With this a new chapter in his life begins. During six years he had lived in Rome, first as an impecunious clerk, then as a client of Maecenas. To all Roman homes of quality and consequence clients were a necessary adjunct: men for the most part humble and needy, who attended to welcome the patron when issuing from his chamber in the morning, preceded and surrounded his litter in the streets, clearing a way for it through the crowd; formed, in short, his court, rewarded by a daily basket of victuals or a small sum of money. If a client was involved in litigation, his patron would plead his cause in person or by deputy; he was sometimes asked to dinner, where his solecisms in good breeding and his unfashionable dress, the rustic cut of his beard, thick shoes, gown clumsily draped, made him the butt of the higher guests. Juvenal, in a biting satire, describes the humiliation of a poor client at a rich man's table. "The host," he says, "drinks old beeswinged Setian wine, served to him in a gold goblet by a beautiful boy; to you a coarse black slave brings in a cracked cup wine too foul even to foment a bruise. His bread is pure and white, yours brown and mouldy; before him is a huge lobster, before you a lean shore-crab; his fish is a barbel or a lamprey, yours an eel:—and, if you choose to put up with it, you are rightly served." The relation, though not held to be disgraceful, involved sometimes bitter mortifications, and seems to us inconsistent with self-respect. We remember how it was resented in modern times, though in a much milder form, by Edmund Spenser, Dr. Johnson, and the poet Crabbe. Even between a Horace and a Maecenas it must have caused occasional embarrassment: we find the former, for instance, dedicating poems to men whose character he could not respect, but to whom, as his patron's associates, he was bound to render homage; while his supposed intimacy with the all-powerful minister exposed him to tedious solicitants, who waylaid him in his daily walks. He had become sick of "the smoke and the grandeur and the roar of Rome" (Od. III, 29, 12); his Sabine retreat would be an asylum and a haven; would "give him back to himself"; would endow him with competence, leisure, freedom; he hailed it as the mouse in his delightful apologue craved refuge in the country from the splendour and the perils of the town:
Give me again my hollow tree,
A crust of bread—and liberty.
(Sat. II, 6, fin.)
SUCCESS
Horace's Sabine farm ranks high among the holy places of the classic world; and through the labours of successive travellers, guided by the scattered indications in his poems, its site is tolerably certain. It was about thirty-two miles from Rome, reached in a couple of hours by pilgrims of the present time; to Horace, who never allowed himself to be hurried, the journey of a full day, or of a leisurely day and a half. Let us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-tailed mule (Sat. I, vi, 104), the heavy saddlebags across its loins stored with scrolls of Plato, of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the comedian, Archilochus the lyric poet. His road lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift waters of the Anio, amid steep hills crowned with small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites of Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A ride of twenty-seven miles would bring him to Tivoli, or Tibur, where he stopped to rest, sometimes to pass the night, possessing very probably a cottage in the little town. No place outside his home appealed to him like this. Nine times he mentions it, nearly always with a caressing epithet. It is green Tibur, dew-fed Tibur, Tibur never arid, leisurely Tibur, breezy Tibur, Tibur sloping to the sun. He bids his friend Varus plant vines in the moist soil of his own Tiburtine patrimony there; prays that when the sands of his life run low, he may there end his days; enumerates, in a noble ode (Od. I, 7), the loveliest spots on earth, preferring before them all the headlong Anio, Tibur's groves, its orchards saturated with shifting streams.
The dark pine waves on Tibur's classic steep,
From rock to rock the headlong waters leap,