by Will Durant
Happy is he who far from business cares,
Even as the oldest race of men,
Tills with his own oxen his patrimonial fields,
Freed from every debt. . . .
How sweet it is to lie under the ancient ilex tree,
Or on the matted grass,
While the stream flows on between high banks,
And the woodland birds sing,
And springs with leaping waters plash,
Inviting to soft sleep! 40
It should be added, however, that these lines are put with Horatian irony into the mouth of a city moneylender, who, having uttered them, at once forgets them and loses himself in his coins.
Probably it was in those quiet haunts that he labored with “painstaking happiness”—curiosa felicitasIII—over those odes by which he knew that his name would live or die. He was tired of hexameters, the endless march of their measured feet, the sharp caesura cleaving the line like some inexorable guillotine. He had enjoyed in his youth the subtle and vivacious meters of Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Anacreon; he proposed now to transplant these “sapphics” and “alcaics,” these iambics and hendecasyllabics, into Roman lyric form, to express his thoughts on love and wine, religion and the state, life and death, in stanzas refreshingly new, epigrammatically compact, modeled for music, and teasing the mind with the complex skein of their weaving. He did not intend them for simple or hurried souls; indeed, he warned such away by the bluenosed opening of the third group:
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Favete linguis. Carmina non prius
audita Musarum sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto:—
“I hate and shun the profane crowd. Be silent! I, priest of the Muses, sing for maidens and youths songs never heard before.”
The maidens, if they had cared to tread and skip their way through Horace’s playful inversions of speech and desire, might have been pleasantly shocked by the chiseled epicureanism of these odes. The poet pictures the pleasures of friendship, eating and drinking, and making love; one would hardly surmise from such lauds that their author was a recluse who ate little and drank less. Why disturb ourselves with Roman politics and distant wars? he asks (anticipating the reader of these pages). Why plan so carefully a future whose shape will laugh at our plans? Youth and beauty touch us and flit away; let us enjoy them now, “reclining under the pine trees, our gray locks garlanded with roses and perfumed with Syrian nard.”42 Even as we speak, envious time runs out; seize the occasion, carpe diem, “snatch the day.”43 He intones a litany of loose ladies whom he claims to have loved: Lalage, Glycera, Neaera, Inacha, Cinara, Candia, Lyce, Pyrrha, Lydia, Tyndaris, Chloe, Phyllis, Myrtale. We need not believe all his protestations of guilt; these were literary exercises almost compulsory among the poets of the day; the same ladies or names had served other pens. The now virtuous Augustus was not deceived by these iambic fornications; he was pleased to find, among them, stately praises of his reign, his victories, his aides, his moral reforms, and the Augustan peace. Horace’s famous drinking song—Nuncest bibendum44—was composed on receipt of the news that Cleopatra was dead and Egypt taken; even his sophisticated soul thrilled at the thought of the Empire victorious and expanding as never before. He warned his readers that new laws could not take the place of old morals; mourned the spread of luxury and adultery, of frivolity and cynical unbelief. “Alas!” he says, referring to the latest war, “the shame of our scars and crimes, and of brothers slain! What have we of this hard generation shrunk from? What iniquity have we left untouched?”45 Nothing could save Rome but a return to the simplicity and steadfastness of ancient ways. The skeptic who found it difficult to believe anything bent his hoary head before the ancient altars, acknowledged that without a myth the people perish, and lent his pen graciously to the ailing gods.
There is nothing in the world’s literature quite like these poems—delicate and yet powerful, exquisite and masculine, subtle and intricate, hiding their art with perfect art, and their toil with seeming ease. This is music in another scale than Virgil’s, less melodious and more intellectual, meant not for youths and maidens but for artists and philosophers. There is rarely any passion here, or enthusiasm, or “fine writing”; the diction is simple even where the sentence stands on its head. But in the greater odes there is a pride and majesty of thought, as if an emperor were speaking and not in letters but in bronze:
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.
Non omnis moriar.46
I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze,
Loftier than the royal peak of pyramids;
No biting storm can bring it down,
No impotent north wind, nor the unnumbered series
Of the years, nor the swift course of time.
I shall not wholly die.
The slandered crowd ignored the Odes, the critics denounced them as tiresome artifice, the puritans declaimed against the songs of love. Augustus pronounced the poems immortal, asked for a fourth group that would celebrate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany, and chose Horace to write the carmen saeculare for the Secular Games. Horace complied, but without inspiration. The effort of the Odes had exhausted him. In his final work he relaxed into the conversational hexameters of the Satires, and wrote his Epistles as from an easy chair. He had always wanted to be a philosopher; now he abandoned himself to wisdom, even while remaining a causeur. Since a philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian, Horace, old at forty-five, was ripe to discuss God and man, morals and literature and art.
The most famous of these letters, named by later critics “The Art of Poetry,” was addressed Ad Pisones—to some uncertain members of the Piso clan; it was no formal treatise, but a bit of friendly advice on how to write. Choose a subject suited to your powers, Horace says; beware of laboring like a mountain and producing a mouse.47 The ideal book is that which at the same time instructs and entertains; “he who has mingled the useful with the pleasant wins every vote”—omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.48 Avoid words that are new, obsolete, or “sesquipedalian”—foot-and-a-half words. Be as brief as clarity allows. Go straight to the heart of the matter—in medias res. In writing poetry do not imagine that emotion is everything. It is true that you must feel an emotion yourself if you wish the reader to feel it (si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi).49 But art is not feeling; it is form (here again is the challenge of the classic to the romantic style).IV To achieve form, study the Greeks day and night; erase almost as much as you write; delete every “purple patch” (purpureus pannus); submit your work to a competent critic, and beware of your friends. If it survives all this, put it away for eight years; if then you do not perceive the uses of oblivion, publish it, but remember that it can never be recalled except by time: verba volant, scripta manent. If you write drama let the action, not your words, tell the story and delineate the characters. Do not represent horror on the stage. Obey the unities of action, time, and place: let the story be one and occur within a brief time in one place. Study life and philosophy, for without observation and understanding even a perfect style is an empty thing. Sapere aude: dare to know.
Horace himself had obeyed all these precepts but one—he had not learned to weep. Because his feelings were too thin, or had been stifled into silence, he seldom rose to the high art that gives form to sincere sympathy, or to “emotion remembered in tranquillity.” He was too urbane. Nil admirari, “to marvel at nothing,”50 was poor advice; to the poet everything should be a miracle, even when, like the sunrise or a tree, it greets him every day. Horace observed life, but not too deeply; he studied philosophy, but kept so persistently an “even mind”51 that only his Odes rise above a “golden mediocrity.”52 He honored virtue like a Stoic, and respected pleasure like an Epicure
an. “Who, then, is free?” he asks, and answers, like Zeno, “The wise man, he who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor bonds affright, who defies his passions, scorns ambition, and is in himself a whole.”53 One of his noblest poems sings a Stoic strain:
Iustum et tenacem propositi virum
si fractus inlabatur orbis
impavidum ferient ruinae—
“If a man is just and resolute, the whole world may break and fall upon him and find him, in the ruins, undismayed.”54 But despite all this he calls himself, with engaging honesty, “a pig from Epicurus’ sty.”55 Like Epicurus he placed more store on friendship than on love; like Virgil he lauded the reforms of Augustus, and remained a bachelor. He did his best to preach religion, but he had none. Death, he felt, ends all.56
His last days were clouded with this thought. He had his share of pains—stomach trouble, rheumatism, and much else. “The years as they pass,” he mourned, “rob us of all joys, one by one.”57 And to another friend: “Alas, O Postumus, the fleeting years slip by; nor shall piety hold back our wrinkles, or pressing age, or indomitable death.”58 He recalled how, in his first satire, he had hoped, when his time came, to quit life contentedly, “like a guest who has had his fill.”59 Now he told himself: “You have played enough, eaten enough, drunk enough; it is time for you to go.”60 Fifteen years have passed since he had told Maecenas that he would not long survive the financier.61 In 8 B.C.. Maecenas died, and a few months later Horace followed him. He left his property to the Emperor, and was laid to rest near Maecenas’ tomb.
V. LIVY
Augustan prose achieved no triumphs equal to those of Augustan verse. Oratory subsided as the making of laws and decisions passed in reality if not in form from Senate and assemblies to the secret chambers of the prince. Scholarship continued its quiet course, sheltered from present storms by its ghostly interests. It was only in the writing of history that the age achieved a masterpiece in prose.
Born in Patavium (Padua) in 59, Titus Livius came to the capital, devoted himself to rhetoric and philosophy, and gave the last forty years of his life (23 B.C—A.D. 17) to writing a history of Rome. That is all we know of him; “Rome’s historian has no history.”63 Like Virgil he came from the region of the Po, retained the old virtues of simplicity and piety, and—perhaps through the pathos of distance—developed a passionate reverence for the Eternal City. His work was planned on a majestic scale and was completed; of its 142 “books” only thirty-five have come down to us; as these fill six volumes we may judge the magnitude of the whole. Apparently it was published in parts, each with a separate title, and all under the general heading, Ab urbe condita—“From the city’s foundation.” Augustus could forgive its republican sentiments and heroes, since its religious, moral, and patriotic tone accorded well with the Emperor’s policies. He took Livy into his friendship and encouraged him as a prose Virgil who was beginning where the poet had left off. Halfway on his long journey from 753 to 9 B.C., Livy thought of stopping, on the ground that he had already won lasting fame; he went on, he says, because he found himself restless when he ceased to write.64
Roman historians looked upon history as a hybrid child of rhetoric and philosophy: if we may believe them, they wrote to illustrate ethical precepts with eloquent narrative—to adorn a moral with a tale. Livy was trained as an orator; finding oratory censured and dangerous, “he took to history,” says Taine, “so that he could still be an orator.”65 He began with a stern preface, denouncing the immorality, luxury, and effeminacy of the age; he buried himself in the past, he tells us, to forget the evils of his time, “when we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” He would set forth, through history, the virtues that had made Rome great—the unity and holiness of family life, the pietas of children, the sacred relation of men with the gods at every step, the sanctity of the solemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas. He would make that stoic Rome so noble that its conquest of the Mediterranean would appear as a moral imperative, a divine order and law cast over the chaos of the East and the barbarism of the West. Polybius had ascribed Rome’s triumph to its form of government; Livy would make it a corollary of the Roman character.
The chief faults of his work derive from this moral intent. He gives many signs of being privately a rationalist; but his respect for religion is so great that he accepts almost any superstition, and litters his pages with omens, portents, and oracles, until we feel that here too, as in Virgil, the real actors are the gods. He expresses his doubts concerning the myths of early Rome; he gives the less credible ones with a smile; but as he goes on he ceases to distinguish legend from history, follows his predecessors with scant discrimination, and accepts at their face value the laudatory romances that earlier historians had composed to ennoble their ancestry.66 He rarely consults original sources or monuments, and never bothers to visit the scene of an action. Sometimes he paraphrases Polybius for pages.67 He adopts the old priestly method of annals, narrating events by consulates; consequently there is in him, aside from his moral theme, no tracing of causes, but only a succession of brilliant episodes. He makes no distinction between the rude patres of the early Republic and the aristocracy of his day, nor between the virile plebs that had created Roman democracy and the venal mob that had destroyed it. His prejudices are always patrician.
The patriotic pride that makes Rome forever right in Livy was the secret of his greatness. It gave him an enduring happiness in his long toil; seldom has any writer executed so vast a plan so faithfully. It gave his readers, and still gives us, a sense of Rome’s grandeur and destiny. This imperial consciousness contributed to the energy of Livy’s style, the vigor of his characterizations, the brilliance and power of his descriptions, the majestic march of his prose. The invented speeches in which his history abounds are masterpieces of oratory, and became models for the schools. The charm of good manners pervades the work: Livy never shouts, never severely condemns; his sympathy is broader than his scholarship and deeper than his thought. It fails him forgivably when he comes to Hannibal; but he atones with a sweep and splendor of narrative that reaches its zenith in describing the Second Punic War.
His readers did not mind his inaccuracies or his bias. They liked his style and story, and gloried in the vivid picture that he had drawn of their past. They took the Ab urbe condita as a prose epic, one of the noblest monuments of the Augustan age and mood. From that time onward it was Livy’s book that would color for eighteen centuries men’s conception of Rome’s history and character. Even readers in subject lands were impressed by this massive record of unprecedented conquests and titanic deeds. The younger Pliny tells of a Spaniard who was so moved by Livy’s work that he traveled from far Cádiz to Rome in the hope of seeing him. Having accomplished his purpose and tendered his worship, he neglected other sights and returned content to his Atlantic home.68
VI. THE AMOROUS REVOLT
Meanwhile poetry continued to flourish, but not quite on the lines of Augustus’ desire. Only supreme artists like Virgil or Horace can produce good verse to governmental specifications; greater men would refuse, lesser men are unable to comply. Of the three major sources of poetry—religion, nature, love—two had been brought under imperial sway; the third remained lawless, even in Horace’s Odes. Now, mildly in Tibullus and Propertius, recklessly in Ovid, poetry escaped from the bureau of propaganda and staged a rebellion that proceeded with mounting gaiety to a tragic end.
Albius Tibullus (54-19), like Virgil, lost his ancestral lands when the Civil War reached the little town of Pedum–near Tibur—that had seen his birth. Messala rescued him from poverty and took him in his train to the East, but Tibullus fell ill on the way and returned to Rome. He was happy to be free from war and politics; now he could give himself to genderless love and the polishing of elegiac verse in the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks. To Delia (otherwise unknown, and perhaps one name for many) he addressed the usual supplications, “sitting like a gatekeeper [ianitor] before
her stubborn doors”69 and reminding her, as so many maids have been reminded, that youth comes but once and soon steals away. It did not disturb him that Delia was married; he put the husband to sleep with undiluted wine—but fumed when her new lover played the same trick upon him.70 These ancient themes might not have harassed Augustus; what made Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid really disagreeable to a government that was finding it hard to enlist recruits for the army was the persuasive anti-militarism of this love-loose set. Tibullus laughs at warriors who forage for death when they might have been seducing women. He mourns for the age of Saturn, when, he imagines,
