No picture of the spot can be more graphic than are these noble lines. They open a Newdigate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, written, says tradition, by its brilliant author in a single night. (R. C. Sewell, Magdalen College, 1825.) Tivoli he had never visited; but those who stand to-day beside the Temple of the Sibyl on the edge of its ravine, who enjoy the fair beauty of the headlong Anio and the lesser Cascatelle, of the ruined Temple of Tiburtus, the Grottos of the Sirens and of Neptune, understand how a poet's genius can, as Shakespeare tells us, shadow forth things unseen, and give them local habitation.
From Tibur, still beside the Anio, we drive for about seven miles, until we reach the ancient Varia, now Vico Varo, mentioned by Horace as the small market town to which his five tenant-farmers were wont to repair for agricultural or municipal business. (Ep. I, xiv, 3.) Here, then, we are in the poet's country, and must be guided by the landmarks in his verse. Just beyond Vico Varo the Anio is joined by the Licenza. This is Horace's Digentia, the stream he calls it whose icy waters freshen him, the stream of which Mandela drinks. (Ep. I, xviii, 104-105.) And there, on its opposite bank, is the modern village Bardela, identified with Mandela by a sepulchral inscription recently dug up. We turn northward, following the stream; the road becomes distressingly steep, recalling a line in which the poet speaks of returning homeward "to his mountain stronghold." (Sat. II, vi, 16.) Soon we reach a village, Roccagiovine, whose central square is named Piazza Vacuna. Vacuna was the ancient name for the goddess Victory; and against the wall is fixed an exhumed tablet telling how the Emperor Vespasian here restored an ancient Temple of Victory. One more echo this name wakes in Horatian ears—he dates a letter to his friend Aristius Fuscus as written "behind the crumbling shrine of Vacuna." (Ep. I, x, 49.) Clearly we are near him now; he would not carry his writing tablets far away from his door. Yet another verification we require. He speaks of a spring just beside his home, cool and fine, medicinal to head and stomach. (Ep. I, xvi, 12.) Here it is, hard by, called to-day Fonte d'Oratini, a survival, we should like to believe, of the name Horatius. Somewhere close at hand must have been the villa, on one side or the other of a small hill now called Monte Rotondo. We may take our Horace from our pocket, and feel, as with our Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, with our Scott at Ashestiel, that we are gazing on the hills, the streams, and valleys, which received the primal outpourings of their muse, and are for ever vocal with its memories.
THE SITE OF HORACE'S VILLA.
From M. Rotondo, eastward to the Licenza, and southward to the high ground of Roccogiovine, stretched apparently the poet's not inconsiderable demesne. Part of it he let off to five peasants on the métayage system; the rest he cultivated himself, employing eight slaves superintended by a bailiff. The house, he tells us, was simple, with no marble pillars or gilded cornices (Od. II, xviii), but spacious enough to receive and entertain a guest from town, and to welcome occasionally his neighbours to a cheerful evening meal—"nights and suppers as of gods" (Sat. II, vi, 65), he calls them; where the talk was unfashionably clean and sensible, the fare beans and bacon, garden stuff and chicory and mallows. Around the villa was a garden, not filled with flowers, of which in one of his odes he expresses dislike as unremunerative (Od. II, xv, 6), but laid out in small parallelograms of grass, edged with box and planted with clipped hornbeam. The house was shaded from above by a grove of ilexes and oaks; lower down were orchards of olives, wild plums, cornels, apples. In the richer soil of the valley he grew corn, whose harvests never failed him, and, like Eve in Eden, led the vine to wed her elm. Against this last experiment his bailiff grumbled, saying that the soil would grow spice and pepper as soon as ripen grapes (Ep. I, xiv, 23); but his master persisted, and succeeded. Inviting Maecenas to supper, he offers Sabine wine from his own estate (Od. I, xx, 1); and visitors to-day, drinking the juice of the native grape at the little Roccogiovine inn, will be of opinion with M. de Florac, that "this little wine of the country has a most agreeable smack." Here he sauntered day by day, watched his labourers, working sometimes, like Ruskin at Hincksey, awkwardly to their amusement with his own hands; strayed now and then into the lichened rocks and forest wilds beyond his farm, surprised there one day by a huge wolf, who luckily fled from his presence (Od. I, xxii, 9); or—most enjoyable of all—lay beside spring or river with a book or friend of either sex.
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!