It is, on one level, a majestically patriotic poem, suffused with an epic sense of scale and destiny. It recounts as its basic theme the establishment of those moral obsessions of ancient Augustan Rome, peace (pax), civilization (mos), and law (ius). “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem,” Virgil wrote: “So hard and massive a task it was to found the Roman race.” Much the same might be said about the composition of Virgil’s poem. Like Shakespeare, Virgil created an extraordinary number of phrases and images that so embedded themselves in the uses of his language that they seem always to have been there: clichés that continually refresh themselves. “Equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” A real shudder of mystery in the presence of the Trojan horse: “Don’t feel safe with the horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts.” Or the warning about Helclass="underline"
The road down to that place of damnation is easy, but
Night and day the gates of Death’s dark kingdom lie open:
But to retrace your steps, to find your way back to daylight–
That is the task, the hard thing.
The Aeneid reverberates throughout with hints and prophecies of Rome’s destiny. Aeneas comforts and encourages his exhausted men (book 1, lines 205–10): “We hold our course for Latium, where the Fates/Hold out a settlement and rest for us. Troy’s kingdom there shall rise again. Be patient:/Save yourselves for more auspicious days.” Aeneas will found the city, and presently
Happy in the tawny pelt
His nurse, the she-wolf, wears, young Romulus
Will take the leadership, build walls of Mars,
And call by his own name, his people Romans.
For these I set no limits, world or time,
But make the gift of empire without end.
In the kingdom of the dead in book 6, Anchises prophesies that “Illustrious Rome will bound her power with earth,/Her spirit with Olympus. She’ll enclose/Her seven hills with one great city wall,/Fortunate in the men she breeds.” And he instructs his son Aeneas to
Turn your two eyes
This way and see this people, your own Romans.
Here is Caesar, and all the line of Iulus,
All who shall one day pass under the dome
Of the great sky; this is the man, this one,
Of whom so often you have heard the promise,
Caesar Augustus, son of the deified,
Who shall bring once again an Age of Gold,
To Latium, to the land where Saturn reigned
In early times. He will extend his power
Beyond the Garamants and Indians,
Over far territories north and south.…
Thus the growth of empire is foreordained.
After Virgil, the best-known of all Augustan poets, then as now, was Quintus Horatius Flaccus—Horace. (Lucretius was certainly influential, both in Rome and, later, through his influence on Milton; but he was not loved and enjoyed as Horace was.) Horace was five years younger than Virgil, the son of a freedman, his father an auctioneer who had been a slave. His career, up to the time he was noticed by Maecenas and brought into the Augustan circle, had been an uneven one. In fact, he had served in the army, fighting on the side of Brutus and Cassius and with the high rank of military tribune, against the future Augustus at Philippi.
Horace was certainly indebted to Maecenas, but he did not feel a bit inferior to him—rather, he addressed him as an equal, a friend—“Maecenas, son of royal stock/My friend, my honour, my firm rock.” A relaxed intimacy seems to prevail between the two men. At one point, in “Epode 14,” Horace even refers to an erotic liaison between Augustus and an actor, Bathyllus—a liberty which he could not possibly have taken if a trusting confidentiality did not exist between him and Augustus’ friend Maecenas.
He makes a few mistakes at first, overflattering Augustus, attributing a politically unwelcome divinity to him. He follows the Augustan line on sexual immorality and public weakness a little too sedulously for some tastes: “Teeming with sin, our times have sullied first the marriage bed, our offspring, and our homes; sprung from this source, disaster’s stream has overflowed the people and the fatherland … The young maiden even now trains herself in coquetry and, impassioned to her finger tips, plans unholy amours.” But soon the right proportion of praise is found, and in the meantime Horace has developed into a wonderful singer of the light of pleasure and, sometimes, of the remorse which can be the shadow of that sun.
He was short and stout, gray-haired, and a connoisseur of wine, gardens, and conversation. He was urbane, humorous, and without rancor in the face of human folly. If you can judge a man’s qualities from his poetry, he was an ideal companion. He loved the country farm that Augustus, through Maecenas, had given him: its orchard, its bubbling spring of water “shinier than glass.” He was presumably homosexual. He never married, and some of his most beautiful verses are addressed to a Roman youth called Ligurinus. But he certainly had no animus against the opposite sex, celebrating it in some of the finest lines ever addressed by a man to a woman, however imaginary:
Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus,
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
cui flavam religas comam,
simplex munditiis?
“What slender lad drenched in liquid scents presses against you, Pyrrha, under some pleasing grotto? For whom are you binding back your blond hair in simple elegance?”
Other remarkable poets enjoyed the favor of Maecenas and, through him, the largesse of Augustus: Sextus Propertius, Tibullus. The characters from their poetry would recur in English verse up to the nineteenth century, thanks to the classical basis of upper-class English education: Propertius’ Cynthia, and the girl whose slave Tibullus declares he is, Delia.
But the most irresistible of these poets, and the “bad boy” of Augustan writing, was Ovid: Publius Ovidius Naso, born in a valley of the Apennines east of Rome in 43 B.C.E., died in exile on the western Black Sea coast in the village of Tomi (now Costanza, in Romania), in 17 C.E., his books having been removed from Rome’s public libraries on Augustus’ orders. It might actually have been a lot worse, for he was allowed to keep his property in Rome. Exactly what Ovid had done to deserve this punishment—Augustus never banished another writer of quality—is not really certain, and Ovid himself never did more than hint at it in his writing, beyond saying that it was caused by a carmen (a song) and an error (a mistake). The mistake was probably sexual, and it may have involved Augustus’ wild and sexy granddaughter Julia, who was some twenty-five years younger than the poet and would herself be banished to a Mediterranean island for immorality at about the same time that Ovid was sent to Tomi. As for the disapproved song, any number of Ovid’s would have fit the bill. “Posterity, recognize who it is you’re reading, / the poet of fun, kindness, love,” declares his Tristia (Lamentations), written in exile, to assert his innocence. Witty, fluent, thrice-married, with a worldly charm that shines through every line of his Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) and his magnum opus, the Metamorphoses, Ovid was the first of the great literary boulevardiers, and to kick him out to a provincial hole like Tomi, whatever the rustic charms of its landscape and its women, was a terrible waste of life-enhancing talent: