Part 3 (2/2)

A man who reported the private talk of friends, even on comparatively indifferent topics,--

”The churl, who out of doors will spread What 'mongst familiar friends is said,”--

(Epistle I. v. 24), was his especial aversion; and he has more than once said, only not in such formal phrase, what Milton puts into the mouth of his ”Samson Agonistes,”

”To have revealed Secrets of men, the secrets of a friend, How heinous had the fact been! how deserving Contempt, and scorn of all, to be excluded All friends.h.i.+p, and avoided as a blab, The mark of fool set on his front!”

Moreover, reticence, the indispensable quality, not of statesmen merely, but of their intimates, was not so rare a virtue in these days as in our own; and as none would have expected Horace, in a poem of this kind, to make any political confidences, he can scarcely be supposed to have written it with any view to throwing the gossips of Rome off the scent.

The excursion had been a pleasant one, and he thought its incidents worth noting. Hence the poem. Happily for us, who get from it most interesting glimpses of some of the familiar aspects of Roman life and manners, of which we should otherwise have known nothing. Here, for example, is a sketch of how people fared in travelling by ca.n.a.l in those days, near Rome. Overcrowding, we see, is not an evil peculiar to our own days.

”Now 'gan the night with gentle hand To fold in shadows all the land, And stars along the sky to scatter, When there arose a hideous clatter, Slaves slanging bargemen, bargemen slaves; 'Ho, haul up here! how now, ye knaves, Inside three hundred people stuff?

Already there are quite enough!'

Collected were the fares at last, The mule that drew our barge made fast, But not till a good hour was gone.

Sleep was not to be thought upon, The cursed gnats were so provoking, The bull-frogs set up such a croaking.

A bargeman, too, a drunken lout, And pa.s.senger, sang turn about, In tones remarkable for strength, Their absent sweethearts, till at length The pa.s.senger began to doze, When up the stalwart bargeman rose, His fastenings from the stone unwound, And left the mule to graze around; Then down upon his back he lay, And snored in a terrific way.”

Neither is the following allusion to the Jews and their creed without its value, especially when followed, as it is, by Horace's avowal, almost in the words of Lucretius (B. VI. 56), of what was then his own. Later in life he came to a very different conclusion. When the travellers reach Egnatia, their ridicule is excited by being shown or told, it is not very clear which, of incense kindled in the temple there miraculously without the application of fire.

”This may your circ.u.mcised Jew Believe, but never I. For true I hold it that the Deities Enjoy themselves in careless ease;[1]

Nor think, when Nature, spurning Law, Does something which inspires our awe, 'Tis sent by the offended G.o.ds Direct from their august abodes.”

[1] So Tennyson, in his ”Lotus-Eaters:”--

”Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like G.o.ds together, careless of mankind.”

See the whole of the pa.s.sage.

Had Horace known anything of natural science, he might not have gone so far to seek for the explanation of the seeming miracle.

Gibbon speaks contemptuously of many of the incidents recorded in this poem, asking, ”How could a man of taste reflect on them the day after?”

But the poem has much more than a merely literary interest; thanks to such pa.s.sages as these, and to the charming tribute by Horace to his friends previously cited.

Nothing can better ill.u.s.trate the footing of easy friends.h.i.+p on which he soon came to stand with Maecenas than the following poem, which must have been written before the year B.C. 32; for in that year Terentia became the mistress of the great palace on the Esquiline, and the allusion in the last verse is much too familiar to have been intended for her. Horace, whose delicacy of stomach was probably notorious, had apparently been the victim of a practical joke--a species of rough fun to which the Romans of the upper cla.s.ses appear to have been particularly p.r.o.ne. It is difficult otherwise to understand how he could have stumbled at Maecenas's table on a dish so overdosed with garlic as that which provoked this humorous protest. From what we know of the abominations of an ordinary Roman banquet, the vegetable stew in this instance must have reached a climax of unusual atrocity.

”If his old father's throat any impious sinner Has cut with unnatural hand to the bone, Give him garlic, more noxious than hemlock, at dinner.

Ye G.o.ds! the strong stomachs that reapers must own!

”With what poison is this that my vitals are heated?

By viper's blood--certes, it cannot be less-- Stewed into the potherbs; can I have been cheated?

Or Canidia, did she cook the villainous mess?

”When Medea was struck by the handsome sea-rover, Who in beauty outshone all his Argonaut band, This mixture she took to lard Jason all over, And so tamed the fire-breathing bulls to his hand.

”With this her fell presents she dyed and infected, On his innocent leman avenging the slight Of her terrible beauty, forsaken, neglected, And then on her car, dragon-wafted, took flight.

”Never star on Apulia, the thirsty and arid, Exhaled a more baleful or pestilent dew, And the gift, which invincible Hercules carried, Burned not to his bones more remorselessly through.

<script>