The Historians' History of the World 05

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.