THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE HORACE CHAPTER I.. LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HORACE. I. THE spirit of the Augustan Age survives in the verse of the five poets whose works remain, out of many which were written and enjoyed their share of popularity during the half century in which Augustus was master of the Roman world. The great prose-writer of the age, the historian Livy, tells us little directly about his own time. It is from him and Virgil that we best understand how the past career and great destiny of Rome impressed the imagination during the time of transition from the Republic to the Empire. But of the actual life, and the spiritual and intellectual movement of the age, our best and almost our sole witnesses are the poets, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. These five poets are of very different value as representatives of their time. The three elegiac poets, although men of refined sensibility and culture, are, in comparison with Virgil and Horace, men of essentially lighter character, living for pleasure, making the life of pleasure the subject of their art, and showing little sympathy with the new B ideas in the sphere of government, which were shaping the future of the world. The idea of Rome acting on their imagination was not that of the Rome of Ennius, of Virgil, and of Livy, but that of which one of their number writes, Mater et Aeneae constat in urbe sui. They came too late to feel deeply the change which was coming over the world. None of them lived in close intimacy with the great minister who bore so large a part in shaping the policy of the new Empire, and in reconciling the old governing class to the change. They had neither the profound feeling and serious imagination of Virgil, nor the many-sided versatility and strong reflective vein which made Horace the most complete representative and interpreter of his age. It is to Virgil and Horace that the Augustan era owes its rank among the great eras of poetry. Virgil is the exponent of its highest hopes and ideas. In the spheres of government, of national and religious feeling, of all the finer influences of . nature and human relationship, it was through him that the most searching, the most idealising, and the most enduring revelation was made. It was in him too that the national literature, after a century and a half of effort, attained its final perfection. But for our knowledge of the actual life of the time, of its manners and humours, of its gaiety on the surface, and of some of its deeper currents of serious feeling, we must go to another representative of the age. And it is in a poet born five years after Virgil, among the Sabellian people of the South of Italy, born like him of obscure parentage, but who, notwithstanding, enjoyed similar advantages of education, who though in early youth separated from him by difference of political sympathy as well as divided by difference of place, became in the first years of his manhood united to him by affection and devotion to kindred studies, that the complement of the genius of the gentle poet from the Cisalpine province is to be found. As Virgil is the most idealising exponent of what was of permanent and catholic significance in the time, Horace is the most complete exponent of its actual life and movement. He is at once the lyrical poet, with heart and imagination responsive to the deeper meaning and lighter amusements of life, and the satirist, the moralist, and the literary critic of the age. The phases of public life and feeling during twenty eventful years, the reflexions suggested by the vicissitudes of national and individual fortune, the pleasures of youth in their refined and piquant aspects, the happiness and the pathetic regrets of the friendships and the social intercourse of maturer years, the idyllic delight of days passed among beautiful scenes endeared by the sense of possession and long familiarity, are so idealised in his lyrical poetry, as to preserve their life and meaning for all after times. The social follies and personal eccentricities, the pedantry and pretention, the avarice and meanness as well as the luxurious indulgence of the age are made to pass before us and to teach their lessons in his satire. The true wisdom of life for the individual under these new social and political conditions, the knowledge how to adapt oneself to the world, and the higher knowledge how to be independent of it, are taught in his Moral Epistles. The criticism which the age needed, and which, so far as criticism could, pointed the way to a more masculine type of poetry than that actually realised by the poets who came after him, was expounded in the poetical Epistles of his later years. On the whole, we find in his writings the completest picture and the justest criticism of his time, expressed with equal mastery in the language of idealising poetry and of common sense. In no Greek or Roman poet do we find so complete a representation of any time, as we find in Horace of those years of the Augustan age which most deserve to live in the memory of the world. This is the first, and perhaps the chief ground of the prominent place assigned to him in the study of Roman literature. But he has another claim which makes him still less likely to be neglected. Among all ancient poets he suits the greatest variety of modern tastes. To a large number of those who receive a classical education he is the earliest, to some the only friend they make within its range. But whatever attraction the gaiety of his spirit and the music of his verse have for the young, it is only after mature experience of life that his full charm is felt, his full meaning understood. He has an attraction not merely of early association for educated men whose lives are cast in other spheres than that of literature: while to those who seek in the study of great poets to gain some temporary admission within the circle of some of the better thoughts, the finer fancies, the happier and more pathetic experiences of our race, he is able to afford this access. To each successive age or century, he seems to express its own familiar wisdom and experience. To Montaigne, to Addison and Johnson, as to our own times, he speaks with the voice of a contemporary. So true beyond his largest expectations was his prophecy :— Usque ego postera Crescam laude recens. He is one of the few ancient writers who unite all the cultivated nations of modern times in a common admiration. seem to claim him as especially their own.] They each But the strongest hold which he has on every generation and every variety of cultivated reader, is that no other writer, ancient or modern, seems equally to speak to each individual as a familiar friend. Among the few happy expressions which meet us occasionally amid the strained phraseology of his imitator Persius, is that in which he characterises this peculiar gift: Admissus circum praecordia ludit. He enters into the mind and heart of every reader through the medium of a style of which, if he is not the inventor, he was at least one of the earliest masters; one which combines the grace of finished art with the familiar tones of natural conversation. But more than by the medium of his style he excites interest and conciliates affection by the frank trust in himself and in his reader, and the self-respect with which he admits the world into his confidence. He was not indeed the first to establish this relation between an author and his readers. For it was the |