|
 Sprung from a simple freedman of Venusia, and educated at Rome and Athens, HORACE (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) built on the piety and tastes of a peasant the culture of a man of the world. From 44 B.C. to 42 B.C., he served the dying Republic as a military tribune in the army of Brutus and Cassius; and, after Philippi, returned to Rome and took to writing lampoons. But gradually he succumbed to events, and accepted the Empire as expedient. He bought a clerkship at the Quæstor's, and worked his way into friendship and reputation by the writing of his Satires. At last he was put on the high road to wealth and honour by Virgil and Varius, who introduced him to the intimacy of Mæcenas. In the quiet comfort of his Sabine farm -- the gift of Mæcenas -- his genius ripened into the Odes and Epistles; he was, in his latter days, recognized and honoured by the friendship of Augustus himself.
His metrical form, like much of his substance, is borrowed from the Greeks, and though the charm and flexibility of the originals are reduced, a new Roman dignity and depth of sound appear which make him, especially in the Odes, a perfect blend of Greece and Rome. The hexameter, which he uses for the Satires and the more or less satiric Epistles, is an advance in ease on the hexameter of Lucretius, but does not attain, or even aim at, the perfect music of Virgil. In the lyrics, where form was more important, Horace brought it to such perfection that, as with the hexameter of Virgil, further development was decay.
In the matter, as in the form of his poetry, one is first and most struck by the perfect balance and union of the different strains which had gone to the making of his life and character. There is the man of simple country tastes, educated and transformed, but not spoilt, by the urbanity of Rome. There is the Roman ring of the earlier poets, softened, but not extinguished, by the glamour and triumphs of the Empire. Above all, the rival contemporary philosophies of Greece, the creed of the Stoics and of Epicurus, find in Horace an unexampled reconciliation. He had studied in Athens and served with Rome.
It is this quality which has made Horace the prophet of the even mind, of moderation, of kindly and humorous wisdom for all time. The follower of Brutus and Cassius who was able twenty years later to call down blessings on Augustus as the heaven-born restorer and guardian of the State, he has appealed ever since to the finer type of worldly mind which seeks to make the best of the passing hour, to remain contented and healthy, to keep faith with one's friends and be generous with one's dependents, to avoid excess, and of all activities to be most strenuous in those which most adorn the intellectual life.
He has none of the enthusiasm and the magic force which made Virgil the leading poet, even a superhuman figure, during the Middle Ages. Still less has he the depth or philosophic power of Lucretius which commend him to the modern world. But in the cultivated man who arose at the Renaissance he found a congenial soul. No poet has been more popular, more universally quoted, more often reprinted since the Revival of Learning. Codorcet had a Horace with him when he died. De witt, before the mob tore him to pieces, quoted the verses which describe the righteous man whom neither the clamour of a degraded crowd nor the scowl of a tyrant can bend from his purpose. This is his most famous passage on the Stoic side. And in the gentler key, what is more admirable than the passage in the first Satire where, after denouncing, as he often does, the mad pursuit of money, he asks whether if, instead of this, you had taken the trouble to retain the love of friends and relatives which had been freely given you by nature, you would be as likely to lose that?
No other author gives us so complete a picture of ancient civilization at its height, with all its weakness and all its strength, charmingly expressed, and with no other can one feel so completely at home.
Purchase books by Horace
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
