140
ODES OE HOKACE.
accordingly. Wieland Iiirtlier calls in the testimony of a letter
of Augustus in Suetonius, in which the emperor coinplains of
Horace’s indifference, and says: “An vereris ne apud posteros
infame tibi sit quod videaris faɪniliaris nobis esse?” the poet
declined to become the emperor’s secretary. These facts speak
clearly enough.
The Odes of Horace are not printed in our editions in their
chronological order: some of them belong to a very early
period, and peιhaps to the time when he was staying at Athens;
but of a great many of them it is impossible to determine the
exact time at which they were written, though it may be con-
fidently asserted, that most of them belong to the period pre-
ceding the war of Actium. The first three books, however, were
not published till after that war. Among the Sermones there
are some of a very early date, and the earliest of all is perhaps
that on the entertainment OfNasidienus5, whom I believe, with
the Scholiast and Lambinus, to be Salvidienus Rufus ; it is not
probable that Horace should have ridiculed the man, who had
become unfortunate, after his death, and this Sermo accordingly
belongs, in all probability, to the first years after the battle of
Philippi, about 710. The fourth book of the Odes and the
second of the Epistles were written in the latter years of
Horace’s life.
With regard to Horace as a poet, he was formerly admired
to extravagance; but for about thirty years, that is from about
the commencement of the present century, when Roman
literature began to be neglected, Horace has not had justice
done to him. His imitations of the lyric poems of the Greeks
are of exquisite beauty, and have much that is original.
Sometimes, however, he is not quite successful; it is evident
that occasionally he was seeking for a particular expression, but
was satisfied with another which is neither the most precise,
nor the most appropriate. This carelessness on the part of
Horace has given rise to many of Bentley’s emendations.
Horace is, on the whole, a veτy amiable character, and there
5 The ancient poets, as the scholiasts justly observe, in speaking of a person
whose name they do not wish to mention, substitute another name of precisely
the same prosody as the real one, so that the latter may be inserted without
disturbing the metre- Thus we have Malthinus for Maecenas. Some one, I
believe, has written on such disguised names in Horace.—N. (Niebuhr seems
to allude here to Buttmann’s essay, “ Ucber das Geschichtliche und die Anspie-
Iungen ιm Horaz,” in the “ Mythologies” i. p. 297—346.)
ESTIMATION OF HORACE.
141
are only two things in him which are disagreeable to my
feelings. First, his disregard for the earlier poetry of his
country, which he treats with contempt, as something old-
fashioned. He was right in opposing the excessive enthusiasm
for everything ancient, which endeavoured to crush all that
was new; but his low estimation of the early Roman poets is
unjust, and deserves censure. It is almost inconceivable how
it was possible for him to mistake the great merits of Plautus,
for example. There is much in Plautus that was offensive to
him, because it was foreign to his age; many an expression
also, which now appears to us noble, may in his time have be-
come a vulgarism, and may therefore have displeased him. But
what more than anything else produced this feeling in him,
seems to have been vexation at those who ridiculously paraded
their partiality for what was old-fashioned, and affected the
most intense admiration of it, just as among us there exists an
extravagant admiration of the middle ages. No one is more
decidedly opposed than myself to an undue admiration of
middle-age customs, and of the poetical productions of that
time, whether they be the songs of the troubadours or the lay
of the Nibelungen itself; but this is a very different thing
from being unjust towards them. The second point which
T have to censure in the poems of Horace,—though I am will-
ing to excuse it, if I consider the circumstances of the time,—
is the irony of the Epicurean philosophy with which he looks
upon everything, as though in reality it were only a folly: he
treats all subjects, even those which are most venerable, lightly,
and tries to smile at everything. This tendency is a bad habit
with him, and is painful to us. I think, however, that he would
have been a different man, if he had lived in a happier age.
He always appears kind and cordial, but somewhat constrained6,
whereas Catullus, in his wild and fanciful strains, and his loud
laughter, as well as in his tears, speaks to our hearts. Horace,
whose real sympathies were with Brutus, was resolved not to
let his heart bleed, and consoled Iiimselfby looking at things
in a manner which is painful to me. The late Count Frederic
Leopold Stolberg says most truly, “ when a real good is lost;
it is often worth a great deal to retain the feeling of the loss.”
In such a case, no one should wish to divert his mind, or try
6 Something analogous to the disposition of Horace is found in Menander, and
the later Attic comedy in general.—N.