youth was eager to grasp every opportunity for the best training, did not visit Greece at all until after he had entered on the practice of his profession: Cicero's son, who was just of Horace's age, was now at Athens studying rhetoric and philosophy. There, too, Horace found a number of other young men of distinguished families, among them Valerius Messala, who traced his descent from the Valerius Poplicola who held with Brutus the first consulship of the Republic. On what terms Horace stood with these fellow-students we are left to conjecture; but his genial nature and conversational gifts, combined with tact and good sense, must have drawn many to him. His friendship with Messala and many closer intimacies, to which his poems bear witness, date no doubt from this period. There was nothing out of the way in this association of the freedman's son with the young nobles in common studies and literary interests. Aristocracy of birth has never aspired to monopolize the brain-work of the world, and youth and good fellowship are not strenuous about social distinctions. In the next stage of Horace's career he found his position very different.

IN THE ARMY OF BRUTUS.

II. In September, 44 B.C., six months after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus came to Athens, and for some months, while waiting for the turn of political events, devoted himself to the schools of philosophy. His appearance created no little sensation. The Athenians, who lived largely in the traditions of their past, welcomed 'the liberator' with enthusiasm, and voted to set up his statue beside those of their own tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The young Romans were flattered by the accession of so illustrious a fellow-student, whose real interest in philosophy was well known; and before the winter was

over Brutus had enlisted a number of them in his service for the coming struggle with the triumvirs. Among these recruits was the young Cicero, who had already seen some service under Pompey. The most distinguished adherent was Messala, and the least distinguished, certainly, was Horace. It argues a high estimate on Brutus' part of Horace's intelligence and capacity, that he appointed this youth of one and twenty, with neither military experience nor family influence to recommend him, to a place among his officers, and eventually gave him, as tribune, the command of a Roman legion. It was high promotion for the freedman's son, and envious tongues were not slow to direct attention to the fact.

12. Horace was in Brutus' army the greater part of two years (B.C. 43 and 42). He is almost entirely silent about this experience, but from our knowledge of the movements of Brutus in those two campaigns we may gather that it gave him the opportunity to visit various places in Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, and many famous cities of Asia Minor, which he mentions in his poems in a way that implies personal acquaintance. He remained with Brutus to the end, and shared the victory and subsequent rout at Philippi. The suicide of his chief at once absolved him from further allegiance and was a confession that the cause for which they had fought was irretrievably lost. Horace was fain to accept the result, and while some of his friends held out and joined the standard of Sextus Pompeius, he followed the example and advice of Messala and made his submission to the victors, who pardoned, or at least did not molest him.

RETURN TO ROME.

13. It was not improbably on his homeward voyage from Greece after Philippi that Horace came near being shipwrecked on the dangerous promontory of Palinurus, on the

Lucanian coast; the critical condition of the times may have been his motive for preferring that roundabout way to the ordinary route. He returned to Rome in a depressed and bitter mood. His father was dead. His estate had been swept away in the confiscation of the territory of Venusia. The outlook was gloomy. He seems, however, to have saved some money from his two campaigns, and with this he purchased a clerkship in the Quaestors' office, which yielded him a small income and, apparently, a good deal of leisure. Under these circumstances, poor in purse and still poorer in favor, Horace began life again at the age of twenty-three. He was thoroughly cured of his aspirations for a public career. His short, but severe experience had taught him that, however strong his interest in his country's welfare, he had no taste for the practical business of war and politics; and he had had enough of running counter to the popular prejudice against humble birth in high station. On the other hand his training and his knowledge of his own powers alike pointed to literature as the career most suitable and promising for him.

CHOICE OF A CAREER.

14. That Horace had practiced verse-writing in the course of his literary studies might be taken for granted. He confesses that at one time, it was probably while he was at Athens, he undertook to write poetry in Greek; and these essays were not, it should seem, in the nature of school exercises, but serious efforts. This was by no means a new thing in Roman literature. The earliest Roman annals were written in Greek, and the same phenomenon had reappeared in the highly Hellenized culture of the Ciceronian period, when Roman writers occasionally used Greek for prose or verse, partly for the pleasure of handling a language of so much richer capacity than their own, partly

to reach a wider circle of appreciative readers. But Horace did not persist in an undertaking which his good sense presently convinced him was as futile as it was unpatriotic.

15. At the time when Horace began his literary career, Vergil, who was five years his senior, had published some youthful verses and was beginning to be known as a sweet singer of pastoral scenes by the publication of his earliest Eclogues. The epic poet of the day was Varius Rufus, who won credit and favor by his poem on the death of Julius Caesar. He was a few years older than Vergil, who lived to rival him in epos; but that was many years later. Asinius Pollio, who as governor of Cisalpine Gaul had recently won Vergil's gratitude by timely assistance, and who was afterwards eminent as an orator and a critic and patron of literature, had at this time attained some distinction as a

writer of tragedy. Various other fields were diligently cultivated by writers of less note, or less known to us. Looking over the ground Horace thought he saw a field suited to his powers in Lucilian satire, which Varro Atacinus and some others had undertaken to revive, but in Horace's opinion without success.

THE SATIRES.

16. The word satura appears to have meant originally a medley. It was used as the name of a variety performance on the rude stage of early times, consisting of comic songs and stories, with dance and gesticulation, to the accompaniment of the pipe. It found its way into literature as the title of a collection of what we should call 'miscellanies in verse:' Ennius (B.C: 239-169) employed it for this purpose, and his example was followed by Lucilius. The Saturae of Lucilius, who had been dead about sixty years when Horace began to write satire, were a series of tracts on every topic

that it came into his head to discuss, -personal, social, political, philosophical, literary, philological. In form they were equally varied, — sometimes didactic, sometimes narrative, or dramatic, or epistolary; and they were written in a variety of metres. More than two thirds, however, of the thirty books were in dactylic hexameters, which Lucilius appears to have finally settled upon as most suitable for his purpose; and this metre was used exclusively by his successors. And in spite of its heterogeneous variety of subjects, there were two features which gave distinctive character to Lucilius' work. One of these was the footing of personal and familiar intercourse on which he placed himself with his reader; his tone was the tone of conversation and his words the utterance of his own mind and heart, as if on the impulse of the moment. The other was that he entered on a field which Roman literature had not yet ventured to tread, but which thenceforth became the peculiar province of satura, as it had been of the Old Comedy of the Greeks, the criticism of contemporary manners and men.

17. By inheritance and training a critical observer of the life about him, Horace justly deemed himself fitted to take up the task of Lucilius, whom he greatly admired in everything but the roughness of his literary workmanship. The unreserved personalities in which Lucilius indulged were no longer permissible in Horace's day, and he avoided them except in a few of his earlier satires. Politics, too, were forbidden ground. In other respects he adopted the method of his master, but in a kindlier spirit and rarely with any exhibition of personal feeling. His manner is that of the accomplished man of the world in familiar conversation, easy and self-possessed, witty but never flippant, discussing with keen insight and a quick sense of humor, but with the abundant charity of a man who knows his own shortcomings, and with a ground-tone of moral earnestness, the various