Chapter III: Golden Age of Roman Literature (2)

Among the other pieces of Catullus must be mentioned his cutting satires, in which even Cæsar was not spared; his exquisite _epithalamia_, or marriage-hymns; and the “Atys,” a weird poem remarkable for its metrical effects. Our poet’s lyric powers may be further judged of by the following

ELEGY ON LESBIA’S SPARROW.

“Loves and Graces, mourn with me,
Mourn, fair youths, where’er ye be!
Dead my Lesbia’s sparrow is,
Sparrow, that was all her bliss,
Than her very eyes more dear;
For he made her dainty cheer,
Knew her well, as any maid
Knows her mother, never strayed
From her lap, but still would go
Hopping round her to and fro,
And to her, and her alone,
Chirrup’d with such pretty tone.
Now he treads that gloomy track,
Whence none ever may come back.
Out upon you, and your power,
Which all fairest things devour,
Orcus’ gloomy shades, that e’er
Ye should take my bird so fair!
Oh! poor bird! Oh! dismal shades!
Yours the blame is, that my maid’s
Eyes, dear eyes! are swoll’n and red,
Weeping for her darling dead.”
THEODORE MARTIN.

POETRY OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE.

As prose reached its highest development in the last years of the Republic, so many causes contributed to perfect Latin verse in the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Secured upon the throne by his triumph at Actium (31 B.C.), Augustus pursued a conciliatory course, with a view to winning the love of his subjects, and he was eminently successful. All classes, tired of civil war and its attendant proscriptions and massacres, hailed with delight the return of peace; and under the patronage of the emperor, seconded by his minister Mæcenas, poetry revived.

Augustus was as fortunate in finding at Rome a number of youthful poets, many of them in humble circumstances and of provincial origin, as in the possession of a minister who could appreciate and foster their talents. Mæcenas knew the value of genius too well to let it die of neglect; and his name, as the patron of art and letters, has passed into a proverb. His luxurious gardens were the haunt of poets and savants, and round his sumptuous table sat an inspired circle who poured their grateful tributes into the ears of their master and his.

Thus the munificence of Augustus and Mæcenas, themselves both critics and writers, combined with the political quiet that gave leisure for literary pursuits, to make their period the golden age of poetry. Prose, on the other hand, declined. Political eloquence was powerless in the face of despotism; while the veracious historian must needs tread a dangerous path, or seal his lips.

The poets of the Augustan era were deficient, as a rule, in that creative genius which characterized the age of Pericles in Greece, their works being rather the fruits of art and industry. A long and careful training, in which Greek studies played a prominent part, prepared them for their high profession; Horace tells us that at the age of twenty-three he was still “seeking the truth among the groves of Academus.” Works on various subjects could now be consulted in the public libraries of Rome; and Alexandrian models helped to mould the literary taste of the day. (_Compare Sellar’s “Roman Poets of the Augustan Age.”_)

=Virgil.=—In the little village of Andes near Mantua, on the 15th of October, B.C. 70, Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro), first saw the light. His boyhood was spent on the banks of the winding Mincio in a quiet round of rural pursuits; his father, as owner of a small farm, being among those whom the poet subsequently pictured as the happiest of men.

Alive to the importance of education, Virgil’s parents set aside a portion of their slender means to provide for his instruction; and when he reached the age of twelve, his father entered him in a school at Cremona. In his seventeenth year he went to Rome, and there prosecuted the higher studies, familiarizing himself with the Greek poets, and spending his leisure in the composition of lyric pieces. Having completed his education, Virgil returned to his native place, where, amid the natural attractions that surrounded him, he conceived the idea of rivalling Theocritus in bucolic poetry, and in 42 B.C. began his Eclogues.

After the victory of the Triumvirs in the civil war, the lands about Cremona and Mantua were divided among the soldiers who had served against Brutus, and the estate of Virgil, neutral though he had been, was taken from him. On the poet’s application to Octavius, however, it was restored, and in one of his Eclogues he gave utterance to his sincere gratitude. Shortly after, Virgil was ejected again, and this time narrowly escaped with his life by swimming the Mincio. Nor does he appear to have ever been reinstated. Octavius, however, loaded him with favors; and a house in Rome near the palace of his friend Mæcenas, with a lovely villa in the suburbs of Naples, where the climate agreed better with his delicate constitution than the damp air of the north, reconciled him to the loss of his boyhood’s home.

The Eclogues, published about 37 B.C., established Virgil’s reputation as a pastoral poet, and gained him no mean place among the literary and political celebrities that crowded the house of Mæcenas. It was by the advice of this statesman that the poet undertook the most finished and original of all his productions,—the Georgics,—a work which, though only about 2200 lines in length, occupied him for seven years.

Having declared in this poem that “he would wed Cæsar’s glories to an epic strain,” Virgil was held to his promise by the emperor, at whose solicitation he gave the rest of his life (eleven years) to the composition of the Æneid. In this great epic, like the Odyssey a sequel to the Iliad, the origin of Rome is traced back to ancient Troy, and the genealogy of Augustus to her greatest surviving hero, “the pious Æneas.” Death stopped the poet’s pen when three years’ labor was yet necessary, in his estimation, to perfect his work.

It appears that in the year 19 B.C. Virgil undertook a tour through Greece and Asia Minor, to acquaint himself with the geography of the countries described in the Æneid; but meeting Augustus at Athens, he changed his plans and started with the emperor for Rome. On the way he was seized with a mortal illness, and only lived to reach the harbor of Brundisium in southern Italy. On his death-bed, Virgil besought his friends to bring him the manuscript of his epic, that he might consign it to the flames; but they wisely saved a masterpiece which the modesty of its author would have condemned to oblivion.

Virgil was interred at Naples. A simple vault, overgrown with ivy and wild myrtle, still marks his grave. On a marble slab set in the rock opposite is the inscription which Dryden has thus rendered:—

“I sung flocks, tillage, heroes: Mantua gave
Me life; Brundisium, death; Naples, a grave.”

Virgil has been described as a tall, dark-complexioned man, careless of his dress, and with awkward country airs. His life was that of a student; and despite the fact that he was a martyr to dyspepsia and pulmonary disease, he did not allow his delicate health to interfere with his literary labors. Of gentle, unassuming manners, he would fly from the admiring crowds that followed him in the streets; and none would have inferred from his appearance or conversation that he was a great poet. He was more than a great poet—he was a pure, unselfish, honest man, uncontaminated by the prevailing vices. Not the least among his virtues was filial piety. His countrymen felt how great and noble he was, when they rose in the theatre and paid him equal honor with the emperor himself.

Had he lived, it was Virgil’s purpose, after completing the Æneid, to study philosophy, the love of which he had imbibed in early life from the verses of Lucretius. The investigation of truth was his highest aim; and there are reasons for believing that he had in mind the preparation of a grand philosophical poem that might have cast into the shade the stately treatise “On the Nature of Things.”

Such liberality had Virgil experienced from his friends that he left a fortune of $400,000, to be divided, as he never married, among his brother, Augustus, Mæcenas, and others of his associates.

THE ECLOGUES.—Virgil was the first Roman writer to cultivate pastoral poetry, and his Eclogues (_selections_), or more properly Bucolics (_shepherd poems_), are mostly dialogues, in imitation of the idyls of Theocritus. Various subjects are charmingly discussed by imaginary shepherds, in whom one sometimes recognizes the poet and his friends.

The least understood of Virgil’s Eclogues is the one entitled “Pollio,” from the name of the consul to whom it is addressed. It was written B.C. 40, and predicts the coming of a wondrous Child, whose birth would usher in a golden age of peace and happiness. Some have seen in this child an unconscious allusion to the Babe of Bethlehem, whose advent the Sibylline oracles are believed to have foretold. Perhaps Virgil had heard of the Hebrew prophecies indirectly through the Alexandrian Greeks, and recast them in Latin verse; perhaps it was but a Roman infant—Pollio’s child—whose birth he sung in an exaggerated strain. However this may be, we may remember that the heathen as well as the Jewish world at this time expected a great reformer, who should restore the innocence and bliss of by-gone ages.

EXTRACT FROM THE POLLIO.

“Comes the Last Age, of which the Sibyl sung—
A new-born cycle of the rolling years;
Justice returns to earth, the rule returns
Of good King Saturn; lo! from the high heavens
Comes a new seed of men. Lucina chaste,
Speed the fair infant’s birth, with whom shall end
Our age of iron, and the golden prime
Of earth return; thine own Apollo’s reign
In him begins anew. This glorious age
Inaugurates, O Pollio, with thee;
Thy consulship shall date the happy months;
Under thine auspices the Child shall purge
Our guilt-stains out, and free the land from dread.
He with the gods and heroes like the gods
Shall hold familiar converse, and shall rule
With his great father’s spirit the peaceful world.
For thee, O Child! the earth untilled shall pour
Her early gifts, the winding ivy’s wreath,
Smiling acanthus, and all flowers that blow.
The ground beneath shall cradle thee in blooms,
The venomed snake shall die, the poisonous herb
Perish from out thy path.
So, when the years shall seal thy manhood’s strength,
The busy merchant shall forsake the seas—
Barter there shall not need; the soil shall bear
For all men’s use all products of all climes.
The glebe shall need no harrow, nor the vine
The searching knife, the oxen bear no yoke;
The wool no longer shall be schooled to lie,
Dyed in false hues; but, coloring as he feeds,
The ram himself in the rich pasture-lands
Shall wear a fleece now purple and now gold,
And the lambs grow in scarlet. So the Fates,
Who know not change, have bid their spindles run,
And weave for this blest age the web of doom.”
W. L. COLLINS.

THE GEORGICS.—Having shown his powers in the Eclogues, Virgil was not unwilling to put them to a further proof, when Mæcenas suggested a work on husbandry, which should dignify that ancient art and revive a love for the simple pursuits of the fathers of the Republic.

Taking Hesiod’s “Works and Days” as his model, he added the artistic Georgics (_agricultural poem_) to the works of Cato and Varro on rural life. No less elevated in tone than theirs, it possesses an additional attraction in its dress of verse, glows with the author’s love of nature, and displays his ardent zeal to check the national decay. Virgil labored upon the Georgics for seven years, it being his habit to rise betimes and dictate in the early morning verses which he spent the rest of the day in polishing and condensing.

The Georgics is a didactic poem, and as such, with the work of Lucretius, represents the only department in which the Romans excelled both the Greeks and all modern nations. The first of its four books is devoted to tillage; it gives directions for ploughing (early and often, was Virgil’s motto), sowing, and fertilizing, and explains the signs of the weather. We learn from it that the pests of the modern farmer were not unknown to the old Roman husbandman:—

“With ponderous roller smooth the level floor,
And bind with chalky cement o’er and o’er;
Lest springing weeds expose thy want of art,
And worn in many a chink the surface part:
There builds the field-mouse underneath the ground,
And loads her little barn with plunder crowned;
There works the mole along her dark abode,
There in its hollow lurks the lonely toad,
There wastes the weevil with insatiate rage,
There the wise ant that dreads the wants of age.”

Arboriculture is treated minutely in the second book, the vine receiving the principal share of attention. Here we have the most beautiful of those digressions which lend an enchanting variety to the style of the Georgics—the poet’s glowing eulogy of his native land.

PRAISES OF ITALY.

“Yet nor the Median groves, nor rivers, rolled,
Ganges, and Hermus, o’er their beds of gold,
Nor Ind, nor Bactra, nor the blissful land
Where incense spreads o’er rich Panchaia’s sand,
Nor all that fancy paints in fabled lays,
O native Italy! transcend thy praise.
Though here no bulls beneath the enchanted yoke
With fiery nostril o’er the furrow smoke,
No hydra teeth embattled harvest yield,
Spear and bright helmet bristling o’er the field;
Yet golden corn each laughing valley fills,
The vintage reddens on a thousand hills,
Luxuriant olives spread from shore to shore,
And flocks unnumbered range the pastures o’er.
Hence the proud war-horse rushes on the foe,
Clitumnus! hence thy herds, more white than snow,
And stately bull, that, of gigantic size,
Supreme of victims, on the altar lies,
Bathed in thy sacred stream oft led the train
When Rome in pomp of triumph deck’d the fane.
Here Spring perpetual leads the laughing Hours,
And Winter wears a wreath of summer flowers:
The o’erloaded branch twice fills with fruits the year,
And twice the teeming flocks their offspring rear.
Yet here no lion breeds, no tiger strays,
No tempting aconite the touch betrays,
No monstrous snake the uncoiling volume trails,
Or gathers orb on orb his iron scales.
But many a peopled city towers around,
And many a rocky cliff with castle crowned,
And many an antique wall whose hoary brow
O’ershades the flood that guards its base below.
All hail, Saturnian earth! hail, loved of fame,
Land, rich in fruits and men of mighty name!
For thee I dare the sacred founts explore,
For thee, the rules of ancient art restore,
Themes once to glory raised again rehearse,
And pour through Roman towns the Ascræan verse.”
SOTHEBY.

The raising of cattle and the management of bees form the subjects of the remaining books of the Georgics.

THE ÆNEID narrates in epic verse the adventures of Æneas, the legendary ancestor of the Romans. Virgil sums up his plot in the opening lines:—

“Arms and the man I sing, who first,
By Fate of Ilian realm amerced,
To fair Italia onward bore,
And landed on Lavinium’s shore:—
Long tossing earth and ocean o’er,
By violence of heaven, to sate
Fell Juno’s unforgetting hate:
Much labored too in battle-field,
Striving his city’s walls to build,
And give his Gods a home.
Thence come the hardy Latin brood,
The ancient sires of Alba’s blood,
And lofty-rampired Rome.”

Æneas, the son of Venus by the Trojan shepherd Anchi’ses, escaped from burning Troy with his aged father, little son, and household gods. He lay concealed for a time in the mountains; and, when the victorious Greeks had all withdrawn, took ship with the remnant of his people to found a new Troy in the west. After seven years of hardships and mistakes, the Trojans embark from Sicily for “the Hesperian shore.”

Here the Æneid takes up the story. In the first book we see the Trojan fleet driven by a tempest, sent at Juno’s solicitation, on the opposite coast of Africa, near the rising walls of Carthage. Dido, its queen, whom the murder of her husband Sichæus by her unnatural brother had driven from Tyre, receives the strangers hospitably, and by the strategy of Venus conceives a passionate love for Æneas. At her request the Trojan prince tells the pathetic story—the fall of his native city through the wiles of the Greeks, and his subsequent trials.

Æneas returns Dido’s love, but only at last to betray his confiding hostess, and fly with his vessels under cover of the night, in obedience to a warning from Mercury, the messenger of Jove. Too “pious” to disregard the heavenly command, he left Dido to end her sorrow on the funeral pyre.

After a temporary sojourn in Sicily, where he celebrates funeral games to his father’s memory, Æneas at length reaches Cumæ in Italy, and at once seeks the Sibyl. She informs him that his trials are not over, and takes him to the lower world that he may hold an interview with his father Anchises. There he descries among other shades the injured Dido, to whom he endeavors to excuse his conduct.

“’Mid these among the branching treen
Sad Dido moved, the Tyrian queen,
Her death-wound ghastly yet and green.
Soon as Æneas caught the view
And through the mist her semblance knew,
Like one who spies, or thinks he spies,
Through flickering clouds the new moon rise,
The tear-drop from his eyelids broke,
And thus in tenderest tones he spoke.
‘Ah Dido! rightly then I read
The news that told me you were dead,
Slain by your own rash hand!
Myself the cause of your despair!
Now by the blessed stars I swear,
By heaven, by all that dead men keep
In reverence here ’mid darkness deep,
Against my will, ill-fated fair,
I parted from your land.’”
CONINGTON.

But Dido averts her eyes “that neither smiled nor wept,” and moves away in silence to join Sichæus, who “gives her love for love.”

Æneas learns from the lips of Anchises the future of his race, and beholds the shadowy forms of kings, generals, and statesmen that are to shed glory on the Roman name. “Augustus Cæsar, god by birth,” figures, as we should expect, the proudest of the throng. At last he espies the great Marcellus, “the Sword of Rome,” glittering in the spoils of the Punic War; and by his side

“A youth full-armed, by none excelled
In beauty’s manly grace.”

In answer to the inquiry of Æneas, Anchises tells his son that this youth is “our own Marcellus,” and eulogizes his virtues. Thus Virgil immortalized the name of a Roman prince of great promise, son of Octavia, the emperor’s sister, whose premature death had filled the Roman world with sorrow. When, at the request of Augustus, the poet read this portion of his epic before the royal family, all were moved to tears, and the bereaved mother fainted. She afterward showed her appreciation of Virgil’s genius by presenting him about $400 for each of the twenty-seven lines. The passage is well worth repeating here:—

VIRGIL’S TRIBUTE TO MARCELLUS.

“Seek not to know (the ghost replied with tears)
The sorrows of thy sons in future years.
This youth (the blissful vision of a day)
Shall just be shown on earth, then snatched away.
The gods too high had raised the Roman state,
Were but their gifts as permanent as great.
What groans of men shall fill the Martian field!
How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield!
What funeral pomp shall floating Tiber see,
When rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity!
No youth shall equal hopes of glory give,
No youth afford so great a cause to grieve.
The Trojan honor, and the Roman boast,
Admired when living, and adored when lost!
Mirror of ancient faith in early youth!
Undaunted worth, inviolable truth!
No foe, unpunished, in the fighting field
Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield!
Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force,
When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse.
Ah! couldst thou break through Fate’s severe decree,
A new Marcellus shall arise in thee!
Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring,
Mixed with the purple roses of the spring:
Let me with funeral flowers his body strow;
This gift which parents to their children owe,
This unavailing gift, at least I may bestow!”—DRYDEN.

From Cumæ the Trojan chief sails to Latium, the land of his destiny, and there he receives from King Lati’nus the promise of his daughter Lavinia’s hand. But this provokes a war with Turnus, a neighboring prince, to whom Lavinia had been secretly plighted by the queen-mother. Not until he had subdued Turnus and his Latin allies did Æneas make Lavinia his own and rule as king of Latium. The poem ends with the fall of Turnus in a duel between the rival chiefs. To finish the story, Alba Longa was built by Æneas’ son Iulus, from whose royal line in later ages sprung Romulus, founder of Rome, the _Julian_ family, and their great hero _Julius_ Caesar.

The passion of Dido, as portrayed in the fourth book of the Æneid, is the most masterly piece of Virgil’s handiwork. We present below the closing scenes that sealed her sad fate.

THE DEATH OF DIDO.

“Now, rising from Tithonus’ bed,
The Dawn on earth her freshness shed:
The queen from off her turret height
Perceives the first dim streak of light,
The fleet careering on its way,
And void and sailless shore and bay;
She smites her breast, all snowy fair,
And rends her golden length of hair:
‘Great Jove! and shall he go?’ she cries,
‘And leave our realm a wanderer’s mock?
Quick, snatch your arms and chase the prize,
And drag the vessels from the dock!
Fetch flames, bring darts, ply oars!—yet why?
What words are these, or where am I?
Why rave I thus? Those impious deeds—
Poor Dido! how your torn heart bleeds.
Too late! it should have bled that day
When at his feet your sceptre lay.
Lo here, the chief of stainless word,
Who takes his household gods on board,
Whose shoulders safe from sword and fire
Conveyed his venerable sire!
Oh! had I rent him limb from limb
And cast him o’er the waves to swim,
His friends, his own Ascanius killed,
And with the child the father filled!
Yet danger in the strife had been:—
Who prates of danger here?
A death-devoted, desperate queen,
What foe had I to fear?
No, I had sown the flame broadcast,
Had fired the fleet from keel to mast,
Slain son and sire, stamped out the race,
And thrown at length with steadfast face
Myself upon the bier.

If needs must be that wretch abhorred
Attain the port and float to land,
If such the fate of heaven’s high lord,
And so the moveless pillars stand;
Scourged by a savage enemy,
An exile from his son’s embrace,
So let him sue for aid, and see
His people slain before his face;
Nor when to humbling peace at length
He stoops, be his or life or land,
But let him fall in manhood’s strength
And welter tombless on the sand.
Such malison to heaven I pour,
A last libation with my gore.
And, Tyrians, you through time to come
His seed with deathless hatred chase:
Be that your gift to Dido’s tomb:
No love, no league ’twixt race and race.
Rise from my ashes, scourge of crime,
Born to pursue the Dardan horde
To-day, to-morrow, through all time,
Oft as our hands can wield the sword:
Fight shore with shore, fight sea with sea,
Fight all that are or e’er shall be!’

She ceased, and with her heart debates
How best to leave the life she hates.
Then to Sichæus’ nurse she cried
(For hers erewhile at Tyre had died):—
‘Good nurse, my sister Anna bring:
O’er face and body bid her fling
Pure drops from lustral bough:
So sprinkled come, and at her side
The victims lead: you too provide
A fillet for your brow.
A sacrifice to Stygian Jove
I here perform, to ease my love,
And give to flame the fatal bed
Which pillowed once the Trojan’s head.’
Thus she: the aged dame gives heed,
And, feebly hurrying, mends her speed.

Then, maddening over crime, the queen,
With bloodshot eyes, and sanguine streaks
Fresh painted on her quivering cheeks,
And wanning o’er with death foreseen,
Through inner portals wildly fares,
Scales the high pile with swift ascent,
Takes up the Dardan sword and bares,
Sad gift, for different uses meant.
She eyed the robes with wistful look,
And, pausing, thought awhile and wept;
Then pressed her to the couch, and spoke
Her last good-night or ere she slept.

‘Sweet relics of a time of love,
When fate and heaven were kind,
Receive my life-blood and remove
These torments of the mind.
My life is lived, and I have played
The part that Fortune gave,
And now I pass, a queenly shade,
Majestic to the grave.
A glorious city I have built,
Have seen my walls ascend,
Chastised for blood of husband spilt
A brother, yet no friend.
Blest lot! yet lacked one blessing more,
That Troy had never touched my shore.’
Then as she kissed the darling bed,
‘To die! and unrevenged!’ she said,
‘Yet let me die: thus, thus I go
Exulting to the shades below.
Let the false Dardan feel the blaze
That burns me pouring on his gaze,
And bear along, to cheer his way,
The funeral presage of to-day.’

Thus as she speaks, the attendant train
Behold her writhing as in pain,
Her hands with slaughter sprinkled o’er,
And the fell weapon spouting gore.
Loud clamors thrill the lofty halls:
Fame shakes the town, confounds, appalls:
Each house resounds with women’s cries.
And funeral wails assault the skies:
E’en as one day should war o’erthrow
Proud Carthage or her parent Tyre,
And fire-flood stream with furious glow
O’er roof, and battlement, and spire.”
CONINGTON.

Virgil’s epic was the pride of his countrymen, who, with a pardonable national vanity, pronounced it superior to Homer’s. Tenderness, grace, elegance, rhythmical perfection, brilliance of description, it certainly possesses; yet, with all its beauties, it is not faultless. We miss the wonderful imagination that plays through every page of the Iliad; indeed, Homer furnished the originals of many of its most striking figures. Nor did Virgil disdain levying on Latin authors also. Whatever recommended itself to him in the poetry of others, he borrowed for his own. And yet he must not be regarded as a plagiarist; doubtless it was his intention to enshrine in a national epic literary monuments of all the great minds of his country.

Æneas, his hero, too often appears as the boaster or the heartless hypocrite, rather than as the ideal of greatness and piety it was designed to draw. The author himself seems to have felt the inferiority of his epic to the Iliad, and hence his wish to destroy it. We are told that it was first written in prose; and then the artist, having a clear conception of the whole, threw different portions into verse as the spirit moved him. (_See Nettleship’s “Introduction to the Study of the Æneid.”_)

=Horace= (65-8 B.C.).—The great lyric poet of Rome was Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), a freedman’s son, of Venusia on the roaring Au’fidus. That he might enjoy the best educational advantages, his father took him to Rome at the early age of twelve. Here he was placed in charge of a famous schoolmaster, called by his pupils “the Flogger;” under whose rod the country lad made the acquaintance of Ennius and Homer. To the watchful care and liberality of his parent, who remained to guard him from the temptations of the metropolis, he gratefully acknowledged that he owed everything.

Horace was at Athens, finishing his course, when Cæsar fell beneath the daggers of the conspirators. With a number of hot-headed fellow-students he promptly espoused the cause of Brutus the Liberator, and served in the civil war as military tribune. But Horace’s courage could not stand the touch of cold steel; he ignominiously fled from the field of Philippi, and his estate was confiscated as a reward for his patriotism. Poverty now compelled him to take a clerkship at Rome; and to add to his slender income he began writing verses. This brought him into notice, and in 38 B.C. he had the honor of an introduction to the social circle that gathered round Mæcenas. His little farm, fifteen miles from Tibur, the ruins of which are still pointed out to tourists, was the gift of his munificent patron.

This “Sabine farm” was at once Horace’s joy and pride. Between Rome and Tibur, therefore, he made frequent journeys, and the simple country-folk, won by his affability, hailed with delight the occasions when, tired of city excitements, he sought relaxation among them. Beset by the throng of gossips and favor-seekers who haunted his footsteps as the friend of Mæcenas, Horace in his Sixth Satire breaks out into enthusiastic praises of his rural home, with its simple fare and freedom from annoyances:—

“This fortune’s favorite son (’tis cried)
Is ever by Mæcenas’ side,
Companion wheresoe’er he goes,
In rural sports or festal shows.
Should any rumor, without head
Or tail, about the streets be spread,
Whoever meets me gravely nods,
And says,‘As you approach the gods,
It is no mystery to you;
What do the Dacians mean to do?’
‘Indeed I know not.’—’How you joke,
And love to sneer at simple folk.’
‘Then, pr’ythee, where are Cæsar’s bands
Allotted their long-promised lands?’
Although I swear I know no more
Of that than what was asked before,
They stand amazed, and think me then
The most reserved of mortal men.
Bewildered thus amidst a maze,
I lose the sunshine of my days,
And often wish: Oh! when again
Shall I behold the rural plain?
And when with books of sages deep
Sequestered ease and gentle sleep,
In sweet oblivion, blissful balm!
The busy cares of life becalm.
Oh! when shall Pythagoric beans
With wholesome juice enrich my veins?
And bacon, ham, and savory pottage,
Be served within my simple cottage?
O nights that furnish such a feast
As even gods themselves might taste!”
FRANCIS.

The loss of his friend Virgil cast a shadow over Horace’s latter years. His own death was sudden. A short month before, Mæcenas had breathed his last; and thus the promise of the poet not to survive his patron was almost literally fulfilled. In an ode to Mæcenas, Horace had sung,

“Should you, alas! be snatched away,
Wherefore, ah! wherefore should I stay,
My value lost, no longer whole,
And but possessing half my soul?
One day (believe the sacred oath)
Shall lead the funeral pomp of both;
With thee to Pluto’s dark abode,
With thee I’ll tread the dreary road.”

The remains of the poet were laid by the side of his friend; and thus, devoted to each other in life, they slept together in the grave. (_Read Milman’s “Life of Horace.”_)

Horace, in his youth, was a free liver, a voluptuary; such, indeed, were the men of his day, Virgil alone excepted. Time, however, corrected his tastes, and at the close of his life we find him playing the part of the moralist. If there is much to condemn in his character, there is also much to admire,—his even temper, contented disposition, and independent spirit. Quick to resent an affront, he was as ready to forgive an injury. His friends found him ever a genial, frank, warm-hearted companion.

As to his personal appearance, we may judge from his own accounts that he was gray in advance of his years, short, corpulent, and withal blear-eyed. This last defect furnished Augustus with a ready joke, when he had Horace on one side and the asthmatic Virgil on the other: “I sit between sighs and tears,” he used to say.

WORKS OF HORACE.—The earliest poetical efforts of Horace were Satires, which, though written in hexameter verse, he called _prose-poems_. Holding up to contempt the follies of fashionable society, fortune-hunting, extravagance, avarice, etc., they pleased the Romans and rapidly grew in popularity. But Horace merely derides, he does not chastise, the vices of his day, evidently deeming ridicule a more effective weapon than denunciation.

In his Epodes, Horace aimed his blows at individuals with something like the force of Archilochus. But personal satire was not the author’s forte, and his Epodes are hardly equal to his other productions.

It is to his Odes, in the lyric metres of Alcæus and Sappho, whose poetry he not only loved, but recast after his own ideas in his native tongue, that Horace owes his renown. Always brief and to the point, clear and elegant in their condensation, graceful, spicy, true to nature, these poems have been read with pleasure for nineteen centuries. They deal with a great variety of subjects—the grand as well as the commonplace; and, whatever the theme, their author is equally admirable. He paints pictures of moral beauty and sublimity with singular impressiveness. Nowhere in the classics is a nobler character sketched than that drawn by Horace of a man firm in the cause of justice (Book III., 3). Byron presents it in an English dress:—

“The man of firm and noble soul
No factious clamors can control;
No threat’ning tyrant’s darkling brow
Can swerve him from his just intent:
Gales the warring waves which plough
By Auster on the billows spent,
To curb the Adriatic main,
Would awe his fixed, determined mind in vain.

Ay, and the red right arm of Jove,
Hurtling his lightnings from above,
With all his terrors then unfurled,
He would unmoved, unawed behold:
The flames of an expiring world
Again in crashing chaos rolled,
In vast promiscuous ruin hurled,
Might light his glorious funeral pile:
Still dauntless, ’mid the wreck of earth he’d smile.”

Horace began writing his odes at the age of thirty-five, and was seven years in completing the first three books; they were issued 23 B.C. That he designed them to include all his lyric productions is evident from the following ode, with which the third book closes:—

“And now ’tis done: more durable than brass
My monument shall be, and raise its head
O’er royal pyramids: it shall not dread
Corroding rain or angry Boreas,
Nor the long lapse of immemorial time.
I shall not wholly die: large residue
Shall ’scape the queen of funerals. Ever new
My after-fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb
With silent maids the Capitolian height.
‘Born,’ men will say,‘where Aufidus is loud,
Where Daunus, scant of streams, beneath him bowed
The rustic tribes, from dimness he waxed bright,
First of his race to wed the Æolian lay
To notes of Italy.’ Put glory on,
My own Melpomene, by genius won,
And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.”
CONINGTON.

The odes of the fourth book were written at the request of Augustus, who commissioned the favorite poet to celebrate the victories of his step-sons over a German tribe. After publishing the original three books, Horace wrote his Epistles, the most finished of all his works. They bear the ripe fruits of his experience, and are full of wise reflections which do credit to his knowledge of men and manners. Sprightliness and wit constitute their charm. Their subjects are various, several of them being literary criticisms; the longest, called “the Art of Poetry,” possesses the greatest value.

The works of Horace have maintained their popularity in all ages; his sententious sayings have become aphorisms; and to-day he is a greater favorite with scholars than ever. Few classical poets have been so fortunate in their translators.

ODE TO MÆCENAS.

“Strong doors, wakeful watch-dogs, securely had barred
Danaë in her tower of brass,
If Venus and Jove had not laughed at such guard
And the shower of gold caused to pass.

Through an army of guards will bright gold make its way;
It will pierce through the thickest of walls;
More power it has and may strike more dismay
Than the lightning from heaven that falls.

Through lucre the house of the Argive seer[46] fell:
Philip forced cities’ gates with his gold;
The power of rivals with bribes he could quell:
We know, too, how fleets have been sold.

The increase of wealth ever brings with it care
And hungry ambition for more;
Thus, Mæcenas, O knight with whom none can compare!
Great fortune I ever forswore.

The more that a man to himself shall deny,
The more he shall have from the gods;
Poor, I seek for the home of contentment, and fly
With joy from the wealthy abodes.

With my stream of pure water, few acres of wood,
And secure that my harvest will pay,
A pleasure I have more substantial than could
Be to him that o’er Afric holds sway.

Though for me never works the Calabrian bee,
Though for me is no Formian wine,
Though no sheep in the pastures of Gaul feed for me.
Yet poverty never is mine.

Much must that man want ever who much shall demand;
What he gains whets the covetous vice;
Happy he to whom God with a niggardly hand
Has granted what yet will suffice.”—YARDLEY.

TO PYRRHA.

“What scented stripling, Pyrrha, wooes thee now
In pleasant cavern, all with roses fair?
For whom those yellow tresses bindest thou
With simple care?

Full oft shall he thine altered faith bewail,
His altered gods; and his unwonted gaze
Shall watch the waters darken to the gale
In wild amaze,

Who now believing gloats on golden charms;
Who hopes thee ever kind and ever void;
Nor, hapless! knows the changeful wind’s alarms,
Nor thee, untried.

For me, let Neptune’s temple wall declare
How, safe escaped, in votive offering
My dripping garments own, suspended there,
Him Ocean-king.”
GLADSTONE.

=Varius= (74-14 B.C.).—Older than Horace or Virgil in the Augustan galaxy was Varius, the friend who introduced them both to Mæcenas. An epic on the death of Cæsar, highly esteemed by his countrymen,—and a tragedy entitled “Thyestes,” classed with the finest Greek dramas,—have won for Varius an enviable fame.

Both are lost; but we still have the benefit of the poet’s labors as the editor of Virgil’s Æneid.

=Albius Tibullus= (59-19 B.C.), another poet of the Augustan age, perfected the erotic elegy which Catullus had introduced from Greece. The meagre accounts that remain of his life inform us that he was a knight, and lost his estates near Rome for political reasons, after the overthrow of Pompey. These he partially recovered, it is supposed through the influence of Messa’la, a noble of the old school, whose praises he never tired of sounding. As aide-de-camp, he accompanied Messala in his expedition against the rebellious Aquitanians, and doubtless figured in the triumph decreed his victorious friend by the emperor.

A peaceful life, however, was more in accordance with his tastes. The hills and dales, the corn-fields, vineyards, and meadows, possessed greater charms for him than the favor of Augustus, who vainly sought to attract Tibullus to his court. Hence we find the poet generally living at his country-seat, amid rural enjoyments.

The elegies of Tibullus preserve the names of two Roman beauties—“Delia,” the early mistress of his heart, and “Nem’esis,” her successor. Delia, “with her queenly charms and golden locks,” first brought him to her feet, and he wooed her in his most finished strains. But, like Catullus, he soon found occasion to lament his fair one’s inconstancy. Delia jilted him for a richer lover, and Tibullus transferred his affections to the imperious Nemesis.

The style of Tibullus is sweet and polished. A pensive, almost melancholy tone pervades his verses. In the following plaintive elegy, the injured but forgiving poet recalls to his false one how tenderly he nursed her through a critical sickness, picturing his dream of happiness with her installed as the mistress of his rural home, and his rude awakening:—

ELEGY TO DELIA.

“Oh! I was harsh to say that I could part
From thee; but, Delia, I am bold no more!
Driven like a top, which boys with ready art
Keep spinning round upon a level floor.

Burn, lash me, love, if ever after this
By me one cruel, blustering word is said;
Yet spare, I pray thee by our stolen bliss,
By mighty Venus and thy comely head.

When thou didst lie, by fell disease o’erpowered,
I rescued thee, by prayers, from death’s domain;
Pure sulphur’s cleansing fumes I round thee showered,
While an enchantress sung a magic strain.

Yes—and another now enjoys the prize,
And reaps the fruit of all my vows for thee:
Foolish, I dreamed of life ’neath golden skies,
Wert thou but saved—not such great heaven’s decree.

I said—I’ll till my fields, she’ll guard my store
When crops are threshed in autumn’s burning heat;
She’ll keep my grapes in baskets brimming o’er,
And my rich must expressed by nimble feet.

She’ll count my flock; some home-born slave of mine
Will prattle in my darling’s lap and play:
To rural god ripe clusters for the vine,
Sheaves for my crops, cates for my fold, she’ll pay.

Slaves—all shall own her undisputed rule;
Myself a cipher—how the thought would please!
Here will Messala come, for whom she’ll pull
The sweetest apples from the choicest trees;

And, honoring one so great, for him prepare
And serve the banquet with her own white hands.
Fond dream! which now the east and south winds bear
Away to far Armenia’s spicy lands.”
CRANSTOUN.

=Propertius.=—With the name of Tibullus is often linked that of Propertius, who was born about 50 B.C. at Assisium, among the Umbrian mountains. In this lovely spot he was prepared for the study of the law, which he afterward adopted as his profession at Rome. But Propertius found this calling distasteful; relinquishing it, accordingly, for the pursuits of literature, he aspired to be a Roman Callimachus, and grounded himself in the principles of Alexandrian verse. But too much study made him artificial, and his numerous mythological allusions and digressions encumber rather than embellish. He lacks the sweetness, simplicity, and tenderness, of Tibullus.

Catullus had his “Lesbia;” Tibullus, his “Delia;” and Propertius, profiting not by the example of his brother bards, lavished his affections on the accomplished but fickle “Cynthia,” who played him false as soon as a rich prætor laid a fortune at her feet. Cynthia was the single theme of our poet’s love-lays, all rapture or gentle reproach. In an elegy to Mæcenas, who had pressed him to attempt an epic, he sings:—

“You ask me why love-elegy so frequently I follow,
And why my little book of tender trifles only sings:
It is not from Calliope, nor is it from Apollo,
But from my own sweet lady-love my inspiration springs.

If in resplendent purple robe of Cos my darling dresses,
I’ll fill a portly volume with the Coan garments’ praise;
Or if her truant tresses wreathe her forehead with caresses,
The tresses of her queenly brow demand her poet’s lays.”

In another elegy he describes his Cynthia’s charms:—

“’Twas not her face, though fair, so smote my eye
(Less fair the lily than my love: as snows
Of Scythia with Iberian vermeil vie;
As float in milk the petals of the rose);

Nor locks that down her neck of ivory stream,
Nor eyes—my stars—twin lamps with love aglow;
Nor, if in silk of Araby she gleam
(I prize not baubles), does she thrill me so,

As when she leaves the mantling cup to thread
The mazy dance, and moves before my view,
Graceful as blooming Ariadne led
The choral revels of the Bacchic crew.”

The death of Propertius is supposed to have taken place about 15 B.C. Of his elegies, there is none better than

LOVE’S DREAM REALIZED.

“Not in his Dardan triumph so rejoiced the great Atrides,
When fell the mighty kingdom of Laomedon of yore;
Not so Ulysses, when he moored his wave-worn raft beside his
Beloved Dulichian island-home—his weary wanderings o’er;

As I, when last eve’s rosy joys I ruminated over:
To me another eve like that were immortality!
Awhile before with downcast head I walked a pining lover—
More useless I had grown, ’twas said, than water-tank run dry.

No more my darling passes me with silent recognition,
Nor can she sit unmoved while I outpour my tender vow.
I wish that I had sooner realized this blest condition;
’Tis pouring living water on a dead man’s ashes now.

In vain did others seek my love, in vain they called upon her,
She leaned her head upon my breast, was kind as girl could be.
Of conquered Parthians talk no more, I’ve gained a nobler honor,
For she’ll be spoils, and leaders, and triumphal car to me.

Light of my life! say, shall my bark reach shore with gear befitting,
Or, dashed amid the breakers, with her cargo run aground?
With thee it lies: but if, perchance, through fault of my committing,
Thou giv’st me o’er, before thy door let my cold corse be found.”
CRANSTOUN.

=Ovid= (43 B.C.-17 A.D.).—Publius Ovidius Na’so, the last of the Augustan poets, was a knight of Sulmo, an ancient Samnite town in the eastern part of Italy. Designed for the legal profession, he was sent to Rome to be educated; but the writing of verses was more congenial than rhetorical studies; and an eminent critic of the day, on hearing one of his early declamations, described it as “nothing else than poetry out of metre.”

After the death of an elder son, his father consented that Publius should follow the bent of his own inclinations, and the poet went abroad to study in Greece and travel in Asia Minor. Returning to Rome, he began his literary career as the glory of the Augustan age was beginning to fade.

For twenty-two years Ovid wasted his talents on the composition of licentious love-poems. In the “Loves” (Amo’res), the earliest of his works, one Corinna is addressed throughout. The hearty reception with which these loose songs met at Rome is a sad comment on the degeneracy of the public taste and morals. They were followed by the “Hero’ides,” a collection of twenty-one imaginary love-letters, inscribed by the heroines of the past to their absent or unfaithful lords—an original idea with Ovid. Penelope indicts an epistle to Ulysses, Medea to Jason, Sappho to Phaon, etc. In the one last named, translated by Pope, the Lesbian poetess informs the youth of her resolve to take the Lover’s Leap.

“A spring there is, where silver waters show,
Clear as a glass, the shining sands below;
A flowery lotus spreads its arms above,
Shades all the banks, and seems itself a grove:
Eternal greens the mossy margin grace,
Watched by the sylvan genius of the place.
Here as I lay, and swelled with tears the flood,
Before my sight a watery virgin stood:
She stood and cried,‘O you that love in vain,
Fly hence, and seek the fair Leucadian main!
There stands a rock, from whose impending steep
Apollo’s fane surveys the rolling deep;
There injured lovers, leaping from above,
Their flames extinguish and forget to love.
Hence, Sappho, haste! from high Leucadia throw
Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below.’
She spoke, and vanished with the voice—I rise,
And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.
I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove:
And much I fear; but ah! how much I love!
To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon’s hate,
And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.”

In the “Art of Love,” Ovid again overleaped the bounds of propriety, and threw so brilliant a coloring into his pictures of vice that his readers were fain to linger over them, to enjoy, and to admire, with manifest danger to their own morals. When even a daughter of the imperial line was corrupted by them, Augustus, the professed defender of virtue, felt that it was time to stop the dissemination of such principles, and visited the poet with his displeasure. In consequence of a subsequent and more serious offence, in some way connected with the royal family, but the nature of which we can only conjecture, Ovid suddenly received notice to quit the capital forever, and retire to To’mi, a dreary and desolate village on the Black Sea, A.D. 9. Despite his urgent prayers, the decree of banishment was never revoked.

The works of his eight years’ exile are the “Tristia,” or Sorrows, “Letters from Pontus,” and some shorter poems; they prove his genius to have been crushed, his spirit broken. Tomi gave Ovid a grave; even his request to be buried in Italy was refused.

The best of Ovid’s works were the “Fasti,” or Roman Calendar, a pleasant almanac in verse, and the “Metamorphoses,” ingenious in both conception and expression. While engaged on the Fasti, which he intended to complete in twelve books, one dedicated to each month, the poet was surprised by the decree of banishment, and left his work unfinished.

The Metamorphoses, from which modern writers have largely drawn, gives an account of the transformations of ancient mythology, such as the changing of Io into a heifer, Daphne into a laurel, the sisters of Phaëton into the poplars of the Po, and Atlas into a mountain of stone by the gorgon-head of Perseus. One of the prettiest of these poems relates to the metamorphosis of the ivory statue wrought by Pygmalion, into a living bride, by the goddess of beauty, in answer to the sculptor’s prayer:—

PYGMALION’S STATUE.

“The sculptor sought
His home, and, bending o’er the couch that bore
His Maiden’s life-like image, to her lips
Fond pressed his own—and lo! her lips seemed warm,
And warmer, kissed again; and dimpling to his touch
The ivory seems to yield,—as in the sun
The waxen labor of Hymettus’ bees,
By plastic fingers wrought, to various shape
And use by use is fashioned. Wonder-spelled,
Scarce daring to believe his bliss, in dread
Lest sense deluded mock him, on the form
He loves again and yet again his hand
Lays trembling touch, and to his touch a pulse
Within throbs answering palpable: ’twas flesh!
’Twas very life!—Then forth in eloquent flood
His grateful heart its thanks to Venus poured!
The lips he kissed were living lips that felt
His passionate pressure; o’er the virgin cheeks
Stole deepening crimson; and the unclosing eyes
At once on heaven and on their lover looked!”
HENRY KING.

With the death of Ovid, the flourishing period of poetry terminated. Among his contemporaries, we may mention, in passing, the epic poets ALBINOVA’NUS author of the These’id, and CORNELIUS SEVE’RUS, who wrote an heroic on the war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. The didactic poets GRATIUS and MANILIUS also flourished in the Augustan age; the former memorable for his poem on hunting, the latter for his “Astronomica.”

PROSE WRITERS.

=Titus Livius.=—The last ornament of the Augustan Era is the historian Livy, born at Pata’vium (now Padua) about 59 B.C.—the scion of a noble line that had figured proudly in the annals of the Republic. His was the uneventful life of the scholar, and few particulars of his biography have therefore been preserved. He appears to have begun his career as a rhetorician; to have come to the capital about B.C. 31, for what precise purpose we cannot say, and there to have gained a ready introduction at court. The emperor, already favorably impressed with his ability, is said to have placed at his disposal a suite of rooms in the palace.

Perhaps, as his importunities made the reluctant Virgil the great epic poet of Rome, so Augustus may have stirred the ambition of Livy to become its historian; whether he did or not, we find the rhetorician of Patavium, soon after taking up his abode at the imperial city, entering upon the composition of his “Annals,” a work which progressed simultaneously with the Æneid. As the different decades (divisions of ten books) were completed, the author, after first reading them to Augustus and Mæcenas, published them for the perusal of his countrymen. They at once made his reputation, and became the received authority on the national history, raising Livy during his lifetime, as at the present day, to the rank of the most distinguished historians. The estimation in which they were held may be inferred from the story of Pliny—that a citizen of Cadiz came all the way to Italy merely to see the great writer the whole Roman world was talking about.

For forty years Livy labored on his history. At the time of his death, which took place in his native town, 17 A.D., he had finished 142 books, covering nearly seven and a half centuries from the founding of Rome. It is supposed that he intended to add eight more, embracing the entire reign of Augustus. Only thirty-five of the original books have been recovered.