Horace

by Sir Theodore Martin

The incident thus recorded is not necessarily discredited by the circumstance of its being closely akin to what is told by Aelian of Pindar, that a swarm of bees settled upon his lips, and fed him with honey, when he was left exposed upon the highway. It probably had some foundation in fact, whatever may be thought of the implied augury of the special favour of the gods which is said to have been drawn from it at the time. In any case, the picture of the strayed child, sleeping unconscious of its danger, with its hands full of wild-flowers, is pleasant to contemplate.

In his father's house, and in those of the Apulian peasantry around him, Horace became familiar with the simple virtues of the poor, their industry and independence, their integrity, chastity, and self-denial, which he loved to contrast in after years with the luxury and vice of imperial Rome. His mother he would seem to have lost early. No mention of her occurs, directly or indirectly, throughout his poems; and remarkable as Horace is for the warmth of his affections, this could scarcely have happened had she not died when he was very young. He appears also to have been an only child. This doubtless drew him closer to his father, and the want of the early influences of mother or sister may serve to explain why one misses in his poetry something of that gracious tenderness towards womanhood, which, looking to the sweet and loving disposition of the man, one might otherwise have expected to find in it. That he was no common boy we may be very sure, even if this were not manifest from the fact that his father resolved to give him a higher education than was to be obtained under a provincial schoolmaster. With this view, although little able to afford the expense, he took his son, when about twelve years old, to Rome, and gave him the best education the capital could supply. No money was spared to enable him to keep his position among his fellow-scholars of the higher ranks. He was waited on by several slaves, as though he were the heir to a considerable fortune. At the same time, however, he was not allowed either to feel any shame for his own order, or to aspire to a position which his patrimony was unable to maintain. His father taught him to look forward to some situation akin to that in which his own modest competency had been acquired; and to feel that, in any sphere, culture, self-respect, and prudent self-control must command influence, and afford the best guarantee for happiness. In reading this part of Horace's story, as he tells it himself, one is reminded of Burns's early lines about his father and himself:—

"My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border,
And carefully he bred me up in decency and order.
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing,
For without an honest manly heart no man was worth regarding."

The parallel might be still further pursued. "My father," says Gilbert Burns, "was for some time almost the only companion we had. He conversed familiarly on all subjects with us as if we had been men, and was at great pains, while we accompanied him in the labours of the farm, to lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend to increase our knowledge, or confirm us in virtuous habits." How closely this resembles the method adopted with Horace by his father will be seen hereafter. {Footnote: Compare it, too, with what Horace reports of "Ofellus the hind, Though no scholar, a sage of exceptional kind," in the Second Satire of the Second Book, from line 114 to the end.}

Horace's literary master at Rome was Orbilius Pupillus, a grammarian, who had carried into his school his martinet habits as an old soldier; and who, thanks to Horace, has become a name (plagosus Orbilius, Orbilius of the birch) eagerly applied by many a suffering urchin to modern pedagogues who have resorted to the same material means of inculcating the beauties of the classics. By this Busby of the period Horace was grounded in Greek, and made familiar, too familiar for his liking, with Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, Attius, Livius Andronicus, and other early Latin writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to one who had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorous style of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care that he should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, in which music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But, what was of still more importance during this critical period of the future poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he enjoyed the advantages of his father's personal superintendence and of a careful moral training. His father went with him to all his classes, and, being himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour, he gave the boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attention to the follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around him, showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates of reason and common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences to the good name and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions. The method he pursued is thus described by Horace (Satires, I. 4):—

"Should then my humorous vein run wild, some latitude allow.
I learned the habit from the best of fathers, who employed
Some living type to stamp the vice he wished me to avoid.
Thus temperate and frugal when exhorting me to be,
And with the competence content which he had stored for me,
'Look, boy!' he'd say,' at Albius' son—observe his sorry plight!
And Barrus, that poor beggar there! Say, are not these a sight,
To warn a man from squandering his patrimonial means?'
When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans;
'Sectanus, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswear
Intrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere;
'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught.
The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be
sought,
The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold
The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old,
And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name.
When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your
frame,
You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won
And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done,
Hard it might be—'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can
quote'—
And then as model pointed to some public man of note.
Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you
One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too,
Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?'
And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread
Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint,
So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint
They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those
Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes."

Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the kindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical and didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the rugged maxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly but echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his own Ofellus, and the elders of the race—not, let us hope, altogether bygone—of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as "Religious men, who give to God and men their dues,"—the Apulian freedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered from books, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace to his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that father's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as occurring in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family and vast wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poet which was afterwards to ripen into a lifelong friendship.

"Yet if some trivial faults, and these but few,
My nature, else not much amiss, imbue
(Just as you wish away, yet scarcely blame,
A mole or two upon a comely frame),
If no man may arraign me of the vice
Of lewdness, meanness, nor of avarice;
If pure and innocent I live, and dear
To those I love (self-praise is venial here),
All this I owe my father, who, though poor,
Lord of some few lean acres, and no more,
Was loath to send me to the village school,
Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule,—
Centurions, and the like,—were wont to swarm,
With slate and satchel on sinister arm,
And the poor dole of scanty pence to pay
The starveling teacher on the quarter-day;
But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome,
There to be taught all arts that grace the home
Of knight and senator. To see my dress,
And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no less
Than patrimonial fortunes old and great
Had furnished forth the charges of my state.
When with my tutors, he would still be by,
Nor ever let me wander from his eye;
And, in a word, he kept me chaste (and this
Is virtue's crown) from all that was amiss,
Nor such in act alone, but in repute,
Till even scandal's tattling voice was mute.
No dread had he that men might taunt or jeer,
Should I, some future day, as auctioneer,
Or, like himself, as tax-collector, seek
With petty fees my humble means to eke.
Nor should I then have murmured. Now I know,
More earnest thanks, and loftier praise I owe.
Reason must fail me, ere I cease to own
With pride, that I have such a father known;
Nor shall I stoop my birth to vindicate,
By charging, like the herd, the wrong on Fate,
That I was not of noble lineage sprung:
Far other creed inspires my heart and tongue.
For now should Nature bid all living men
Retrace their years, and live them o'er again,
Each culling, as his inclination bent,
His parents for himself, with mine content,
I would not choose whom men endow as great
With the insignia and seats of state;
And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes,
Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise,
In thus refusing to assume the care
Of irksome state I was unused to bear."

The education, of which Horace's father had laid the foundation at Rome, would not have been complete without a course of study at Athens, then the capital of literature and philosophy, as Rome was of political power. Thither Horace went somewhere between the age of 17 and 20. "At Rome," he says (Epistles, II. ii. 23),

"I had my schooling, and was taught
Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought;
At classic Athens, where I went ere long,
I learned to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong,
And search for truth, if so she might be seen,
In Academic groves of blissful green." (C.)