The character of Virgil was gentle and amiable, his manners simple and unobtrusive, and we hear little from himself of the great men with whom he was associated in friendship. His health was feeble, and his life passed away in uneventful study, of which his poems were the fruit and are the evidence. Nothing can be more finished than the style and versification of Virgil. His phraseology is so idiomatic as often to defy translation; his learning so great, that each page requires a commentary. He bestowed the greatest labour in polishing his writings; his habit being, as is said, to pour forth a vast quantity of verses in the morning, which he reduced to a small number by continual elaboration, after the manner (as he said) of a bear licking her cubs into shape.
It may be said that Cicero, Horace, and Virgil himself, completed the hellenising tendency which had begun with Ennius. Lucretius, though he borrowed his matter from the old Greek philosophers, is much more Roman in his style. Catullus is more Roman still. But Virgil, except in idiom, is Greek everywhere. His Eclogues are feeble echoes of the Doric grace of Theocritus. His Georgics are elaborately constructed from the works of Hellenic writers, tempered in some of the noblest poetic passages with the grave majesty of Lucretius. In his Æneid almost every comparison and description is borrowed from Homer, Apollonius, and other Greek poets. In strength of character his epic fails entirely. No one person in the Æneid excites awe, love, sympathy, or any other strong feeling, unless we except the untimely end of Nisus and Euryalus, the fates of young Lausus and young Pallas, and the death of the heroine Camilla. But, notwithstanding all this, such is the tender grace of his style, such the elaborate beauty of his descriptions, that we read again and yet again with renewed delight.
To give any adequate account of the gay Horace in a page is impossible. Q. Horatius Flaccus was born in the colony of Venusia in the year 65 B.C., two years before the consulship of Cicero. He was therefore nearly six years younger than Virgil, and two years older than Octavian. He died in the fifty-seventh year of his age (8 B.C.), following his friend and patron Mæcenas, who died a month or two before, according to his own prophetic promise. His father was a freedman by birth, and by profession a tax-collector, a good and tender parent, caring above all things for the education of his son. He was at the expense of taking the promising boy to Rome, probably when he was about twelve years old, where he attended the school of Orbilius, known to others besides Horace for his belief in the maxim that the “sparing of the rod spoils the child.” There he learned Greek as well as Latin, by reading Homer and the old Roman poets. About the age of eighteen he went to complete his education at Athens, where Q. Cicero was his fellow-student. He was at Athens when Cæsar was murdered, and became an officer in the army of Brutus. After the battle of Philippi he returned to Rome, and was thrown entirely upon the world. He obtained, we know not how, a clerkship in the treasury, on the proceeds of which he contrived to live in the most frugal manner; vegetables and water formed his truly poetic diet.
But he was not left to languish in poverty. He became acquainted with Varius and Virgil, and was by them introduced to Mæcenas; and we have from his own pen a pleasing narrative of the introduction. For several months, however, he received no sign of the great man’s favour; but before the journey to Brundusium he was evidently established in intimacy as great as Virgil’s. Soon after this he published the first book of the Satires. The second book and the Epodes followed; but in the interval he had received a substantial reward from his patron in the present of the Sabine farm, so prettily described by himself. At a latter period he became master of a cottage at Tibur, distant about fifteen miles from his Sabine villa. But it must be said that, notwithstanding his dependence upon patrons, Horace always maintained a steady determination not to be subservient to any one, emperor or minister. The Epistle to Mæcenas deserves especial notice; for it is written in a tone equally creditable to the poet who would not condescend to flatter the patron, and to the patron who tolerated such freedom in the poet.
Hitherto he had declined the name of poet. But the publication of the three books of his Odes in rapid succession indicated his title to this name, though still he declined to approach subjects of epic grandeur. Before this he had been introduced to Agrippa, and somewhat later to Octavia. The first book of his Epistles seems to have been completed in 21 B.C., when the poet was beginning his forty-fifth year. Then followed the Carmen Seculare, which may be fixed, by the occasion to which it belongs, to the year 17 B.C. After this came the fourth book of Odes and the second book of Epistles, works in great part due to the express request of Augustus.
The popularity of the Odes of Horace has ever been great. He disclaims the title of poet for his other writings; and of the odes he says that he wrote poetry only under the sharp compulsion of poverty. Much is borrowed from the Greek, as we know; and if the works of the Greek lyric poets remained to us in a less fragmentary form, we should doubtless find far more numerous examples of imitation. But the style of Horace is so finished, his sentiments expressed with so much lively precision, and in words so happily chosen, that he deserves the title which he claims of “Rome’s lyric minstrel.” No doubt his poetry was the result of great labour, and every perusal of his odes strengthens the belief that he spoke literally when he compared himself to “the matine bee,” rifling the sweets of many flowers, and finishing his work with assiduous labour. It is in the first book of the Epistles that we must seek the true genius of Horace—the easy man of the world, popular with his great patrons, the sworn friend of his brother poets, good-natured to every one, except the old poets of Rome, whom he undervalued partly (as in the case of Livius) from dislike for a rude and imperfect style, partly (as we must suspect in the case of Catullus and Calvus) from an irrepressible emotion of jealousy.
The elegiac poets, Tibullus and Propertius, with their younger and more famous compeer Ovid, and many writers of lesser note, belong to the imperial era of Augustus.
THE FINE ARTS
A few words may be added on the subject of art generally. With the great fortunes that had been amassed first by senatorial rulers and afterwards by the favourites of the triumvirs, it is natural that art in some shape should be cultivated. But Greek masters still ruled at Rome; and a taste began for collecting ancient works, such as resembles the eagerness with which the pictures of the old masters are sought in modern Europe. In the oration of Cicero against Verres we have an elaborate exposure of the base and greedy arts by which that wholesale plunderer robbed the Sicilians of their finest works of art. It was, no doubt, an extreme case; but Verres would not have dared to proceed to extremities so audacious, unless he had been encouraged by many precedents.