, of womanhood. Poet as he was, he must have delighted to contemplate the ideal elevation and purity of woman, as occasionally depicted in the poetry of Greece, and of which he could scarcely fail to have had some glimpses in real life. Nay, he paints (Odes, III. 11) the devotion of Hypermnestra for her husband's sake "magnificently false" (splendide mendax) to the promise which, with her sister Danaids, she had given to her father, in a way that proves he was not incapable of appreciating, and even of depicting, the purer and higher forms of female worth. But this exquisite portrait stands out in solitary splendour among the Lydes and Lalages, the Myrtales, Phrynes, and Glyceras of his other poems. These ladies were types of the class with which, probably, he was most familiar, those brilliant and accomplished hetairae, generally Greeks, who were trained up in slavery with every art and accomplishment which could heighten their beauty or lend a charm to their society. Always beautiful, and by force of their very position framed to make themselves attractive, these "weeds of glorious feature," naturally enough, took the chief place in the regards of men of fortune, in a state of society where marriage was not an affair of the heart but of money or connection, and where the wife so chosen seems to have been at pains to make herself more attractive to everybody rather than to her husband. Here and there these Aspasias made themselves a distinguished position, and occupied a place with their protector nearly akin to that of wife. But in the ordinary way their reign over any one heart was shortlived, and their career, though splendid, was brief,—a youth of folly, a premature old age of squalor and neglect. Their habits were luxurious and extravagant. In dress they outvied the splendour, not insignificant, of the Roman matrons; and they might be seen courting the admiration of the wealthy loungers of Rome by dashing along the Appian Way behind a team of spirited ponies driven by themselves. These things were often paid for out of the ruin of their admirers. Their society, while in the bloom and freshness of their charms, was greatly sought after, for wit and song came with them to the feast. Even Cicero, then well up in years, finds a pleasant excuse (Familiar Letters, IX. 26) for enjoying till a late hour the society of one Cytheris, a lady of the class, at the house of Volumnius Eutrapelus, her protector. His friend Atticus was with him; and although Cicero finds some excuse necessary, it is still obvious that even grave and sober citizens might dine in such equivocal company without any serious compromise of character.
It was perhaps little to be wondered at that Horace did not squander his heart upon women of this class. His passions were too well controlled, and his love of ease too strong, to admit of his being carried away by the headlong impulses of a deeply-seated devotion. This would probably have been the case even had the object of his passion been worthy of an unalloyed regard. As it was,
"His loves were like most other loves,
A little glow, a little shiver;"
and if he sometimes had, like the rest of mankind, to pay his homage to the universal passion by "sighing upon his midnight pillow" for the regards of a mistress whom he could not win, or who had played him false, he was never at a loss to find a balm for his wounds elsewhere. He was not the man to nurse the bitter-sweet sorrows of the heart—to write, and to feel, like Burns—
"'Tis sweeter for thee despairing,
Than aught in the world beside."
Parabilem amo Venerem facilemque, "Give me the beauty that is not too coy," is the Alpha and Omega of his personal creed. How should it have been otherwise? Knowing woman chiefly, as he obviously did, only in the ranks of the demi-monde, he was not likely to regard the fairest face, after the first heyday of his youth was past, as worth the pain its owner's caprices could inflict. For, as seen under that phase, woman was apt to be both mercenary and capricious; and if the poet suffered, as he did, from the fickleness of more than one mistress, the probability is—and this he was too honest not to feel—that they had only forestalled him in inconstancy.
If Horace ever had a feeling which deserved the name of love, it was for the Cinara mentioned in the lines above quoted. She belonged to the class of hetairae, but seems to have preferred him, from a genuine feeling of affection, to her wealthier lovers. Holding him as she did completely under her thraldom, it was no more than natural that she should have played with his emotions, keeping him between ecstasy and torture, as such a woman, especially if her own heart were also somewhat engaged, would delight to do with a man in whose love she must have rejoiced as something to lean upon amid the sad frivolities of her life. The exquisite pain to which her caprices occasionally subjected him was more than he could bear in silence, and drove him, despite his quick sense of the ridiculous, into lachrymose avowals to Maecenas of his misery over his wine, which were, doubtless, no small source of amusement to the easy-going statesman, before his wife Terentia had taught him by experience what infinite torture a charming and coquettish woman has it in her power to inflict. Long years afterwards, when he is well on to fifty, Horace reminds his friend (Epistles, I. 7) of
"The woes blabbed o'er our wine, when Cinara chose
To tease me, cruel flirt—ah, happy woes!"—
words in which lurks a subtle undercurrent of pathos, like that in Sophie Arnould's exclamation in Le Brun's Epigram,—