The reference to Alcaeus in Ep. i. 19— Hunc ego non alio dictum prius ore Latinus and the following lines, prove that when that Epistle was written the Odes were generally known and criticised. The evidence of the Epistles is thus conclusive against assigning so late a date as 19 B. C. for the publication of the three books of the Odes. The other date generally assigned to the publication is the year 23 B.C., before the death of Marcellus, and the detection of Murena's conspiracy, which event took place in 22 B.C. It is urged with much force that it would have been inconsistent with the tact and good feeling of Horace to have sent forth the stanza Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo in which a stress is laid on the connexion of the house of Marcellus with the Imperial family, after the death of the young heir of the Empire had given to that connexion so painful a significance. It might perhaps be urged on the other hand, that it would have been even more marked to have omitted the stanza from an Ode written many years before the event and familiarly known: the stanza would still remain as a record not only of the old connexion formed by the union of Octavia with the father of the young Marcellus, but of the closer connexion created by his marriage with Julia. Still it would be remarkable that the lyrical poet of the Empire should have remained silent on an event which made so profound and lasting an impression on the Roman people', and which was lamented not only in the great epic poem of the age, but in the work of a poet almost entirely absorbed in his own passion, if it had occurred before the completion and publication of the three books of the Odes. The Ode iii. 19, in which it is not easy to find any other theme 1 Cf. Tac. Annals, ii. 41: 'Sed suberat occulta formido reputantibus haud prosperum in Druso patre eius favorem vulgi, avunculum eiusdem Marcellum flagrantibus plebis studiis intra iuventam ereptum, breves et infaustos populi Romani amores.' L than that of a festive meeting held in honour of Murena, presents a similar difficulty. If the spirit of that Ode is entirely genial and friendly, it seems hardly possible that Horace would have published it after he knew of the punishment which had overtaken one so nearly connected with his friend and patron Maecenas. The answer given to this by Mr. Verrall is that the spirit is one not of friendly congratulation, but of mocking irony; and he finds the motive not only of that poem, but of the severest utterances and the most elaborate symbolism in the book (Od. iii. 4 and 24), in the painful feeling excited by the career of Murena. The nineteenth Ode is one of those in which Horace expresses himself not directly but dramatically, and this he does with an abruptness and apparent want of continuity to which there is scarcely any parallel. This at least appears, that neither this Ode nor ii. 10, directly addressed to the same person, implies that Horace had any strong personal regard for Murena. He might have still retained both Odes, even after Murena's disgrace and fall, as a record of warnings that had been delivered to him in the time of his prosperity, possibly at the instance of Maecenas himself, and as pointing the moral of a proud heart going before destruction. This we may regard as possible without assigning to the tragedy of Murena anything like the prominence which is given to it by Mr. Verrall. On such a supposition we might assign the publication of the Odes to the year 22, rather than 23. This would admit of that special reference to the riotous disturbance in the year 22, which Mr. Verrall, with his usual acuteness, finds in the lines (iii. 24. 25) O quisquis volet impias Caedes et rabiem tollere civicam, Si quaeret PATER VRBIVM Subscribi statuis, indomitam audeat And this date seems to agree with the evidence of Ep. i. 13, in which Horace sends his Odes (carmina, not sermones or satiras) by the hands of Vinius to Augustus. He writes to Vinius, He whom he supposes still on his journey, a letter recapitulating the instructions which he had given him at starting. supposes that he has not yet reached his destination at the time the letter is written, and he urges him to press on per clivos, flumina, lamas. This looks as if the Odes were sent to Augustus while absent from Italy; between the latter part of the year 22 and the latter part of 19 B. C. These considerations are insufficient to fix the date definitely; but they seem to limit it to the year 23 or 22 B.C., with a bias of probability in favour of the latter date. The date of the Carmen Seculare is fixed for the year 17: the fourth book of the Odes after the year 15. There is a general but not absolute adherence to chronological order in the Odes written in connexion with public events. This chronological order is not necessarily that in which the poems were composed. Thus the second poem of Book i. may have been written after the twelfth, possibly after the thirty-seventh, and yet may be intended to give expression to the feelings of an earlier time. II. The first general impression we form of the Odes of Horace is that they are in form and expression the poetry of one who is emphatically an artist and a poet of culture, rather than of strong native inspiration. He does not, like some of the great lyrical poets of modern times, give back to his people their own joys and sorrows in their own language. He speaks through a Greek medium to a class of cultivated men and women, to whom Greek life and Greek art were thoroughly familiar. It was in the Augustan age that the genius of Italy was finally perfected by that union with the genius of Greece, still surviving in her art and literature, which had been becoming more and more close ever since the days of Ennius. And no one, not even Cicero in a previous age, nor Virgil in his own, felt more deeply the spirit of Greek culture than Horace. It had drawn him to Athens in his earliest youth; it had for a time almost induced him to forget his nationality, and, instead of making a new place for himself among the Roman poets, to 'attempt to add one more recruit to the mighty host of Greek bards''magnas Graecorum implere catervas.' In one of the purest utterances of his personal feeling (ii. 6), his heart is touched by Greek associations, and his longing for Tibur and Tarentum seems to gather strength from the memories of their foundation by Greek settlers. But fortunately his national feeling and his common sense were stronger forces in him than his sympathetic culture. His ambition is to make the old art of Lesbos and Ionia live again in Italian measures, associated with the greatness of Rome, the varied beauty of Italy, and the interests of the hour, as Virgil had made the grace of the Sicilian pastoral live again in association with the beauty of his native district, and the vicissitudes of his personal fortunes. As the poet of culture, Horace sets before himself purer models than even Virgil had in his earlier works. He aspires to breathe the fresh air of the morning of Greek creation, and by the inspiration thus derived to glorify the realism of Roman public life and Roman pleasure, and his own relation to the world and to nature. What distinguishes him and Lucretius from all other Roman poets, is that they sought none but the 'integros fontes.' The absolute sincerity of the one, the faultless critical taste of the other, made them equally averse to re-echoing the Alexandrian echoes of a greater time. Yet the culture of the Roman world was more deeply steeped in Alexandrianism in the time of Horace than in that of Lucretius; and though Horace, for the form of his art, for something of his thought and much of his diction, goes back to Homer and the Greek lyric and tragic poets, yet in his use of Greek mythology as a kind of storehouse of romantic adventure, and in his numerous geographical allusions, we see that he is yielding to tastes formed and fostered by Alexandrian learning. But if we compare Horace in these respects with so thorough an Alexandrian as Propertius, we find that it is the personages and the tales of mythology familiar from Homer and Pindar and the Greek tragedians, not the obscurer beings and more artificial fancies of later creation, that live for us again in the Odes, and that his geographical allusions are not introduced as so much dead learning, but give new life to his subject by names which stirred the imagination. in his own day with the thought of distant lands, or wild and wandering tribes on the confines of the Empire, or seas, suggestive of the enterprise of the present time and the memories of a more adventurous past. This is the first impression we get from the Odes. We seem to be living in a kind of renaissance of Greek art and fancy. Perhaps it is a note of his wish to recall into life a Greek ideal, associated with poetry, that he begins his enumeration of the various ambitions of men with the lines Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum,' &c. There was in the age of Augustus a revival corresponding to the romantic revival, and one corresponding to the aesthetic revival of modern times. Virgil and Livy are the purest exponents of the first: Horace in his Odes of the second. But the time was also one of a great living movement, of a great revolution in human affairs, accompanied at first by a great disturbance in men's minds, afterwards by a settled determination of thought and feeling into new lines. It was a time by its sufferings and vicissitudes calculated to stimulate reflexion on the problems, the duties and interests of life. It was a time of great wealth and luxury, in which the refinement of pleasure afforded a piquant attraction to the senses, while the extravagance of luxury afforded an appropriate theme for satire to the moralist. If Horace lived in imagination in the poetry of the past, he had lived his own life also; in the world of pleasure, and in retirement from the world, in active social intercourse with the men most eminent in literature and society, and in the most confidential intimacy with the man who was then the chief depositary of the secrets of state, and whose position called upon him to study and understand all the forces by which |