Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the "old popular Horace" of Tennyson, petted and loved, by Frenchmen and Englishmen especially, above all the poets of antiquity, was born on 8th December, B.C. 65. He calls himself in his poems by the three names indifferently, but to us he is known only by the affectionate diminutive of his second or gentile name, borne by his father, according to the fashion of the time, as slave to some member of the noble Horatian family. A slave the father unquestionably had been: meanness of origin was a taunt often levelled against his son, and encountered by him with magnanimous indifference; but long before Horace's birth the older Horatius had obtained his freedom, had gained sufficient money to retire from business, and to become owner of the small estate at Venusia on the borders of Apulia, where the poet was born and spent his childhood. He repeatedly alludes to this loved early home, speaks affectionately of its surrounding scenery, of the dashing river Aufidus, now Ofanto, of the neighbouring towns, Acherontia, Bantia, Forentum, discoverable in modern maps as Acerenza, Vanzi, Forenza, of the crystal Bandusian spring, at whose identity we can only guess. Here he tells us how, wandering in the forest when a child and falling asleep under the trees, he woke to find himself covered up by woodpigeons with leaves, and alludes to a prevailing rural belief that he was specially favoured by the gods. Long afterwards, too, when travelling across Italy with Maecenas, he records with delight his passing glimpse of the familiar wind-swept Apulian hills.

Of his father he speaks ever with deep respect. "Ashamed of him?" he says, "because he was a freedman? whatever moral virtue, whatever charm of character, is mine, that I owe to him. Poor man though he was, he would not send me to the village school frequented by peasant children, but carried me to Rome, that I might be educated with sons of knights and senators. He pinched himself to dress me well, himself attended me to all my lecture-rooms, preserved me pure and modest, fenced me from evil knowledge and from dangerous contact. Of such a sire how should I be ashamed? how say, as I have heard some say, that the fault of a man's low birth is Nature's, not his own? Why, were I to begin my life again, with permission from the gods to select my parents from the greatest of mankind, I would be content, and more than content, with those I had." The whole self-respect and nobleness of the man shines out in these generous lines. (Sat. I, vi, 89.)

Twice in his old age Horace alludes rather disparagingly to his schooldays in Rome: he was taught, he says, out of a translation from Homer by an inferior Latin writer (Ep. II, i, 62, 69), and his master, a retired soldier, one Orbilius, was "fond of the rod" (Ep. II, i, 71). I observe that the sympathies of Horatian editors and commentators, themselves mostly schoolmasters, are with Orbilius as a much enduring paedagogue rather than with his exasperated pupil. We know from other sources that the teacher was a good scholar and a noted teacher, and that, dying in his hundredth year, he was honoured by a marble statue in his native town of Beneventum; but like our English Orbilius, Dr. Busby, he is known to most men only through Horace's resentful epithet;—"a great man," said Sir Roger de Coverley, "a great man; he whipped my grandfather, a very great man!"

The young Englishman on leaving school goes to Oxford or to Cambridge: the young Roman went to Athens. There we find Horace at about nineteen years of age, learning Greek, and attending the schools of the philosophers; those same Stoics and Epicureans whom a few years later the first great Christian Sophist was to harangue on Mars' Hill. These taught from their several points of view the basis of happiness and the aim of life. Each in turn impressed him: for a time he agreed with Stoic Zeno that active duty is the highest good; then lapsed into the easy doctrine of Epicurean Aristippus that subjective pleasure is the only happiness. His philosophy was never very strenuous, always more practical than speculative; he played with his teachers' systems, mocked at their fallacies, assimilated their serious lessons.

Then into his life at this time came an influence which helped to shape his character, but had nearly wrecked his fortunes. Brutus, fresh from Caesar's murder, was at Athens, residing, as we should say, in his old University, and drawing to himself the passionate admiration of its most brilliant undergraduates; among the rest, of the younger Cicero and of Horace. Few characters in history are more pathetically interesting than his. High born, yet disdainful of ambitious aims, irreproachable in an age of almost universal profligacy, the one pure member of a grossly licentious family, modest and unobtrusive although steeped in all the learning of old Greece, strong of will yet tolerant and gentle, his austerity so tempered by humanism that he won not only respect but love; he had been adored by the gay young patricians, who paid homage to the virtue which they did not rouse themselves to imitate, honoured as an equal by men far older than himself, by Cicero, by Atticus, by Caesar. As we stand before the bust in the Palace of the Conservators which preserves his mobile features, in that face at once sweet and sad, at once young and old, as are the faces not unfrequently of men whose temperaments were never young—already, at thirty-one years old, stamped with the lineaments of a grand but fatal destiny—we seem to penetrate the character of the man whom Dante placed in hell, whom Shakespeare, with sounder and more catholic insight, proclaimed to be the noblest Roman of them all:

Quitting Athens after a time to take command of the army which had been raised against Antony, Brutus carried Horace in his company with the rank of military tribune. He followed his patron into Asia; one of his early poems humorously describes a scene which he witnessed in the law courts at Clazomenae. (Sat. I, vii, 5.) He was several times in action; served finally at Philippi, sharing the headlong rout which followed on Brutus' death; returned to Rome "humbled and with clipped wings." (Od. II, vii, 10; Ep. II, ii, 50.) His father was dead, his property confiscated in the proscription following on the defeat, he had to begin the world again at twenty-four years old. He obtained some sort of clerkship in a public office, and to eke out its slender emoluments he began to write. What were his earliest efforts we cannot certainly say, or whether any of them survive among the poems recognized as his. He tells us that his first literary model was Archilochus (Ep. I, xix, 24), a Greek poet of 700 B.C., believed to have been the inventor of personal satire, whose stinging pen is said to have sometimes driven its victims to suicide. For a time also he imitated a much more recent satirist, Lucilius, whom he rejected later, as disliking both the harshness of his style and the scurrilous character of his verses. (Sat. I, x.) It has been conjectured therefore that his earliest compositions were severe personal lampoons, written for money and to order, which his maturer taste destroyed. In any case his writings found admirers. About three years after his return to Rome his friends Varius and Virgil praised him to Maecenas; the great man read the young poet's verses, and desired to see him. (Sat. I, vi, 54.)

It is as an enlightened and munificent patron of letters that Maecenas holds his place in popular estimation, but he was much more than this. He had been since Caesar's death the trusty agent and the intimate adviser of Augustus; a hidden hand, directing the most delicate manoeuvres of his master. In adroit resource and suppleness no diplomatist could match him. His acute prevision of events and his penetrating insight into character enabled him to create the circumstances and to mould the men whose combination was necessary to his aims. By the tact and moderation of his address, the honied words which averted anger, the dexterous reticence which disarmed suspicion, he reconciled opposing factions, veiled arbitrary measures, impressed alike on nobles and on populace the beneficence of imperial despotism, while he kept its harshness out of sight. Far from parading his extensive powers, he masked them by ostentatious humility, refusing official promotion, contented with the inferior rank of "Knight," sitting in theatre and circus below men whom his own hand had raised to station higher than his own. Absorbed in unsleeping political toil, he wore the outward garb of a careless, trifling voluptuary. It was difficult to believe that this apparently effeminate lounger, foppish in dress, with curled and scented hair, luxuriating in the novel refinement of the warm bath, an epicure in food and drink, patronizing actors, lolling in his litter amid a train of parasites, could be the man on whom, as Horace tells us, civic anxieties and foreign dangers pressed a ceaseless load. He had built himself a palace and laid out noble gardens, the remains of which still exist, at the foot of the Esquiline hill. It had been the foulest and most disreputable slum in Rome, given up to the burial of paupers, the execution of criminals, the obscene rites of witches, a haunt of dogs and vultures. He made it healthy and beautiful; Horace celebrates its salubrity, and Augustus, when an invalid, came thither to breathe its air. (Sat. I, viii, 8, 14.) There Maecenas set out his books and his gems and his Etruscan ware, entertained his literary and high born friends, poured forth his priceless Caecuban and Chian wines. There were drops of bitter in these cups. His beautiful wife Terentia tormented him by her temper and her infidelities; he put her away repeatedly, as often received her back. It was said of him that he had been married a hundred times, though only to a single wife: "What is the latest conjugal news?" men asked as his sumptuous litter passed by, "is it a marriage or a divorce?" And he was haunted by terror of death. "Prolong my life," was his prayer, in words which Seneca has ridiculed and La Fontaine translated finely, yet missing the terseness of the original, "life amid tortures, life even on a cross, only life!"

His patronage of intellectual men was due to policy as well as inclination. Himself a cultured literary critic, foreseeing the full-winged soar of writers still half-fledged—the "Aeneid" in Virgil's "Eclogues," the "Odes" of Horace in his "Epodes"—he would not only gather round his board the men whom we know to have been his equals, whose wit and wisdom Horace has embalmed in an epithet, a line, an ode; Varius, and Sulpicius, and Plotius, and Fonteius Capito, and Viscus; but he saw also and utilized for himself and for his master the social influence which a rising poet might wield, the effect with which a bold epigram might catch the public ear, a well-conceived eulogy minister to imperial popularity, an eloquent sermon, as in the noble opening odes of Horace's third book, put vice out of countenance and raise the tone of a decadent community.

To Horace, then, now twenty-seven years old, these imposing doors were opened. The first interview was unsatisfactory; the young poet was tongue-tied and stammering, the great man reserved and haughty: they parted mutually dissatisfied. Nine months later Maecenas sent for him again, received him warmly, enrolled him formally amongst his friends. (Sat. I, vi, 61.) Horace himself tells the story: he explains neither the first coldness, the long pause, nor the later cordiality. But he rose rapidly in his patron's favour; a year afterwards we find him invited to join Maecenas on a journey to Brundusium, of which he has left us an amusing journal (Sat. I, v); and about three years later still was presented by him with a country house and farm amongst the Sabine hills, a few miles to the east of Tibur, or, as it is now called, Tivoli.

With this a new chapter in his life begins. During six years he had lived in Rome, first as an impecunious clerk, then as a client of Maecenas. To all Roman homes of quality and consequence clients were a necessary adjunct: men for the most part humble and needy, who attended to welcome the patron when issuing from his chamber in the morning, preceded and surrounded his litter in the streets, clearing a way for it through the crowd; formed, in short, his court, rewarded by a daily basket of victuals or a small sum of money. If a client was involved in litigation, his patron would plead his cause in person or by deputy; he was sometimes asked to dinner, where his solecisms in good breeding and his unfashionable dress, the rustic cut of his beard, thick shoes, gown clumsily draped, made him the butt of the higher guests. Juvenal, in a biting satire, describes the humiliation of a poor client at a rich man's table. "The host," he says, "drinks old beeswinged Setian wine, served to him in a gold goblet by a beautiful boy; to you a coarse black slave brings in a cracked cup wine too foul even to foment a bruise. His bread is pure and white, yours brown and mouldy; before him is a huge lobster, before you a lean shore-crab; his fish is a barbel or a lamprey, yours an eel:—and, if you choose to put up with it, you are rightly served." The relation, though not held to be disgraceful, involved sometimes bitter mortifications, and seems to us inconsistent with self-respect. We remember how it was resented in modern times, though in a much milder form, by Edmund Spenser, Dr. Johnson, and the poet Crabbe. Even between a Horace and a Maecenas it must have caused occasional embarrassment: we find the former, for instance, dedicating poems to men whose character he could not respect, but to whom, as his patron's associates, he was bound to render homage; while his supposed intimacy with the all-powerful minister exposed him to tedious solicitants, who waylaid him in his daily walks. He had become sick of "the smoke and the grandeur and the roar of Rome" (Od. III, 29, 12); his Sabine retreat would be an asylum and a haven; would "give him back to himself"; would endow him with competence, leisure, freedom; he hailed it as the mouse in his delightful apologue craved refuge in the country from the splendour and the perils of the town: