though that too was all-important for a man of letters in that age.

POLITICAL VIEWS.

25. Through his intimacy with Maecenas Horace came to the acquaintance and notice of Octavian, towards whom his feelings, in the course of this decade, underwent a complete change. Like many of the followers of Brutus and Cassius, who had remained quiescent or hostile during the harmonious supremacy of the triumvirs, Horace saw that when it became necessary to choose between Octavian and Antony, the best hopes of the country were bound up with the success of the former. His change of heart was no doubt hastened by the influence of Maecenas, and in fact the prevailing influences at Rome set in that direction. When the contest reached its crisis at Actium, Hoface's conversion was complete. He celebrated the victory and the death of Cleopatra, - with true Roman spirit he was silent about Antony, with odes of triumph, and cordially accepted the result which placed the sole supremacy in the hands of the one man who could command peace. Towards Augustus personally, however, Horace was not inspired at this time, and probably not any time, with any warmer feeling than patriotic admiration and gratitude.

THE ODES.

26. When Octavian returned to Rome and celebrated his triple triumph in 29 B.C., the year after Vergil completed his seven years' labor on the Georgics, — Horace had published his two books of Satires and the Epodes. In each of these the opening poem was addressed to Maecenas, which was equivalent to a dedication. Horace's work in satire was not pursued further, at least in the same form. He had become deeply interested in lyrical composition, and

his success in the Epodes had encouraged him to try his hand at more complicated lyrical metres. He made careful studies in early Greek lyric, taking as his especial models and guides the two great poets of Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho (about 600 B.C.) Just when Horace began to write what we call the Odes, but which he called simply poems (carmina), it is not possible to say. In fact, the line of division between the Epodes and the Odes is a somewhat arbitrary one, and a few poems are found under each head that might equally well have been placed under the other. The earliest of the odes to which a date can be assigned with certainty is I. 37, written on receiving the news of the death of Cleopatra in B.C. 30. Possibly some were written before this, but probably not many. From this time on, for about seven years, Horace devoted himself with great zeal and industry, and almost to the exclusion of every other kind of literary work, to lyrical composition. His mastery of form and fine rhythmical sense had here their highest opportunity, and the result was a body of lyric which ín volume and variety and in perfection of finish was never equaled in Latin literature before or after. Catullus, a generation earlier, had written lyrics which in freshness and spontaneity, and as direct and unaffected expressions of the poet's personality, Horace himself could not equal. But Catullus had written chiefly in the easier lyrical metres, iambics, Glyconics, and particularly the Phalaecean, his favorite rhythm. He tried the Sapphic strophe in only two poems, one of these a translation, — and the Alcaic not at all. These two, with three Asclepiad strophes which Catullus did not touch, were the rhythms that Horace developed most successfully, and, after many experiments with other forms, came to use almost exclusively. He also worked in accordance with strict metrical theories, formulated probably by the Roman philologians of the time, and not by

Horace himself, whereas Catullus had allowed himself the full liberty of his Greek models as he found them, so that his verses sometimes, to the ears of later critics, had a touch of harshness. It was not unnatural that Horace should regard his own achievement, wrought out with much study and labor, as the first adequate and successful adaptation of the Lesbian rhythms to the Latin language, in comparison with which the slighter efforts of Catullus might be deemed to have gone, in point of artistic workmanship, little beyond the point he had himself reached in his Epodes. And his claim, in this limited sense, must be allowed. But it is to be wished that he had accorded to the genius of his predecessor in lyric the same generous recognition which he gave to that of Lucilius in satire.

27. Horace's Odes, many of which are addressed to one or another of his friends, were privately read and circulated long before they were published in collected form. The first publication, which embraced three books, dedicated in a fitting introductory ode to Maecenas, took place, according to almost conclusive internal evidence, in B.C. 23, when Horace had reached the age of forty-two. It was the .gathered fruits of the best years of his life, when his mind had attained its full maturity and his spirit had not yet lost its freshness. The collection is arranged with some reference to the chronological order of composition, but with more to variety of subject and pleasing sequence of rhythms.. The odes range in quality from mere studies or versions from the Greek to products of the poet's matured skill and poems in which motive and thought are wholly Roman. Horace gave his work to the world with the undisguised assurance of its immortality and his own. It did not immediately silence his detractors; but it won its way surely, and he did not have to wait many years for a general verdict of approval from the reading public. ·

THE FIRST BOOK OF EPISTLES.

28. With this achievement Horace's ambition to make for himself a unique place in Roman literature was satisfied, or his lyric impulse was spent; at any rate he wrote no more odes for some years. His old propensity for the study of life reasserted itself and found expression in a new series of sermones, as he calls them, indicating their close resemblance in subject and method, as they were identical in metre, with the Satires. In form they were Epistles, and this is the title under which they have come down to us. Some are letters in fact as well as in form, relating to personal matters, -one is a letter of introduction. Others contain some admixture of personal communication, while in many the insertion of a name is no more than a compliment or serves only to lend a certain personal interest to the discourse. It was a practice to which he had become habituated in the Odes, the influence of which on the Epistles is further apparent in a more finished rhythm and a more compact and sententious style than he had attained in the Satires. The first series of Epistles was written in the years immediately following the publication of the Odes, and was published in B.C. 20 or 19. The book, like its predecessors, was dedicated to Maecenas.

PERSONAL TRAITS.

29. In the epilogue of this first book of Epistles Horace has left a brief sketch of his own person and temper at the age of forty-four: 'short of stature, prematurely gray, quick to take offense, but quickly appeased.' He was stout as well as short; but in his younger days, with black hair and the low forehead which the Romans admired, and an agreeable voice and smile, he was personally far from unattractive. He enjoyed good health in his youth except that he

But as he grew

was troubled with an affection of the eyes. older his health began to fail, and he found it necessary to guard it carefully. In spite of the friendly reproaches of Maecenas, he spent a good part of the year away from the city, among the hills at his villa or at Tibur or Praeneste, or on the seashore at Baiae or Tarentum.

30. Horace never married, nor was he ever taken possession of by an overmastering passion, like his friend Tibullus and the other elegiac poets. Among all the feminine names that occur in his lighter odes only one appears to be real, that of Cinara, of whom he speaks only after her early death. The Lydias and Lalages, and all the rest of the Greek ladies who figure in his love poems are creatures of his fancy, or of the fancy of some Greek poet before him; and if, as is no doubt to some extent true, the poems reflect the poet's own experiences, they also show how lightly these experiences touched him. Horace was not of a temperament to make a serious business of love; and his artistic delineations of it are pretty, but they have not the ring of genuineness and true passion. Something of the same sort must be said of his convivial odes. They must be taken as artistic productions, not as self-portraiture. Horace enjoyed good wine and was very sociable by disposition, and he no doubt often found himself, especially in his younger days, in boisterous company; but by his whole nature and training excess of all kinds was distasteful to him, and it is impossible not to believe that his strong self-control rarely failed to assert itself here. The odes in which he enjoins moderation in the use of wine reflect not only his rule but, we may confidently believe, his habitual practice.

THE CARMEN Saeculare anD THE FOURTH Book of ODEs.

31. In the year 17 B.C. Horace's eminence as a poet received the stamp of official recognition in his appointment