So roll to each other across the ages and the continents echoes of the Persian and the Roman bards.
Of the beauty of his home he speaks always modestly; it may not compare with Praeneste, Tarentum, Baiae; its charm he is never weary of extolling. Nowhere, he says, is the air sweeter and more balmy, in summer temperate, warm in winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm, tranquillity, repose, making, as Wordsworth says, the very thought of country life a thought of refuge; and that was what, so long in populous city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was his home, where he could possess his soul, could be self-centred and serene. "This," says Ruskin, "is the true nature of Home; it is the Place of Peace."
He loved the country, yet he was no hermit. When sickened of town life he could apostrophize the country in the beautiful lines which many a jaded Londoner has echoed (Sat. II, vi, 60); but after some months of its placid joys the active social side of him would re-assert itself: the welcoming friends of the great city, its brilliant talk, its rush of busy life, recovered their attractiveness, and for short intervals, in the healthy season of the year, he would return to Rome. There it is less easy to image him than in his rustic home. Nature, if spared by man, remains unaltered; the heights and recesses of the Digentian valley meet our eye to-day scarce changed in twenty centuries, but the busy, crowded Rome of Horace is now only a desolate excavation. We stand upon the "Rock of Triumph," the Capitoline Hill, looking down upon the Forum: it lies like a stonemason's yard: stumps of pillars, fragments of brick or marble, overthrown entablatures, pillars, altars, tangles of staircases and enclosures, interspersed with poppies, wild oats, trefoils, confuse and crowd it:
Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grow
Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped
On what were chambers; arch crushed, columns strown
In fragments; choked up vaults, where the owl peeped,
Deeming it midnight.
But patient, daily survey, educated by the restorations of a Lanciani, enables us to piece together these encumbering ruins, until with tolerable clearness we can follow Horace in his walk along the Via Sacra towards Caesar's gardens, and can fairly reconstruct the objects which must have met his view. Everywhere is haunted ground: there is the bronze wolf of the Capitol, "thunder-stricken nurse of Rome," and the Tarpeian rock, from which "the Traitor's leap cured all ambition." There is the mythical gulf of Curtius, and the Mamertine prison where the Catiline conspirators were strangled, with its vault into which Jugurtha, after gracing the triumph of Marius, was hurled to die. Maiden-hair fern grows profusely in the crevices of Juturna's well, hard by the spring where the great twin brethren gave their horses drink after the battle of the Lake Regillus. Half covered with a mass of green acanthus is the base of Vesta's Temple, adjoining the atrium of the Virgins' house surrounded with their portrait statues: their names are engraved on each pedestal, but one is carefully erased, its original having, it is supposed, violated her vestal vow. We pause upon the spot where Caesar's body was burned, and beside the rostra whence Cicero thundered, and Antony spoke his "Friends, Romans, countrymen"; return finally to the Capitoline Museum, nucleus and centre of the ancient mistress of the world, to gaze upon gods, senators, emperors, shining still in undiminished majesty; on the Antinous, the Amazon, the Juno, the Dying Gladiator, and the Grecian masterpiece of Praxiteles.