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LIFE OF HORACE.

QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS was born at Venusia, or Venusium,' a city of Apulia, A. U. C. 689, B. C. 65. His father, a freedman' and client of the Gens Horatia, was the proprietor of a small farm in the vicinity of that place, from which he afterwards removed to Rome, when his son had attained the age of nine or ten years, in order to afford him the benefit of a liberal education. While the parent was discharging, in this great city, the humble duties of an attendant on public sales, the son was receiv

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(1) Venusia, or Venusium, (now Venosa), was an old city of the Samnites or Hirpini, which the Romans, at the time of their war with this nation and king Pyrrhus, made their principal place of arms in Southern Italy. It was included by them within the limits of Apulia, to which it naturally belonged. Horace, in one of his Satires (2. 1. 34.) expresses a doubt whether he himself was a Lucanian or an Apulian: this would appear to have arisen from the circumstance of there having been a chain diverging from the Appenines, one geographical mile south of Venusia, which separated Apulia from Lucania. Hence the city of Venusia would lie on the immediate confines of the latter region.

(2) Thus, in Carm. 2. 20. 6. the poet speaks of himself as being “pauperum sanguis parentum ;" and in Serm. 1. 6. 45, observes, “ Nunc ad me redeo libertino patre natum," &c. (3) Commentators are divided in relation to the employment pursued at Rome by the father of Horace. In the life of the poet which is ascribed to Suetonius, his parent is styled, according to the common reading, exactionum coactor, “a tax-gatherer,” or “collector of imposts." Gesner, however, suggested as an emendation exauctionum coactor," an officer attendant upon sales at auction, who collected the purchase-money." This correction has been generally adopted. The same piece of biography informs us that he was more correctly believed to have been a salsamentarius, “a preparer and vender of salt provisions';" and that a certain person, in the heat of a quarrel, reproached the poet with this mean employment of his father, and the vulgar habits attendant upon it, by observing, “quoties ego vidi patrem nasum cubito emungentem." This passage, however, is now regarded by the best critics as a mere interpolation. The vulgar habit just alluded to, and which in our own days we ascribe to every low employment, would seem, from a passage of the treatise on Rhetoric addressed to Herennius, to have been regarded by the Romans as a peculiar characteris tia of the salsamentarii. It occurs, lib. 4. c. 54. "Per consequentiam significatio fit, quum res, quae sequuntur aliquam rem, dicuntur, ex quibus tota res relinquitur in suspicione; ut si salzamentarii filio dicas: Quiesce tu, cujus pater cubito se emungere solebat.”

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