The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  yet I see you clear, small and shallow and cheap.

  What? You cannot understand? The wrongs you do to your lover

  force him to love you more, but, ah my dear, prize you less.

  He had come far from that young fresh world of enchantment where he watched the sparrow play. He was only in his early twenties, but he would never enter it again:

  Yours is the guilt, my Lesbia, to this pass you have brought me, where love’s duty works ruin to love itself.

  So that I have no power to wish you were best among women,

  Yet no power to cease loving you through all you do.

  She had certainly been trying to hold him in spite of all this anguish of bitterness, but a day came when she did not try any more. She had done with him and in his passion-torn, despairing young heart he found courage to face the truth:

  Poor wretch Catullus, end this frantic folly now,

  and what you see is dead give up for lost, poor fool.

  A time was once when golden suns shone bright for you,

  when you went only where a girl was pleased to go,

  a girl more loved than any will be loved again.

  Then there was merry sport for two, unstinted joys,

  what you would have and what your lady, too, liked well.

  Then golden suns in very truth shone bright for you.

  She wants no more. Then do not you, infirm of will.

  When she would flee, will you run after—live a wretch?

  Now force your heart—now steel your stubborn will—be hard.

  Goodbye, my girl, Catullus has made hard his heart.

  No more pursuit—to cold reluctance no more prayers.

  It is you will suffer pain when no one prays to you.

  Oh, you are evil. Yet what life awaits you now—

  Who now will go to you? To whom will you seem fair?

  Whom will you love now—swear that you are his alone?

  Whom kiss and kissing keenly, hotly, bite his lips?

  But you, Catullus, come, an end. Make hard your heart.

  His dearly loved brother had lately died in the distant east; his grief for him, his old father who needed him, his sick longing for change, called him home from the city of his suffering and he went back to Verona. There he found money troubles, and as the quickest way to be free of them, he got a post with a new governor on the point of leaving for his province, and he went to the east in his train. He made no money, the province having been already drained dry by Roman fortune hunters, but one great wish he did fulfill, he went to his brother’s grave and he wrote a poem, ranked among his best, which shows the tenderness there was in him.

  Over many lands and many seas I have travelled,

  only to stand by a tomb, brother, to weep what is lost.

  Give you death’s last gift, tears, words of sorrowful parting,

  tears to the careless earth, words to the silent dead.

  But since fate has taken you, you, your very self, from me,

  brother, pitied, beloved, gone from me in your youth,

  these rites now I pay, from olden time taught our fathers,

  weeping pay to the dead what to the dead is due.

  Wet with a brother’s tears, receive from my hand the last tribute.

  And forever, my dear, greeting—forever goodbye.

  But his love story was not yet ended. Lesbia called him back. Probably he went to Rome of himself, moved in part by the terrible need to see her. And then—did she meet him one day in a crowd, see him avoid her with visible hatred and scorn, and suddenly feel an amused determination to show him her power—show herself, too, perhaps, for she was nearing forty and needed reassurance. So she lifted a white hand and beckoned to him and he fell at her feet:

  When, past hope, there comes to the starving heart its desire,

  comes after long despair, that—that—is the heart’s best joy.

  So joy best of best and richer than wealth has come to me, given to my desire, Lesbia, you yourself.

  Back to my hopeless desire you came, you gave yourself to me,

  Oh, a day of light, marked with splendor for me.

  Where is the man who lives more blessed than I am—I only?

  Who could ask of gods more that life can give?

  The reunion could not have lasted long. The house on the Palatine was changed. The good, stupid Metellus was dead and strange stories about his death were abroad. People capable of being shocked visited it no more and they were not missed. It was a house of excesses; each latest experience must outdo the one before. What he suffered there Catullus never put into verse. Caelius Rufus was his close friend. When she took him and brought him into her house to live, Catullus at last saw the end. He broke off, this time for always:

  Hard—it is hard of a sudden to break with a love years-long cherished.

  Yes, it is hard, but you must. This way or that, end it now.

  Here only is your salvation. This fight you must win—here be victor.

  This you shall do. If you can or if you cannot. You must.

  O Gods, if ever you pity, if ever you bring to the stricken, help in the anguish of death, in life’s extremity,

  look on my misery, save him who vows he has lived free from evil.

  Purge this plague from my blood, make me clean of this taint,

  creeping like slow corruption within me, body, bone, sinew.

  Not in all my heart space where joy may come.

  No more now I pray she might love me again as I love her,

  not for what cannot be, that she should wish to be true.

  I would be healed, rise up from this torment of sickness that fouls me.

  O Gods, give only this—this to your worshipper.

  He had but a year or two left to live. In his life as in his love he was the quintessential lover, he died young. We hear in his writings of a cough that racked him, the fitting accompaniment to a broken heart. Shortly before his death and after the trial and Clodia’s increased recklessness that followed it, he wrote to Caelius:

  Caelius, Lesbia—she, our Lesbia—Oh, that

  only Lesbia, whom Catullus only

  loved as never himself and all his dearest,

  now on highways and byways seeks her lovers,

  strips all Rome’s noble great-souled sons of their money.

  These bitter and poignant words are the last we know of Clodia and her poet.

  * It is not necessary to say that such poems are untranslatable. All poems are. Still, the burning fusion of feeling and expression certainly has its own peculiar difficulties for the translator, and the following translations are offered in the hope of giving the reader an idea not so much of what Catullus’ poetry is like, but only of what he himself was like. In each case the original metre of the poem has been reproduced accurately enough to give the reader the feeling of the rhythm.

  VIII

  Horace

  There are people to whom any sense of fitness would assign a short life. Catullus is one of them. Indeed one can hardly conceive of him as living on to old age and the hardest heart could not wish that he had. In his space of thirty odd years he had felt more than most octogenarians, even octogenarian poets. All things were always final with him and moderation in any shape or form impossible. One cannot think without profound weariness of his going on like that. To live perpetually at such an altitude is not for humanity and Catullus would have been worn out long before old age overtook him. Fate at the end was kind to him.

  But there are other people whom anyone would like to have live forever, and in that number Horace stands foremost. He would have liked it, too. He had that most delightful gift of enjoying keenly all life’s simplest pleasures, a grassy bank by a river, a glowing fire on a cold night, a handful of ripe olives, the sky, the sunshine, the cooling wind. And it is not a doubtful assumption that of those people we would choose out to be immortal nine-tenths would have that very gift. There is none other that helps life along as much, for
others as well as for the possessor.

  Who would not like to see Horace walk in through his door any day in the year? Immediately everything would seem more agreeable, the cocktails better flavored, the armchairs softer, even the comfort of the warm sheltered room would take on the proportions of an active delight. And the talk would never centre round himself. Every attempt to make it do so would be warded off deprecatingly with a touch of gay humor. Sitting in your armchair he would be the most stimulating of listeners—but any balloon you launched would be in danger of a puncture from a sly dart of irony, which yet, with all its cutting edge, would fail to wound.

  And if you were in difficulties, if you had spent too freely, or quarrelled with an important neighbor or offended your employer or tried to be on with the new love before you were fairly off the old, you would have in him the most understanding and the shrewdest, most worldly-wise of advisers.

  Horace is the complete man of the world, with tolerance for all and partisanship for none; able to get on with everyone and at home everywhere; ready for any pleasure, averse to all the disturbing passions, viewing this earthly scene with some detachment—and almost never in a state of mind where a laugh comes hard. The description does not suggest a poet, and indeed no one could be further from a lunatic or your veritable true lover either than Horace is. Not a touch of madness in that clear, cool, balanced head. He is Benjamin Franklin turned poet, or rather, for he never borders upon the provincial, a poetical Montaigne. He is a poet whose distinguishing characteristic is common sense, a combination never known before or since.

  He was just turned twenty-one when Cicero died and Rome entered upon one of her worst periods of civil war. He took sides with Brutus and fought with him through the campaign that resulted in the final defeat of the republican cause and the establishment of Augustus and Antony as masters of the world. He came back to Rome heartsick, hardly more than a boy even then, to find that his little estate had been confiscated and that he was penniless. A bad beginning, which would have turned many a man with his great ability and great sensibility into an irreconcilable or a misanthrope, and his earliest writing has a bitterness, even a brutality sometimes, which show how close he had come to the danger of being permanently warped or stunted. But this temper of mind soon passed. What Horace did was to face the fact that the Republic was dead and Augustus completely alive, and to get himself a small governmental post as a clerk. He never appeared thereafter in any of his writings as the champion of republican ideas. Quite the contrary. He extolled Augustus to the skies with praise which in any other period except the Roman Empire would have been fulsome almost beyond belief. And yet his reader notes these facts with no sense of condemnation. No one who knows Horace despises him for a time-server. He was not that. He was a man of supreme good sense who saw that the Republic was gone irrevocably and the Empire had arrived to stay, and who chose not to spend his life in a futile effort to turn back the hands of the clock. The result was that he emerged from an experience of early pain and defeat that would have embittered most men, and from a shifting of allegiance that might well have resulted in a cowed and servile spirit, a man of mellow serenity and unshaken independence. These are the triumphs which can be achieved by an evenly poised spirit, by what is one of the rarest of qualities, wisdom.

  After dealing him blows so hard and so many, fate turned kind. Augustus’ all powerful minister, Maecenas, met him and took a fancy to him, although Horace says of himself he was so shy at the first meeting, he could not get out a sentence without stammering. A great friendship resulted which lasted for thirty years. Maecenas, dying a few weeks before Horace, on his death-bed bade the emperor, “Be mindful of Horatius Flaccus as of myself.” Horace’s troubles were ended. Maecenas’ circle, the best men of the day, was opened to him; Maecenas’ purse, too, enough that is for Horace’s very simple needs, and he was free. The world was his to do exactly what he pleased.

  There was never any question in his mind what that was. In one of his earlier pieces he makes himself go for advice to a famous lawyer, Trebatius, one of Cicero’s correspondents: “Direct me, Trebatius. What shall I do? Trebatius: Keep still. Horace: You mean not write any more verses—not at all? Trebatius: That’s what I say. Horace: I’ll be hanged if that wouldn’t be best. But I can’t sleep all the time—No, it won’t do. Everyone has his own way of enjoying himself. Mine is to put words into metre. No use talking about it. Whether peaceful old age awaits me or even now black-pinioned death flies round me, rich, poor, in Rome or, if chance so bids, in exile, whatever my life shall be, bright or dark, I will write.”

  So he felt through thirty years. All that time he “played with words on paper,” as he called his writing, and he never had any other pursuit. Yet the result is only one slender volume. There was one great advantage in the way they did it in Rome, nothing urged quantity upon Horace. The idea could never occur to him that the more pages he filled the better it would be for his purse. In the Roman system the pursuit of literature and the pursuit of money were in large measure separated. In this particular case that was very well for the world, because Horace had by nature, as no one more, the gift of brevity. The result of his freedom to write as he pleased was poetry which belongs to that rare order of verse which is distilled; only the essence left. He gave a good deal of advice, first and last, to would-be writers, and of it all “Be brief” comes first: “So that the thought does not stand in its own way, hindered by words that weigh down the tired ears.” And remember always, “More ought to be scratched out than left.”

  What he taught he practiced, even in his verses which were not poetry, but only prose done metrically. These, his Satires and Epistles as they are called—he called them Talks and Letters, better suited to their informality—make up full half of his writing, and they prove beyond all question that what he said of himself was true, he loved “to put words into metre.” No other reason can be found for his not having written them in prose. They are little rambling treatises about everything in the world, a great deal of excellent literary criticism and some not so good, a great deal of tiresome copy-book morality and some that is arrestingly true, many wise observations on education, and no less on cooking. He discusses the Epicurean and Stoic philosophies, gives in great detail the mishaps of a journey, makes fun of the way a boring person talks, applies common sense to Greek poetry, and so on and so on, all along the dead level of prose, and saved from being dull only by that admirable brevity. Why he did not use the magnificent medium Cicero had left to Roman literature and write them as little prose essays, would be inexplicable if it were not for his own words.

  He loved to produce a smooth-flowing metrical line, and the more complicated the measure the greater his enjoyment. It was a delight to him to try his hand at turning the many varied metres of the Greek lyric poets into Latin, a veritable tour-de-force. The first eleven poems of his odes are written in ten different measures, completely unlike each other. His polish and perfection of technique in using these intricate rhythms, his accomplished method, are his alone. No one has ever rivalled him. But the singing gift, the power of “song that wells up as from the bird’s throat,” which is our idea, more or less, of the lyric poet’s endowment, was never Horace’s at all. He utterly disclaimed it for himself. Poetical spontaneity, he tells us, was not for him. “Toiling hard” he made his songs.

  He was one of the most skilled technicians that ever put pen to paper. Words and phrases were his passion. “Sometimes,” he says in discussing composition, “a beautiful word leaps out.” So they do continually in his own writing. “A cunning combination can make a familiar word seem brand-new,” he writes and he knows well what he is praising. He is the poet of the exquisite phrase, the consummately perfect word. What he says may be negligible, but the way he says it is entrancing. When Hamlet bids Horatio

  Absent thee from felicity a while—

  there is perfect beauty of poetry in the words, but precisely in those words and no others, in the expression
, not the thought. Put that into different words and the poetry has gone: “Refrain from happiness for a time,” “Withdraw temporarily from delight”—there is not a particle of significance in either statement. But in

  Men must endure

  Their going hence, even as their coming hither;

  Ripeness is all:

  there is something which could not be completely lost, however worded.

  A slight alteration would reduce to prose the loveliest phrases in poetry: “In cradle of the rude, imperious surge”; “Through verdurous glooms and winding, mossy ways”; “Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.” But just as Catullus’ burning intensity comes through even poor translations, so no verbal change could nullify the passion of

  —for I love you so

  That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

  If thinking on me then should make you woe.

  “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed” might be turned into a simple geographical statement, but truth of poetry independent of the particular expression is in, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

  That order of poetry is nowhere in Horace. His thought is hardly more than sagacious at its best and is far oftener commonplace than not. He says of his satires “Change the order of my words and the poetry is gone,” and in a sense it is true of everything he wrote. It is never what he says that is important but always how he says it. For this reason he is the most difficult of Latin writers to give an account of to those who do not read Latin. His poetry is completely untranslatable and all of his admirers who have tried to turn him into English, very distinguished personages some of them, have only, each in his turn, produced one more illustration of the fact.

  The following examples, perhaps it is necessary to state, are all translations of the same lines, and, what could certainly not be deduced without the statement, of lines which rank among the most famous in Horace.