Part 7 (2/2)
”I'll spare no pains, no arts, no s.h.i.+fts!
His servants I'll corrupt with gifts.
To-day though driven from his gate, What matter? I will lie in wait, To catch some lucky chance; I'll meet Or overtake him in the street; I'll haunt him like his shadow. Nought In life without much toil is bought.”
Just at this moment who but my Dear friend Aristius should come by?
My rattlebrain right well he knew.
We stop. ”Whence, friends, and whither to?”
He asks and answers. Whilst we ran The usual courtesies, I began To pluck him by the sleeve, to pinch His arms, that feel but will not flinch, By nods and winks most plain to see Imploring him to rescue me.
He, wickedly obtuse the while, Meets all my signals with a smile.
I, choked with rage, said, ”Was there not Some business, I've forgotten what, You mentioned, that you wished with me To talk about, and privately?”
”Oh, I remember! Never mind!
Some more convenient time I'll find.
The Thirtieth Sabbath this! Would you Affront the circ.u.mcised Jew?”
”Religious scruples I have none.”
”Ah, but I have. I am but one Of the _canaille_--a feeble brother.
Your pardon. Some fine day or other I'll tell you what it was.” Oh, day Of woeful doom to me! Away The rascal bolted like an arrow, And left me underneath the harrow; When, by the rarest luck, we ran At the next turn against the man, Who had the lawsuit with my bore.
”Ha, knave!” he cried with loud uproar, ”Where are you off to? Will you here Stand witness?” I present my ear.
To court he hustles him along; High words are bandied, high and strong.
A mob collects, the fray to see: So did Apollo rescue me.
The Satires appear to have been completed when Horace was about thirty-five years old, and published collectively, B.C. 29. By this time his position in society was well a.s.sured. He numbered among his friends, as we have seen, the most eminent men in Rome,--
”Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place”--
men who were not merely ripe scholars, but who had borne and were bearing a leading part in the great actions of that memorable epoch.
Among such men he would be most at home, for there his wit, his shrewdness, his genial spirits, and high breeding would be best appreciated. But his own keen relish of life, and his delight in watching the lights and shades of human character, took him into that wider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly sought after to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the rich and the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animal spirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capital endurable even in spite of its pleasures. What Victor Hugo calls
”Le banquet des amis, et quelquefois les soirs, Le baiser jeune et frais d'une blanche aux yeux noirs,”
never quite lost their charm for him; but during this period they must often have tempted him into the elaborate dinners, the late hours, and the high-strung excitement, which made a retreat to the keen air and plain diet of his Sabine home scarcely less necessary for his body's than it was for his spirit's health. For, much as he prized moderation in all things, and extolled ”the mirth that after no repenting draws,”
good wine, good company, and fair and witty women would be sure to work their spell on a temperament so bright and sympathetic, and to quicken his spirits into a brilliancy and force, dazzling for the hour, but to be paid for next day in headache and depression.
He was all the more likely to suffer in this way from the very fact that, as a rule, he was simple and frugal in his tastes and habits. We have seen him (p. 66), in the early days of his stay in Rome, at his ”plain meal of pancakes, pulse, and pease,” served on homely earthenware. At his farm, again, beans and bacon (p. 80) form his staple dish. True to the old Roman taste, he was a great vegetarian, and in his charming ode, written for the opening of the temple of Apollo erected by Augustus on Mount Palatine (B.C. 28), he thinks it not out of place to mingle with his prayer for poetic power an entreaty that he may never be without wholesome vegetables and fruit.
”Let olives, endive, mallows light, Be all my fare; and health Give thou, Apollo, so I might Enjoy my present wealth!
Give me but these, I ask no more, These, and a mind entire-- An old age, not unhonoured, nor Unsolaced by the lyre!”
Maecenas himself is promised (Odes, III. 28), if he will visit the poet at the Sabine farm, ”simple dinners neatly dressed;” and when Horace invites down his friend Torquatus (Epistles, II. 5), he does it on the footing that this wealthy lawyer shall be content to put up with plain vegetables and homely crockery (_modica olus omne patella_). The wine, he promises, shall be good, though not of any of the crack growths. If Torquatus wants better, he must send it down himself. The appointments of the table, too, though of the simplest kind, shall be admirably kept--
”The coverlets of faultless sheen, The napkins scrupulously clean, Your cup and salver such that they Unto yourself yourself display.”
Table-service neat to a nicety was obviously a great point with Horace. ”What plate he had was made to look its best.” ”_Ridet argento domus_”--”My plate, newly-burnished, enlivens my rooms”--is one of the attractions held out in his invitation to the fair Phyllis to grace his table on Maecenas's birthday (Odes, IV. 11). And we may be very sure that his little dinners were served and waited on with the studied care and quiet finish of a refined simplicity. His rule on these matters is indicated by himself (Satires, II. 2):--
”The proper thing is to be cleanly and nice, And yet so as not to be over precise; To neither be constantly scolding your slaves, Like that old prig Albutus, as losels and knaves, Nor, like Naevius, in such things who's rather too easy, To the guests at your board present water that's greasy.”
To a man of these simple tastes the elaborate banquets, borrowed from the Asiatic Greeks, which were then in fas.h.i.+on, must have been intolerable. He has introduced us to one of them in describing a dinner-party of nine given by one Nasidienus, a wealthy sn.o.b, to Maecenas and others of Horace's friends. The dinner breaks down in a very amusing way, between the giver's love of display and his parsimony, which prompted him, on the one hand, to present his guests with, the fas.h.i.+onable dainties, but, on the other, would not let him pay a price sufficient to secure their being good. The first course consists of a Lucanian wild boar, served with a garnish of turnips, radishes, and lettuce, in a sauce of anchovy-brine and wine-lees. Next comes an incongruous medley of dishes, including one
”Of sparrows' gall and turbots' liver, At the mere thought of which I s.h.i.+ver.”
A lamprey succeeds, ”floating vast and free, by shrimps surrounded in a sea of sauce,” and this is followed up by a crane soused in salt and flour, the liver of a snow-white goose fattened on figs, leverets'
shoulders, and roasted blackbirds. This _menu_ is clearly meant for a caricature, but it was a caricature of a prevailing folly, which had probably cost the poet many an indigestion.
Against this folly, and the ruin to health and purse which it entailed, some of his most vigorous satire is directed. It furnishes the themes of the second and fourth Satires of the Second Book, both of which, with slight modifications, might with equal truth be addressed to the dinner-givers and diners-out of our own day. In the former of these the speaker is the Apulian yeoman Ofellus, who undertakes to show
”What the virtue consists in, and why it is great, To live on a little, whatever your state.”
Before entering on his task, however, he insists that his hearers shall cut themselves adrift from their luxuries, and come to him fasting, and with appet.i.tes whetted by a sharp run with the hounds, a stiff bout at tennis, or some other vigorous gymnastics;--
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