Part 1 (2/2)
When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans; 'Secta.n.u.s, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswear Intrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere; 'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught.
The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be sought, The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old, And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name.
When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your frame, You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done, Hard it might be--'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can quote'-- And then as model pointed to some public man of note.
Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too, Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?'
And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread Of dying, forces them to put upon their l.u.s.ts restraint, So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes.”
Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the kindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical and didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of ”the rugged maxims hewn from life” with which his works abound are manifestly but echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his own Ofellus, and the elders of the race--not, let us hope, altogether bygone--of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as ”Religious men, who give to G.o.d and men their dues,”--the Apulian freedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered from books, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace to his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that father's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as occurring in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family and vast wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poet which was afterwards to ripen into a lifelong friends.h.i.+p.
”Yet if some trivial faults, and these but few, My nature, else not much amiss, imbue (Just as you wish away, yet scarcely blame, A mole or two upon a comely frame), If no man may arraign me of the vice Of lewdness, meanness, nor of avarice; If pure and innocent I live, and dear To those I love (self-praise is venial here), All this I owe my father, who, though poor, Lord of some few lean acres, and no more, Was loath to send me to the village school, Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule,-- Centurions, and the like,--were wont to swarm, With slate and satchel on sinister arm, And the poor dole of scanty pence to pay The starveling teacher on the quarter-day; But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome, There to be taught all arts that grace the home Of knight and senator. To see my dress, And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no less Than patrimonial fortunes old and great Had furnished forth the charges of my state.
When with my tutors, he would still be by, Nor ever let me wander from his eye; And, in a word, he kept me chaste (and this Is virtue's crown) from all that was amiss, Nor such in act alone, but in repute, Till even scandal's tattling voice was mute.
No dread had he that men might taunt or jeer, Should I, some future day, as auctioneer, Or, like himself, as tax-collector, seek With petty fees my humble means to eke.
Nor should I then have murmured. Now I know, More earnest thanks, and loftier praise I owe.
Reason must fail me, ere I cease to own With pride, that I have such a father known; Nor shall I stoop my birth to vindicate, By charging, like the herd, the wrong on Fate, That I was not of n.o.ble lineage sprung: Far other creed inspires my heart and tongue.
For now should Nature bid all living men Retrace their years, and live them o'er again, Each culling, as his inclination bent, His parents for himself, with mine content, I would not choose whom men endow as great With the insignia and seats of state; And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes, Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise, In thus refusing to a.s.sume the care Of irksome state I was unused to bear.”
The education, of which Horace's father had laid the foundation at Rome, would not have been complete without a course of study at Athens, then the capital of literature and philosophy, as Rome was of political power. Thither Horace went somewhere between the age of 17 and 20. ”At Rome,” he says (Epistles, II. ii. 23),
”I had my schooling, and was taught Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought; At cla.s.sic Athens, where I went ere long, I learned to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong, And search for truth, if so she might be seen, In Academic groves of blissful green.” (C.)
At Athens he found many young men of the leading Roman families--Bibulus, Messalla, Corvinus, the younger Cicero, and others--engaged in the same pursuits with himself, and he contracted among them many enduring friends.h.i.+ps. In the political lull which ensued between the battle of Pharsalia (B.C. 48) and the death of Julius Caesar (B.C. 44), he was enabled to devote himself without interruption to the studies which had drawn him to that home of literature and the arts. But these were destined before long to be rudely broken. The tidings of that startling event had been hailed with delight by the youthful spirits, some of whom saw in the downfall of the great Dictator the dawn of a new era of liberty, while others hoped from it the return to power of the aristocratic party to which they belonged. In this mood Brutus found them when he arrived in Athens along with Ca.s.sius, on their way to take command of the Eastern provinces which had been a.s.signed to them by the Senate. Ca.s.sius hurried on to his post in Syria, but Brutus lingered behind, ostensibly absorbed in the philosophical studies of the schools, but at the same time recruiting a staff of officers for his army from among the young Romans of wealth and family whom it was important he should attach to his party, and who were all eagerness to make his cause their own. Horace, infected by the general enthusiasm, joined his standard; and, though then only twenty-two, without experience, and with no special apt.i.tude, physical or mental, for a military life, he was intrusted by Brutus with the command of a legion. There is no reason to suppose that he owed a command of such importance to any dearth of men of good family qualified to act as officers. It is, therefore, only reasonable to conclude, that even at this early period he was recognised in the brilliant society around him as a man of mark; and that Brutus, before selecting him, had thoroughly satisfied himself that he possessed qualities which justified so great a deviation from ordinary rules, as the commission of so responsible a charge to a freedman's son. That Horace gave his commander satisfaction we know from himself. The line (Epistles, I. xx. 23), ”_Me primis urbis belli placuisse domique_,”--
”At home, as in the field, I made my way, And kept it, with the first men of the day,”--
can be read in no other sense. But while Horace had, beyond all doubt, made himself a strong party of friends who could appreciate his genius and attractive qualities, his appointment as military tribune excited jealousy among some of his brother officers, who considered that the command of a Roman legion should have been reserved for men of n.o.bler blood--a jealousy at which he said, with his usual modesty, many years afterwards (Satires, I. vi. 45), he had no reason either to be surprised or to complain.
In B.C. 43, Brutus, with his army, pa.s.sed from Macedonia to join Ca.s.sius in Asia Minor, and Horace took his part in their subsequent active and brilliant campaign there. Of this we get some slight incidental glimpses in his works. Thus, for example (Odes, II. 7), we find him reminding his comrade, Pompeius Varus, how
”Full oft they sped the lingering day Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay, With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair.”
The Syrian spikenard, _Malobathrum Syrium_, fixes the locality. Again, in the epistle to his friend Bullatius (Epistles, I. 11), who is making a tour in Asia, Horace speaks of several places as if from vivid recollection. In his usual dramatic manner, he makes Bullatius answer his inquiries as to how he likes the places he has seen:--
”_You know what Lebedos is like_; so bare, With Gabii or Fidenae 'twould compare; Yet there, methinks, I would accept my lot, My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot, Stand on the cliff at distance, and survey The stormy sea-G.o.d's wild t.i.tanic play.” (C.)
Horace himself had manifestly watched the angry surges from the cliffs of Lebedos. But a more interesting record of the Asiatic campaign, inasmuch as it is probably the earliest specimen of Horace's writing which we have, occurs in the Seventh Satire of the First Book. Persius, a rich trader of Clazomene, has a lawsuit with Rupilius, one of Brutus's officers, who went by the nickname of ”King.” Brutus, in his character of quaestor, has to decide the dispute, which in the hands of the princ.i.p.als degenerates, as disputes so conducted generally do, into a personal squabble. Persius leads off with some oriental flattery of the general and his suite. Brutus is ”Asia's sun,” and they the ”propitious stars,” all but Rupilius, who was
”That pest, The Dog, whom husbandmen detest.”
Rupilius, an old hand at slang, replies with a volley of rough sarcasms, ”such as among the vineyards fly,” and
”Would make the pa.s.ser-by Shout filthy names, but shouting fly”--
a description of vintage slang which is as true to-day as it was then.
The conclusion is curious, as a punning allusion to the hereditary fame of Brutus as a puller-down of kings, which it must have required some courage to publish, when Augustus was omnipotent in Rome.
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