Horace's Sabine farm ranks high among the holy places of the classic world; and through the labours of successive travellers, guided by the scattered indications in his poems, its site is tolerably certain. It was about thirty-two miles from Rome, reached in a couple of hours by pilgrims of the present time; to Horace, who never allowed himself to be hurried, the journey of a full day, or of a leisurely day and a half. Let us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-tailed mule (Sat. I, vi, 104), the heavy saddlebags across its loins stored with scrolls of Plato, of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the comedian, Archilochus the lyric poet. His road lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift waters of the Anio, amid steep hills crowned with small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites of Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A ride of twenty-seven miles would bring him to Tivoli, or Tibur, where he stopped to rest, sometimes to pass the night, possessing very probably a cottage in the little town. No place outside his home appealed to him like this. Nine times he mentions it, nearly always with a caressing epithet. It is green Tibur, dew-fed Tibur, Tibur never arid, leisurely Tibur, breezy Tibur, Tibur sloping to the sun. He bids his friend Varus plant vines in the moist soil of his own Tiburtine patrimony there; prays that when the sands of his life run low, he may there end his days; enumerates, in a noble ode (Od. I, 7), the loveliest spots on earth, preferring before them all the headlong Anio, Tibur's groves, its orchards saturated with shifting streams.

No picture of the spot can be more graphic than are these noble lines. They open a Newdigate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, written, says tradition, by its brilliant author in a single night. (R. C. Sewell, Magdalen College, 1825.) Tivoli he had never visited; but those who stand to-day beside the Temple of the Sibyl on the edge of its ravine, who enjoy the fair beauty of the headlong Anio and the lesser Cascatelle, of the ruined Temple of Tiburtus, the Grottos of the Sirens and of Neptune, understand how a poet's genius can, as Shakespeare tells us, shadow forth things unseen, and give them local habitation.

From Tibur, still beside the Anio, we drive for about seven miles, until we reach the ancient Varia, now Vico Varo, mentioned by Horace as the small market town to which his five tenant-farmers were wont to repair for agricultural or municipal business. (Ep. I, xiv, 3.) Here, then, we are in the poet's country, and must be guided by the landmarks in his verse. Just beyond Vico Varo the Anio is joined by the Licenza. This is Horace's Digentia, the stream he calls it whose icy waters freshen him, the stream of which Mandela drinks. (Ep. I, xviii, 104-105.) And there, on its opposite bank, is the modern village Bardela, identified with Mandela by a sepulchral inscription recently dug up. We turn northward, following the stream; the road becomes distressingly steep, recalling a line in which the poet speaks of returning homeward "to his mountain stronghold." (Sat. II, vi, 16.) Soon we reach a village, Roccagiovine, whose central square is named Piazza Vacuna. Vacuna was the ancient name for the goddess Victory; and against the wall is fixed an exhumed tablet telling how the Emperor Vespasian here restored an ancient Temple of Victory. One more echo this name wakes in Horatian ears—he dates a letter to his friend Aristius Fuscus as written "behind the crumbling shrine of Vacuna." (Ep. I, x, 49.) Clearly we are near him now; he would not carry his writing tablets far away from his door. Yet another verification we require. He speaks of a spring just beside his home, cool and fine, medicinal to head and stomach. (Ep. I, xvi, 12.) Here it is, hard by, called to-day Fonte d'Oratini, a survival, we should like to believe, of the name Horatius. Somewhere close at hand must have been the villa, on one side or the other of a small hill now called Monte Rotondo. We may take our Horace from our pocket, and feel, as with our Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, with our Scott at Ashestiel, that we are gazing on the hills, the streams, and valleys, which received the primal outpourings of their muse, and are for ever vocal with its memories.

From M. Rotondo, eastward to the Licenza, and southward to the high ground of Roccogiovine, stretched apparently the poet's not inconsiderable demesne. Part of it he let off to five peasants on the mÉtayage system; the rest he cultivated himself, employing eight slaves superintended by a bailiff. The house, he tells us, was simple, with no marble pillars or gilded cornices (Od. II, xviii), but spacious enough to receive and entertain a guest from town, and to welcome occasionally his neighbours to a cheerful evening meal—"nights and suppers as of gods" (Sat. II, vi, 65), he calls them; where the talk was unfashionably clean and sensible, the fare beans and bacon, garden stuff and chicory and mallows. Around the villa was a garden, not filled with flowers, of which in one of his odes he expresses dislike as unremunerative (Od. II, xv, 6), but laid out in small parallelograms of grass, edged with box and planted with clipped hornbeam. The house was shaded from above by a grove of ilexes and oaks; lower down were orchards of olives, wild plums, cornels, apples. In the richer soil of the valley he grew corn, whose harvests never failed him, and, like Eve in Eden, led the vine to wed her elm. Against this last experiment his bailiff grumbled, saying that the soil would grow spice and pepper as soon as ripen grapes (Ep. I, xiv, 23); but his master persisted, and succeeded. Inviting Maecenas to supper, he offers Sabine wine from his own estate (Od. I, xx, 1); and visitors to-day, drinking the juice of the native grape at the little Roccogiovine inn, will be of opinion with M. de Florac, that "this little wine of the country has a most agreeable smack." Here he sauntered day by day, watched his labourers, working sometimes, like Ruskin at Hincksey, awkwardly to their amusement with his own hands; strayed now and then into the lichened rocks and forest wilds beyond his farm, surprised there one day by a huge wolf, who luckily fled from his presence (Od. I, xxii, 9); or—most enjoyable of all—lay beside spring or river with a book or friend of either sex.

So roll to each other across the ages and the continents echoes of the Persian and the Roman bards.

Of the beauty of his home he speaks always modestly; it may not compare with Praeneste, Tarentum, Baiae; its charm he is never weary of extolling. Nowhere, he says, is the air sweeter and more balmy, in summer temperate, warm in winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm, tranquillity, repose, making, as Wordsworth says, the very thought of country life a thought of refuge; and that was what, so long in populous city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was his home, where he could possess his soul, could be self-centred and serene. "This," says Ruskin, "is the true nature of Home; it is the Place of Peace."

He loved the country, yet he was no hermit. When sickened of town life he could apostrophize the country in the beautiful lines which many a jaded Londoner has echoed (Sat. II, vi, 60); but after some months of its placid joys the active social side of him would re-assert itself: the welcoming friends of the great city, its brilliant talk, its rush of busy life, recovered their attractiveness, and for short intervals, in the healthy season of the year, he would return to Rome. There it is less easy to image him than in his rustic home. Nature, if spared by man, remains unaltered; the heights and recesses of the Digentian valley meet our eye to-day scarce changed in twenty centuries, but the busy, crowded Rome of Horace is now only a desolate excavation. We stand upon the "Rock of Triumph," the Capitoline Hill, looking down upon the Forum: it lies like a stonemason's yard: stumps of pillars, fragments of brick or marble, overthrown entablatures, pillars, altars, tangles of staircases and enclosures, interspersed with poppies, wild oats, trefoils, confuse and crowd it:

But patient, daily survey, educated by the restorations of a Lanciani, enables us to piece together these encumbering ruins, until with tolerable clearness we can follow Horace in his walk along the Via Sacra towards Caesar's gardens, and can fairly reconstruct the objects which must have met his view. Everywhere is haunted ground: there is the bronze wolf of the Capitol, "thunder-stricken nurse of Rome," and the Tarpeian rock, from which "the Traitor's leap cured all ambition." There is the mythical gulf of Curtius, and the Mamertine prison where the Catiline conspirators were strangled, with its vault into which Jugurtha, after gracing the triumph of Marius, was hurled to die. Maiden-hair fern grows profusely in the crevices of Juturna's well, hard by the spring where the great twin brethren gave their horses drink after the battle of the Lake Regillus. Half covered with a mass of green acanthus is the base of Vesta's Temple, adjoining the atrium of the Virgins' house surrounded with their portrait statues: their names are engraved on each pedestal, but one is carefully erased, its original having, it is supposed, violated her vestal vow. We pause upon the spot where Caesar's body was burned, and beside the rostra whence Cicero thundered, and Antony spoke his "Friends, Romans, countrymen"; return finally to the Capitoline Museum, nucleus and centre of the ancient mistress of the world, to gaze upon gods, senators, emperors, shining still in undiminished majesty; on the Antinous, the Amazon, the Juno, the Dying Gladiator, and the Grecian masterpiece of Praxiteles.

Of his life in Rome Horace has given us a minute account (Sat. I, vi, 110, etc.). "Waking usually about six, I lie in bed or on my sofa, reading and writing, till nearly ten o'clock; anoint myself, go to the Campus for a game at ball, return home to a light luncheon. Then perhaps I amuse myself at home, perhaps saunter about the town; look in at the Circus and gossip with the fortune-tellers who swarm there when the games are over; walk through the market, inquiring the price of garden stuff and grain. Towards evening I come home to my supper of leeks and pulse and fritters, served by my three slave-boys on a white marble slab, which holds besides two drinking cups and ladle, a saltcellar shaped like a sea-urchin, an oil flask, and a saucer of cheap Campanian ware; and so at last I go to bed, not harassed by the thought that I need rise at day-break." Sometimes, to his great annoyance, he would be roused early to become sponsor in the law courts for a friend; shivering in the morning cold, pelted by falling hailstones, abused by the crowd through which he had to force his way. Or he would accompany Maecenas on a drive, their talk of matters trivial—the time of day, the early frosts, the merits of popular gladiators. We remember how delightfully Pope has adapted the passage to his own relation with Harley. (Imitation of Sat. II, vi.) Often he dined with Maecenas or his friends, and one such dinner he has described, at the house of a rich, vulgar epicure (Sat. II, viii). The guests were nine in number, including Maecenas, Varius, and Viscus: they lay on couches at maplewood tables arranged in three sides of a square. The first course was a Lucanian wild boar garnished with salads; when that was removed, servants wiped the board with purple napkins. Then a procession of slaves brought in Caecuban and Chian wines, accompanied with cheesecakes, fish, and apples. The second course was a vast lamprey, prawns swimming in its sauce; the third an olio of crane, hare, goose's liver, blackbirds, and wood-pigeons. A sumptuous meal, but spoiled by the host's tedious disquisitions on each dish as it appeared. Of social gatherings in their higher aspect, of the feasts of reason which he must have often shared at his patron's board, we long to know, but Horace is discreet; for him the rose of Harpocrates was suspended over every caenobium, and he would not profane its sacrament. He sat there as an equal, we know; his attitude towards those above him had in it no tinge of servility. That he was, and meant to be, independent they were fairly warned; when Maecenas wished to heap on him further benefits, he refused: "What I have is enough and more than enough," he said, "nay, should fortune shake her wings and leave me, I know how to resign her gifts" (Od. III, xxix, 53). And if not to Maecenas, so neither to Maecenas' master, would he sacrifice his freedom. The emperor sought his friendship, writes caressingly to Maecenas of "this most lovable little bit of a man," wished to make him his secretary, showed no offence at his refusal. His letters use the freedom of an intimate. "Septimius will tell you how highly I regard you. I happened to speak of you in his presence; if you disdain my friendship, I shall not disdain in return."—"I wish your little book were bigger; you seem to fear lest your books should be bigger than yourself."—"I am vexed with you, that you have never addressed one of your Epistles to myself; are you afraid that to have appeared as my friend will hurt you with posterity?" Such royal solicitations are a command, and Horace responded by the longest and one amongst the most admired of his Epistles (Ep. II, i). This was his final effort, unless the fragmentary essay on criticism, known as the "Art of Poetry," belongs to these last years; if that be so, his closing written words were a humorous disparagement of the "homely slighted shepherd's trade" (A. P. 470-476).

His life was drawing to a close; his friends were falling round him like leaves in wintry weather. Tibullus was dead, and so was Virgil, dearest and whitest-souled of men (Sat. I, v, 41); Maecenas was in failing health and out of favour. Old age had come to himself before its time; love, and wine, and festal crown of flowers had lost their zest:

But he rallies his life-long philosophy to meet the change; patience lightens the inevitable; while each single day is his he will spend and enjoy it in such fashion that he may say at its conclusion, "I have lived" (Od. III, xxix, 41). His health had never been good, undermined, he believed, by the hardships of his campaign with Brutus; all the care of Augustus' skilful physician, Antonius Musa, failed to prolong his days. He passed away on the 17th of November, B.C. 8, in his fifty-seventh year; was buried on the Esquiline Hill, in a grave near to the sepulchre of Maecenas, who had died only a few days before; fulfilling the promise of an early ode, shaped almost in the words of Moabitish Ruth, that he would not survive his friend.