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Life of Quintus Horatius Flaccus

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Life of Quintus Horatius Flaccus f r^ttfPMWAMMtoM "* " ' ' "^-^ '< > ' iiai>i<7» iiii>Bi ^ '1 ) BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OP 1891 ^i^^77ri : 1"^- Ik 5474 Cornell University Library PA 6411.M65 ' Life of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 3 1924 026 491 948 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026491948 ' ^?i3 -*fi LIFE QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS. REV. HENRY HART MILMAN, D.D., DEAN OF HT. PAUL'S. EJKitf) Sllusttattcns. A NEW EDITION. LONDON - JOHN MTJEEAT. MBOCCLIV. T -^1 -^l^r'i^^ t?l m TO HENRY MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE, K.G. mSTINGUISHED ALIKE FOK HIS LOVE OF LETTEKS AND OF THE FINE A1!T>, THIS ATTEMPT TO ILLUSTRATE THE POET OF ROMAN MANNERS, AND OF ROMAN SOCIAL LIFE, FIIOM THE REMAINS OF AKCIENT ART, IS IXSCllIBED, WITH SENTIMENTS OF HIGH ESTEEM, AND GRATEFUL REGARD, M BY THE EDITOR. WM iKM "^^:^~^ e^--' --^^ rAOB 1 LIFE OF HORACE . • 89 FASTI HORATIANI . LETTER BY G. W. DENNIS: DB VILLA HORATII . 97 . Ill PERSONS HORATIANI . PERSONS HORATIANI: POETS 104 '(^x^ 1^ ILLUSTKATIONS TO THE LIFE OF HORACE, Venusia Mount Voltore The Rivbb Aufidus FoNS Bandusia 21 DiGENTIA . ... 47 # RoccA GioYANE ei SORACTE . 71 ^l\^ — JEEnBilnEaEiEaE^^ CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION —BIBTH, PAEENTAGE, EDUCATION OF HOEAOE ATHENS — PHILIPPI —RETURN TO ROME. I HE POETRY of Horace is the history of Eome during the great change from a repubhc into a monarchy, during the sudden and almost complete revolution from centuries of war and civil faction to that peaceful period, which is called the Augustan Age of Letters. His life is the image of his eventful times. In his youth he plunges into the fierce and sanguinary civil IEiBEiiB!5iH!!iia!5iB15iBEiBH m 2 LIFE OF HORACE. war; and afterwards subsiding quietly into literary ease, the partisan of Brutus softens into the friend of Mseoenas, and the happy subject, if not the flatterer, of Augustus. Nor is his personal history merely illustrative of his times in its broader outline ; every part of it, which is revealed to us in his poetry, is equally instructive. Even the parentage of m the poet is connected with the difficult but important questions of the extent to which slavery in the Roman world was affected by manumission, and the forma- tion of that middle class (the libertini), with their privileges, and the estimation in which they were held by' society. His birthplace in the romantic scenery, and among the simple virtues of the old Italian yeomanry; his Eoman education ; his residence at Athens ; his military services ; the confiscation of his estate ; his fortunes as a literary adventurer, oast upon the world in Eome ; the state of Eoman poetry when he commenced his career ; the degree in which his compositions were Eoman and original, or but the naturalization of new forms of Grecian poetry; the influence of the different sects of philosophy on the literature and manners of the age ; even the state of religion, particularly as it affected the higher and more intellectual orders, at this momentous crisis when Christianity was about to be revealed to man- kind — every circumstance in the life of the Poet is rSM an incident in the history of man. The influences which formed his moral and poetical character, are '•'£\^ the prevalent modes of feeling and thought among the people, who had achieved the conquest of the world, and, weary of their own furious contentions, now began to slumber in the proud consciousness of universal empire. In him as in an individual ex- ample appears the change which took place in the fortunes, position, sentiments, occupations, estimation, character, mode of living, when the Eoman, from the citizen of a free and turbulent republic, became the subject of a peaceful monarchy, disguised indeed, but M} not, therefore, the less arbitrary : while his acquaint- ance, and even his intimate friends, extending through almost every gradation of society, show the same in- fluences, as they affect persons of different characters, talents, or station. Horace is exactly in that happy intermediate rank which connects both extremes. His poems are inscribed to Agrippa or Maecenas, even to the Emperor himself, to his humbler private friend, or to his bailiff. He unites, in the same way, the literary with the social life ; he shows the station assumed by or granted to mere men of letters, when the orator in the senate or in the forum ceded his place to the agreeable writer; 0i the man who excited or composed at his will the strong passions of the Eoman people, had lost ^w^ his occupation and his power, which devolved, as far as the literary part of his fame, upon the popular author. The mingling intellectual elements blend together, even in more singular union, in the mind of the Poet. Grecian education and tastes have not polished off the old Eoman independence ; the imitator of Greek forms of verse writes the pmest vernacular Latin; the Epicurean philosophy has not 4 LIFE OF HORACK. subdued his masculine shrewdness and good sense to dreaming indolence. In the Eoman part of his character he blends some reminiscences of the sturdy virtue of the Sabine or Apulian mountaineers, with the refined manners of the eity. All the great men of his day are the famiUars of the poet; not in their hours of state alone, but in the ease of social intercourse : we become acquainted with their ordinary manners and habits ; and are admitted to the privacy of Maecenas, of Augustus himself, of VirgU, and of Varius. Thus the Horatian poetry is more than historical, it is the living age itself in all its varied reality. Without the biography of the poet, even without that of some of his contemporaries, the poetry of Horace cannot be truly appreciated, it can hardly be understood ; and by the magic of his poetry, the reader is at once placed in the midst of Eoman society in the Augustan age. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on the 8th of December, in the year u. c. 689, b. c. 6S, during the consulship of L. Cotta and L. Manlius Torquatus. His father (such was the received and natural theory) owed his freedom to one of the illustrious family of the Horatii, whose name, according to general usage, he was perinitted to assume. Recent writers, however, have shown from inscriptions, (') that Venusia, the town in the territory of which Horace was born, be- longed to the Horatian tribe in Rome ; and that the (') G. F. Grotefend in " Ersch und Grubei's Encyclopsedie," " Horatius ; and C. L. Grotefend in the Darmstadt Lit. Journal." Franhe, Fasti Horatiani, note 1. UFK OF HORACE. 5 father of Horace may have been a freed-man of the town of Venusia. The great family of the Horatii, so glorious in the early days of the republic, certainly did not maintain its celebrity in later times. With one solitary exception, a legate of C. Calvisius in Africa (Cic. ad. Fam. xii. 30), it might seem to have been extinct. If the freed-man of an Horatius, the father of the poet does not appear to have kept up that connection, or civil relationship, which bound the emancipated slave, by natural ties of affection and gratitude, to the family of his generous master. The theory of this assumption of a Boman name was, that the master, having bestowed civil life on the freed-man, stood, in a certain sense, in the place of a parent. He still retained some authority, and inherited the freed-man's property, in case of his dying intestate. On the other hand, the freed-man was under the obligation of maintaining his patron, or even the father and mother of his patron, if they fell into indigence. (') But there is no allusion in the • (') Compare Pliny xxxi. 2, for an instance of the literai-y son of a distinguished man in those times paying a tribute of gratitude to his civil parent. Laurea TuHius the poet was a freed-man of the great orator. A warm spring had broken out in the acBidemic Villa of Cicero, which was supposed to cure diseases in the eyes. The poetical inscription hy L. Tullius (of which the feeling is better than the taste) described the spring as providentially revealed, in order that more eyes might be enabled to read the widely disseminated works of his master. The freed-man and freed-woman were admitted into the family mausoleum with those who had emancipated them. See several inscriptions, especially a very beautiful one, Gruter, p. 715; Ciampini, p. 173. LIFE OF HORACE. poet's works to any connection of this kind. At all events,, the freed-man has thrown a brighter and more lasting lustre around that celebrated name, than all the virtues and exploits of the older patriots who bore it. We know no reason for his having the If prsenomen Quintus, nor the agnomen, by which he was familiarly known, Flaccus. The latter name was by no \i means uncommon ; it is found in the Calpurnian, the Cornelian, the Pomponian, and the Valerian families. Horace was of ingenuous birth, which implies that ii he was born after his father had received his manumis- \i sion. The silence of the poet about his mother, leads to the supposition that she died in his early youth. The father of Horace exercised the function of collector of payments at auctions, f) The collector was a public servant. This comparatively humble office was probably paid according to the number of sales, and the value of the property brought to market ; and in those days of confiscation, and of rapid and frequent changes of property, through the inordinate ambition or'luxury of some, the forfeitures or ruin of opulent landholders, and the extinction of noble families in the civil wars, the amount and value of the property brought to sale (sub hastd) was likely to enable a prudent public officer to make a decent fortune.
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