Horatius
1.
The name of three brave Roman brothers, who fought, according to the old Roman legends,
against the Curiatii, three Alban brothers, about 667 years before the commencement of our
era. Mutual acts of violence committed by the citizens of Rome and Alba had given rise to a
war. The armies were drawn up against each other at the Fossa Cluilia, where it was agreed to
avert a battle by a combat of three brothers on either side —namely, the Horatii
and Curiatii. It is evident that we have here types of the two nations regarded as sisters
and of the three tribes in each. In the first onset, two of the Horatii were slain by their
opponents; but the third brother, by joining address to valour, obtained a victory over all
his antagonists. Pretending to fly from the field of battle, he separated the three Curiatii,
and then, attacking them one by one, slew them successively. As he returned triumphant to the
city, his sister Horatia, who had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii, met and reproached
her brother bitterly for having slain her intended husband. Horatius, incensed at this,
stabbed his sister to the heart, exclaiming, “So perish every Roman woman who
bewails a foe.” For this murder he was adjudged by the duumvirs to be scourged with
covered head and hanged on the accursed tree. Horatius appealed to his peers, the burghers or
populus; and his father pronounced him guiltless, or he would have
punished him by the paternal power. The populus acquitted Horatius, but prescribed a
symbolical punishment. With veiled head, led by his father, Horatius passed under a yoke or
gibbet—
tigillum sororium, “sisters'
gibbet.” (See Livy, i. 26.)
2.
Cocles. See
Cocles.
3.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a celebrated Roman poet, born at
Venusia, December 8th, B.C. 65, during the consulship of L. Aurelius Cotta and L. Manlius
Torquatus (
Carm. iii. 21, 1;
Epod. 13, 6). His father, who was a freedman of the Horatian family,
had gained considerable property as a
coactor, a name applied to the
servant of the moneybrokers, who attended at sales at auction, and collected the money from
the purchasers (
Hor.Sat. i. 6, 86). With these
gains he purchased a farm in the neighbourhood of Venusia, on the banks of the Aufidus. In
this place Horace appears to have lived until his eleventh or twelfth year, when his father,
dissatisfied with the country school of Flavius, removed with his son to Rome, where he was
placed under the care
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Monument of the Horatii and Curiatii. (Von Falke.)
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of a celebrated teacher, Orbilius Pupillus, of Beneventum, whose life has been
written by Suetonius. After studying the ancient Latin poets, Horace acquired the Greek
language. He also enjoyed, during the course of his education, the advice and assistance of
his father, who appears to have been a sensible man, and who is mentioned by his son with the
greatest esteem and respect. It is probable that, soon after he had assumed the
toga virilis at the age of seventeen, he went to Athens to pursue his
studies, where he appears to have remained till the breaking out of the Civil War during the
second triumvirate. In this contest he joined the army of Brutus, was promoted to the rank of
military tribune, and was present at the battle of Philippi, his flight from which he
compares to a similar act on the part of the Greek poet Alcaeus.
Though the life of Horace was spared by the imperial party, his paternal property at
Venusia was confiscated, and he repaired to Rome, with the hope of obtaining a living by his
literary exertions. Some of his poems attracted the notice of Vergil and Varius, who
introduced him to Maecenas, and the liberality of that statesman quickly relieved the poet
from all pecuniary difficulties. From this eventful epoch the current of his life flowed on
in a smooth and gentle course. Satisfied with the competency which his patron had bestowed,
Horace declined the offers made him by Augustus, to take him into his service as private
secretary, and steadily resisted the temptation thus held out of rising to wealth and
political consideration; advantages which would have been dearly purchased by the sacrifice
of his independence. That he was really independent in the noblest sense of the word, in
freedom of thought and action, is evidenced by that beautiful epistle (i. 7) to Maecenas, in
which he states that if the favour of his patron is to be secured by a slavish renunciation
of his own habits and feelings, he will at once say farewell to fortune and welcome poverty.
Not long after his introduction to Maecenas the journey to Brundisium took place (
Hor. Sat. i. 5), and the gift of his Sabine farm soon
followed. Rendered independent by the bounty of Maecenas, high in the favour of Augustus,
courted by the proudest patricians of Rome, and blessed in the friendship of his brother
poets, Vergil, Tibullus, and Varius, it is difficult to conceive a state of more perfect
temporal felicity than Horace must have enjoyed. This happiness was first seriously
interrupted by the death of Vergil, which was shortly succeeded by that of Tibullus. These
losses must have sunk deeply into his mind. The solemn thoughts and serious studies which, in
the first epistle of his first book, he declares shall henceforward occupy his time, were, if
we may judge from the second epistle of the second book, confirmed by those sad warnings of
the frail tenure of existence. The severest blow, however, which Horace had to encounter, was
inflicted by the death of his early
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Horace. (From a Gem in the British Museum.)
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friend and best patron Maecenas. He had declared that he could never survive the
loss of one who was “part of his soul” (
Carm. ii. 17, 5), and his prediction was verified. The death of the
poet occurred only a few weeks after that of his friend, on the 27th of November, B.C. 8,
when he had nearly completed his fiftyeighth year. His remains were deposited next to those
of Maecenas, on the Esquiline Hill.
When at Rome, Horace lived in a small and plainly-furnished mansion on the Esquiline. When
he left the city, he either betook himself to his Sabine farm or his villa at Tibur, the
modern Tivoli. When in the country, as the whim seized him, he would
either study hard or be luxuriously idle. The country was his favourite abode, and here he
displayed all the genial simplicity of his nature.
If we may believe Horace himself, his own preference was for a country life; and some of
the truest poetry that he ever wrote deals with themes drawn from his love of rural
scenes— the peaceful meadows of Apulia, the Bandusian fountain, the cattle resting
in the flickering shade through the long summer afternoon, the siesta by the brook-side, the
cool vistas of the forest glades with the young deer browsing among the trees. His own homely
tastes are delightfully set forth in the passages where he tells of his sitting about the
fire at evening with his rustic neighbours, exchanging stories and cracking jokes over the
mellow wine.
Horace is described as short and stout, so that Augustus rallied him on his corpulency; of
a rather quick temper, yet easily placated; and given to ease and the enjoyment of the good
things of life. This disposition is perfectly reflected in his writings, which embody a
genial, if not very deep, philosophy of life, and a good sense which robbed Epicureanism of
its selfishness and Stoicism of its sourness and severity.
The productions of Horace are divided into Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles. The Epodes
(
Epodi) are the earliest of his works, and are written in various forms of
iambic and dactylic verse. They were not published as a collection until B.C. 29, after the
publication of his first book of Satires (
Sermones), which had appeared about
the year B.C. 35, dedicated to Maecenas. At about the time of the publication of the Epodes
appeared the second book of Satires. The Odes (
Carmina) were written in part
as early as B.C. 29, but their formal appearance in three books is to be assigned to the year
B.C. 20 or thereabouts. These three books were also dedicated to Maecenas. Following them
came a continuation of the Satires in a new form, that of letters addressed each to a single
person, and called Epistles (
Epistulae). These are in two books, the first
having been published soon after the first publication of the Odes, and the second not long
before the poet's death in B.C. 8. In B.C. 17, the
Carmen Saeculare or Secular
Hymn was composed at the request of Augustus for the celebration of the Ludi Saeculares (q.
v.). Horace likewise, being in a way the Poet Laureate of Augustus, celebrated the victories
of the emperor's stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus, in several new Odes, which he published with
a number of others, as a fourth book of Odes in B.C. 13. The famous bit of literary
criticism, the
Epistula ad Pisones, usually known as the
Ars
Poetica, and perhaps unfinished, is of uncertain date, but is to be assigned with
much probability to the year B.C. 20.
Horace, as a poet, does not show the inspiration and
Geist that would rank
him with the great masters of lyric verse—Pindar, Alcaeus, Sappho— whom
he imitates; and he is himself thoroughly aware of his own poetic limitations. When he
attempts the flight of the Theban eagle and when he writes in his
rôle of Poet Laureate, he is never at his best; but, like Tennyson in his
official verse, invariably suggests a person ill at ease
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Augustus and his Friends. (From a wall-painting from the Palace of the Caesars,
discovered in 1737.)
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over a perfunctory task. His temperament and tastes marked out for him a far
different sphere, in which he is inimitable. When he gets away from battles and triumphs, and
gods and heroes, and the whole machinery of Olympus, and turns to the familiar world in which
he lives, he plays with a master hand upon the chords that vibrate in the breast of all men.
Tenderness, humour, a lively and picturesque fancy, a sympathetic love of external nature in
her familiar aspects, a keen insight into human nature in its varying moods—all
these are his in a high degree, and joined with them is an undercurrent of occasional
melancholy that not infrequently touches the source of tears. In those Odes where he depicts
the lighter side of love, the genial intercourse of friends, and natural scenery, or in which
he sets forth his amiable philosophy of life, he is quite inimitable. Words cannot do justice
to the exquisite polish of his verse, the crispness and terse vigour of his phrases, and the
perfect choice of words, which Petronius, in the following century, characterized as
Horatii curiosa felicitas. He has filled the pages of modern literature with
a host of sparkling epigrams, phrases, and proverbial lines—“jewels five
words long”—more numerous, in fact, than those that have been taken from
all the rest of Latin literature put together. No other writer in any language so abounds in
pregnant phrases. His
carpe diem is an epitome in two words of the whole
practical teaching of Epicureanism. His
nil desperandum, twisted out of
its context, has almost become an English phrase. So, too, the expressions
consule
Planco— damnosa quid non—nunc vino pellite curas—post equitem
sedet atra cura—non omnis moriar—semper avarus eget—sapere
aude—nil admirari—sub iudice lis est—disiecti membra
poetae—and a hundred others.
It is in his Satires and Epistles that the true Horace is most clearly seen, freed from the
uncomfortable trappings of the grand style, and, as it were, chatting at ease among his
friends. Here he most winningly sets forth his shrewd and kindly views of men and things,
laughing good-humouredly at the foibles of his friends and at his own as
well, like Thackeray, except that in the laugh of Horace there is no subacid tone of even a
pretended cynicism. The whole tenour of his teaching is moderation—the
mediocritas aurea, the
modus in rebus—which
he preaches incessantly alike to the ambitious, the pleasure-loving, and the philosopher. Not
even virtue itself is to be pursued beyond what is reasonable. This is essentially the
philosophy of “good form,” of the man of the world, enlivened by a sense
of humour that is fatal alike to the fanaticism of the “crank” and the
priggish solemnity of the Philistine. It is the philosophy of the average man, and it
explains the constant popularity of Horace in all ages and all nations, and the fact that he
is today, at the end of the nineteenth century, the most modern writer that literature can
show us. He, more than any other, makes antiquity live for us again; and, stripping off the
superficial differences of time and place and language, flashes upon the mind a conviction of
the essential unity of the present and the past. He is thus the most human of all the classic
writers, and the one whose wit and wisdom linger in the mind of the most idle student long
after the lines of Aeschylus and Vergil and even Homer have been forgotten. Hence we find him
admired, translated, and imitated by men of such different types as Pope, Byron, Gladstone,
and Eugene Field. His nearest representative in English literature is Pope; but, as Mr.
Mackail well says, to suggest a true parallel we must unite in thought the excellence of Pope
and Gray with the easy wit and cultured grace of Addison.
From an early date Horace's poems were used in Roman schools as a text-book, and were
expounded by Roman scholars, especially by Acron and Porphyrion. His use as a school-text has
perpetuated the order in which his works are now always printed, that being the order in
which the Roman school-boys read them. As Horace has been continuously popular, there exist a
very large number of MSS. (about 250) of the text—none, however, older than the
ninth century A.D. The oldest is the Codex Bernensis (denoted as B), written in Ireland. This
is incomplete. A separate source of Horace is represented by the Codex Blandinius
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Q. Horatius Flaccus. (From a Gem. )
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(
Vetustissimus or V), in part collated by Cruquius (Jacques de Crusques)
at Blankenberg, but destroyed about 1566. (See
Cruquius.) The best representative of this “family” is probably
the Codex Gothanus (G), dating from the year 1456. The Horatian MSS. are enumerated in Keller
and Holder's preface.
Bibliography.—The
editio princeps
of Horace is said to have appeared at Milan in 1470. Great editions are those of Lambinus
(Leyden, 1561, reprinted at Paris in 1567, 1579, 1587, and at Coblentz in
1829); Cruquius
(first printed as a whole at Antwerp, 1578); Heinsius
(Leyden, 1612); the great epoch-making work of Bentley
(Cambridge, 1711,
reprinted at Amsterdam, 1713, and lately at Berlin, 1869); Wakefield
(London,
1794); Orelli and Baiter (1850-52; last ed. Berlin, 1885 foll.); Dillenburger
(1881); Nauck and Krüger
(Leipzig, 1885); Schütz
(Berlin, 1880-83); Kiessling
(Berlin, 1884- 1888); the text alone
by Meineke
(Berlin, 1854); Keller and Holder
(Leipzig, 1864-70);
Haupt and Vahlen
(4th ed. Leipzig, 1881); L. Müller
(last ed.
Chicago, 1882); with illustrations from gems, by King, text by H. A. J. Munro
(London, 1869); French commentary by Waltz
(Paris, 1887); English
commentaries by Macleane
(London, 1869); Wickham
(vol. i. Odes and Epodes,
1874; vol. ii. Satires and Epistles, 1891). Separate editions are those of the Odes
by Page, with an off-hand commentary of much literary merit
(4th ed. London,
1890), and Wickham
(2d ed. London, 1887); of the Satires by Palmer
(London, 1883) and L. Müller
(Vienna, 1891); of the
Epistles by Wilkins
(3d ed. London, 1889), Shuckburgh
(Cambridge,
1888), L. Müller
(Vienna, 1893); of the Satires and Epistles
together by Kirkland, after Kiessling
(Boston and N. Y. 1893). The
Ars
Poetica is edited separately by Hofmann-Peerlkamp
(Leyden, 1845) and
Albert
(Paris, 1886), and discussed by Weissenfels
(Görlitz,
1880), and Bonino
(Turin, 1888).
No translation of Horace does any kind of justice to the original, though some of the
imitations in English by Pope are very clever. There are translations by Sir Philip Francis,
by Professor Conington (in verse), by Sir Theodore Martin (Odes and Satires), by Clark
(Odes), by Sargent (Odes), and Sir Stephen De Vere (selected Odes and Epodes)— the
last two in 1893. There is a fair prose translation by Lonsdale and Lee.
The life of Horace has been written in English by Milman
(1853) and Hovenden
(1877); in German by L. Müller
(1880); in French by
Walckenaer, 2 vols.
(1858), and Des Vergers
(1855); in Italian by
Onesolto
(Padua, 1888). A valuable life of the poet by Suetonius has come down
to us with some discreditable interpolations, in the MSS. of the poet. Valuable criticism of
Horace will be found in Teuffel's
Charakteristik des Horaz (Leipzig,
1842); Gerlach,
Leben und Dichtung des Horaz (Basle,
1867); Weissenfels,
Horaz (Berlin, 1885); Vogel,
Die Lebensweisheit des Horaz (Meissen, 1868); Beck,
Horaz als Kunstrichter und Philosoph (Mainz, 1875); Weise,
De Horatio Philosopho (Colberg, 1881); Maier,
D.
philosoph. Standpunkt des Horaz (Kremsier, 1888); and
Sellar,
Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Horace (1892).
The scholia to Horace have been edited by Fabricius
(Basle, 1555), with
additions by Pauly
(Prague, 1858 and 1877), and by Hauthal
(Berlin,
1864-66). See the account of the scholia by Usener
(Berne, 1863). There is a lexicon to Horace by Koch
(2d ed. Hanover,
1879). On the language, etc., of Horace, see Ernesti's
Clavis
Horatiana (2d ed. Leipzig, 1823); Barta,
Sprachliche Studien,
etc.
(Linz, 1879 and 1881); Habenicht,
Alliteration bei
Horaz (Eger, 1885); Waltz,
Des Variations de la Langue et de la
Métrique d'Horace, etc.
(Paris, 1881); and the introduction
to Kirkland's edition of the Satires and Epistles
(1893). On Horace as a
satirist, see R. Y. Tyrrell in
Hermathena, iv. 355; id.
Latin
Poetry (1895); and the article
Satira.
