was born on the 8th of December (vi. idus Decemb.), in the year B. C. 65, A. U. 689, during the consulship of L. Aurelius Cotta and L. Manlius Torquatus. The poet is his own biographer. The place of his birth, the station and occupation of his father, the principal events and the general character of his life, rest upon his own authority. His birthplace was on the doubtful confines of Lucania and Apulia, in the territory of the military colony Venusia.
The father of Horace was a libertinus: he had received his manumission before the birth of the poet, who was of ingenuous birth, but did not altogether escape the taunt, which adhered to persons even of remote servile origin. (Sat. i. 6. 46.) Of his mother nothing is known: from the silence of the poet, it is probable that she died during his early youth. It has been the natural and received opinion that the father derived his name from some one of the great family of the Horatii, which, However, does not appear to have maintained its distinction in the later days of the republic. But there seems fair ground for the recent opinion, that he may have been a freedman of the colony of Venusia, which was inscribed in the Horatian tribe. (G. F. Grotefend, in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopädie, and E. L. Grotefend, in the Literary Transactions of Darmstadt.) We know no reason for his having the praenomen Quintus, or the more remarkable agnomen Flaccus: this name is not known to have been borne by any of the Horatian family.
His father's occupation was that of collector (coactor), either of the indirect taxes farmed by the publicans, or at sales by auction (exactionum or exauctionum); the latter no doubt a profitable office, in the great and frequent changes and confiscations in property during the civil wars. With the profits of his office he had purchased a small farm in the neighbourhood of Venusia, where the poet was born. The father, either in his parental fondness for his only son, or discerning some hopeful promise in the boy (who, if much of the romantic adventure alluded to above be not mere poetry, had likewise attracted some attention in the neighbourhood "as not unfavoured by the gods "), determined to devote his whole time and fortune to the education of the future poet. Though by no means rich, and with an unproductive farm, lie declined to send the young Horace to the common school, kept in Venusia by one Flavius, to which the children of the rural aristocracy, chiefly retired military officers (the consequential sons of consequential centurions), resorted, with their satchels and tablets, and their monthly payments. (Sat. i. 71. 5.) Probably about his twelfth year, the father carried the young Horace to Rome, to receive the usual education of a knight's or senator's son. He took care that the youth should not be depressed with the feeling of inferiority, and provided him with dress and with the attendance of slaves, befitting the higher class with which he mingled. The honest parent judged that even if his son should be compelled to follow his own humble calling, he would derive great advantages from a good education. But he did not expose the boy unguarded to the dangers and temptations of a dissolute capital : the father accompanied him to the different schools of instruction, watched over his morals with gentle severity, and, as the poet assures us, not only kept him free from vice, but even the suspicion of it. Of his father Horace always writes with becoming gratitude, bordering on reverence. (Sat. 1.4. 105.) One of these schools was kept by Orbilius, a retired military man, whose flogging propensities have been immortalised by his pupil. (Epist. 11.1. 71.) He was instructed in the Greek and Latin languages: the poets were the usual school books -- Homer in the Greek, the old tragic writer, Livius Andronicus (who had likewise translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse), in the Latin.
But at this time a good Roman education was not complete without a residence at Athens, the great school of philosophy, perhaps of theoretic oratory. The father of Horace was probably dead before his son set out for Athens; if alive, he did not hesitate to incur this further expense. In his 18th year the young Horace proceeded to that seat of learning. Theomnestus the Academic, Cratippus the Peripatetic, and Philodemus the Epicurean, were then at the head of the different schools of philosophy. Horace seems chiefly to have attached himself to the opinions which he heard in the groves of Academus, though later in life he inclined to those of Epicurus. (Epist. 2.2. 45.) Of his companions we know nothing certain; but Quintus Cicero the younger was among the youth then studying at what we may call this university of antiquity. The civil wars which followed the death of Julius Caesar interrupted the young Horace in his peaceful and studious retirement. Brutus came to Athens; and in that city it would have been wonderful if most of the Roman youth had not thrown themselves with headlong ardour into the ranks of republican liberty. Brutus, it is probable, must have found great difficulty in providing Roman officers for his new-raised troops. Either from his personal character, or from the strong recommendation of his friends, Horace, though by no means of robust constitution, and altogether inexperienced in war, was advanced at once to the rank of a military tribune, and the command of a legion: his promotion, as he was of ignoble birth, made him an object of some jealousy. It is probable that he followed Brutus into Asia; some of his allusions to the cities in Asia Minor appear too distinct for borrowed or conventional description ; and the somewhat coarse and dull fun of the story which forms the subject of the seventh satire seems to imply that Horace was present when the adventure occurred in Clazomenae. If indeed he has not poetically heightened his hard service in these wars, he was more than once in situations of difficulty and danger. (Carnm. 2.7. 1.) But the battle of Philippi put an end to the military career of Horace; and though he cannot be charged with a cowardly abandonment of his republican principles, he seems, happily for mankind, to have felt that his calling was to more peaceful pursuits. The playful allusion of the poet to his flight, his throwing away his shield, and his acknowledgment of his fears (Carm. 2.7. 9, Epist. 2.2. 46, &c.) have given rise to much grave censure and as grave defence. (Lessing, Rettungen des Horaz. Werke, vol. iv. p. 5, ed. 1838; Wieland, Notes on Epist. 2.2.) It could be no impeachment of his courage that he fled with the rest, after the total discomfiture of the army; and that he withdrew at once from what his sagacity perceived to be a desperate cause. His poetical piety attributes his escape to Mercury, the
But what was this poetry? Did he expect to make money or friends by it? or did he write merely to disburthen himself of his resentment and indignation at that period of depression and destitution, and so to revenge himself upon the world by an unsparing exposure of its vices ? Poetry in those times could scarcely have been a lucrative occupation. If, as is usually supposed, his earliest poetry was bitter satire, either in the Lucilian hexameter, or the sharp iambics of his Epodes, he could hardly hope to make friends; nor, however the force and power of such writings might command admiration, were they likely to conciliate the ardent esteem of the great poets of the time, of Varius or of Virgil, and to induce them to recommend him to the friendship of Maecenas. But this assuredly was not his earliest poetic inspiration. He had been tempted at Athens to write Greek verses: the genius of his country--the God Quirinus--had wisely interfered, and prevented him from sinking into an indifferent Greek versifier, instead of becoming the most truly Roman poet. (Sat. i. 10. 31, 35.) It seems most probable that some of the Odes (though collected and published, and perhaps having received their last finish, at a later period of his life) had been written and circulated among his friends. Some of his amatory lyrics have the ardour and freshness of youth, while in others he acknowledges the advance of age. When those friendly poets, Varius and Virgil, told Maecenas what Horace was (dixere quid essem), they must have been able to say more in his praise than that he had written one or two coarse satires, and perhaps a few bitter iambics; more especially if, according to the old scholiast, Maecenas himself had been the object of his satire. This interpretation, however, seems quite inconsistent with the particular account which the poet gives of his first interview with Maecenas (Sat. 1.6, 54, &c). On his own side there is at first some shyness and timidity, afterwards a frank and simple disclosure of his birth and of his circumstances: on the other the careless, abrupt, and somewhat haughtily indifferent manner of the great man, still betrays no appearance of wounded pride, to be propitiated by humble apology. For nearly nine months Maecenas took no further notice of the poet but at the end of that period he again sought his acquaintance, and mutual esteem grew up with the utmost rapidity. Probably the year following this commencement of friendship (B. C. 37), Horace accompanied his patron on that journey to Brundusium, so agreeably described in the fifth Satire, book i. This friendship quickly ripened into intimacy; and between the appearance of the two books of Satires, his earliest published works, Maecenas bestowed upon the poet a Sabine farm, sutficient to maintain him in ease, comfort, and even in content (satis beatus unicis Sabinis), during the rest of his life. The situation of this Sabine farm was in the valley of Ustica (Carm. 1.17. 11), within view of the mountain Lucretilis, part of what is now called Mount Gennaro, and near the Digentia, about fifteen miles from Tibur (Tivoli). The valleys still bear names clearly resembling those which occur in the Horatian poetry: the Digentia is now the Licenza; Mandela, Bardella; Ustica, Rustica. (Capmartin de Chaupy, Maison d'Horace, vol. iii. Rome, 1767; Sir W. Gell, Rome and its Vicinity, vol. i. p. 315.)
For the description of the villa, its aspect, climate, and scenery, see Epist. 1.10. 11, 23, and Epist. 1.16. A site exactly answering to the villa of Horace, and on which were found ruins of buildings, was first discovered by the Abbé Capmartin de Chaupy, and has since been visited and illustrated by other travellers and antiquarians. (Domenico di Sanctis, Dissertazione sopra la Villa d'Orazio Flacco, Ravenna, 1784.) The site and ruins of the Temple of Vacuna (Epist. 1.10. 49) seem to be ascertained. (Sebastiani, Viaggio a Tivoli.)
The estate was not extensive; it produced corn, olives, and vines; it was surrounded by pleasant and shady woods, and with abundance of the purest water; it was superintended by a bailiff (villicus), cultivated by five families of free coloni (Epist. 1.14. 3); and Horace employed about eight slaves (Sat. 2.7. 118). Besides this estate, his admiration of the beautiful scenery in the neighbourhood of Tibur inclined him either to hire or to purchase a small cottage in that romantic town; and all the later years of his life were passed between these two country residences and Rome. (For Tibur, see Carm. 1.7. 10-14. 2.6. 5-8, 3.4. 21-24, Epod. 1.29-30; Epist. 1.7.44-45, 1.8. 12, Carm. 4.2. 27-32, 4.3. 10-12.) In Rome, when the poet was compelled to reside there, either by business, which he hated (invisa negotia), or the societv which he loved, if he did not take up his abode, he was constantly welcome in some one of the various mansions of his patron; and Maecenas occasionally visited the quiet Sabine retreat of the poet.
From this time his life glided away in enjoyable repose, occasionally threatened but not seriously interrupted by those remote dangers which menaced or disturbed the peace of the empire. When Maecenas was summoned to accompany Octavius in the war against Antony, Horace (Epod. i.) had offered to attend him; but Maecenas himself either remained at Rome, or returned to it without leaving Italy. From that time Maecenas himself resided constantly
This constant transition from the town to the country life is among the peculiar charms of the Horatian poetry, which thus embraces every form of Roman society. He describes, with the same intimate familiarity, the manners, the follies, and vices of the capital; the parasites, the busy coxcombs, the legacy-hunters, the luxurious banquets of the city; the easy life, the quiet retirement, the more refined society, the highest aristocratical circles, both in the city, and in the luxurious country palace of the villa; and even something of the simple manners and frugal life of the Sabine peasantry.
The intimate friendship of Horace introduced him naturally to the notice of the other great men of his period, to Agrippa, and at length to Augustus himself. The first advances to friendship appear to have been made by the emperor; and though the poet took many opportunities of administering courtly flattery to Augustus, celebrating his victories over Antony, and on the western and eastern frontiers of the empire, as well as admiring his acts of peace, vet he seems to have been content with the patronage of Maecenas, and to have declined the offers of favour and advancement made by Augustus himself. According to the life by Suetonius, the emperor desired Maecenas to make over Horace to him as his private secretary; and instead of taking offence at the poet's refusal to accept this office of trust and importance, spoke of him with that familiarity (if the text be correct, coarse and unroyal familiarity) which showed undiminished favour, and bestowed on him considerable sums of money. He was ambitious also of being celebrated in the poetry of Horace. The Carmen Seculare was written by his desire; and he was, in part at least, the cause of Horace adding the fourth book of Odes, by urging him to commemorate the victory of his step-sons Drusus and Tiberius over the Vindelici.
With all the other distinguished men of the time, the old aristocracy, like Aelius Lamia, the statesmen, like Agrippa, the poets Varius, Virgil, Pollio, Tibullus, Horace lived on terms of mutual respect and attachment. The "Personae Horatianae" would contain almost every famous name of the age of Augustus.
Horace died on the 17th of November, A. U. C. 746, B. C. 8, aged nearly 57. His death was so sudden, that he had not time to make his will; but he left the administration of his affairs to Augustus, whom he instituted as his heir. IIe was buried on the slope of the Esquiline Hill, close to his friend and patron Maecenas, who had died before him in the same year. (Clinton, Fasti Hellen. sub ann.)
Horace has described his own person. (Epist. 1.20. 24.) He was of short stature, with dark eyes and dark hair (Art. Poet. 37), but early tinged with grey. (Epist. l.c.; Carm. 3.14. 25). In his youth he was tolerably robust (Epist. 1.7. 26), but suffered from a complaint in his eyes. (Sat. 1.5. 30.) In more advanced life he grew fat, and Augustus jested about his protuberant belly. (Aug. Epist. Frag. apud Sueton. in Vita.) His health was not always good. He was not only weary of the fatigue of war, but unfit to bear it (Carm. 2.6, 7, Epod. 1.15), and he seems to have inclined to be a valetudinarian. (Epist. 1.7. 3.) When young he was irascible in temper, but easily placable. (Carm. 1.16. 22, &c., 3.14. 27, Epist. 1.20. 25.) In dress he was rather careless. (Epist. 1.1. 94.) His habits, even after he became richer, were generally frugal and abstemious; though on occasions, both in youth and in maturer age, he seems to have indulged in conviviality. He liked choice wine, and in the society of friends scrupled not to enjoy the luxuries of his time.
Horace was never married; he seems to have entertained that aristocratical aversion to legitimate wedlock, against which, in the higher orders, Augustus strove so vainly, both by the infliction of civil disabilities and the temptation of civil privileges. In his various amours he does not appear to have had any children. Of these amours the patient ingenuity of some modern writers has endeavoured to trace the regular date and succession, if to their own satistfaction, by no means to that of their readers. With the exception of the adventure with Canidia or Gratidia, which belongs to his younger days, and one or two cases in which the poet alludes to his more advanced age, all is arbitrary and conjectural; and though in some of his amatory Odes, and in one or two of the latter Epodes, there is the earnestness and force of real passion, others seem but the play of a graceful fancy. Nor is the notion of Buttman, though rejected with indignation by those who have wrought out thisminute chronology of the mistresses of Horace, by any means improbable, that some of them are translations or imitations of Greek lyrics, or poems altogether ideal, and without any real groundwork. (Buttman, Essay in German, in the Berlin Transactions, 1804, and in his Mythologus, translated in the Philological Museum, vol. i. p. 439.)
The political opinions of Horace were at first republican. Up to the battle of Philippi (as we have seen) he adhered to the cause of Brutus. (On his return to Rome, he quietly acquiesced in the great change which established the imperial monarchy. He had abandoned public life altogether, and had become a man of letters. His dominant feeling appears to have been a profound horror for the crimes and miseries of the civil wars. The sternest republican might rejoice in the victory of Rome and Augustus over Antony and the East. A government, under whatever form, which maintained internal peace, and the glory of the Roman arms on all the frontiers, in Spain, in Dacia, and in the East, commanded his grateful homage. He may have been really, or may have fancied himself, deceived by the consummate skill with which Augustus disguised the growth of his own despotism under the old republican forms. Thus, though he gradually softened into the friend of the emperor's favourite, and at length the poetical courtier of the emperor himself, he still maintained a certain independence of character. He does not suppress his old associations of respect for the republican leaders, which break out in his admiration of the indomitable spirit of Cato; and he boasts, rather than disguises, his services in the army of Brutus. If, with the rest of the world, he acquiesced in the inevitable empire, it is puerile to charge him with apostacy.
The religion of Horace was that of his age, and of the men of the world in his age. He maintains
The philosophy of Horace was, in like manner, that of a man of the world. He playfully alludes to his Epicureanism, but it was practical rather than speculative Epicureanism. His mind, indeed, was not in the least speculative. Common life wisdom was his study, and to this he brought a quickness of observation, a sterling common sense, and a passionless judgment, which have made his works the delight and the unfailing treasure of felicitous quotation to practical men.
The love of Horace for the country, and his intercourse with the sturdy and uncorrupted Sabine peasantry, seems to have kept alive an honest freedom and boldness of thought; while his familiarity with the great, his delight in good society, maintained that exquisite urbanity, that general amenity, that ease without forwardness, that respect without servility, which induced Shaftesbury to call him the most gentlemanlike of the Roman poets.
In these qualities lie the strength and excellence of Horace as a poet. His Odes want the higher inspirations of lyric verse--the deep religious sentiment, the absorbing personality, the abandonment to overpowering and irresistible emotion, the unstudied harmony of thought and language, the absolute unity of imagination and passion which belongs to the noblest lyric song. His amatory verses are exquisitely graceful, but they have no strong ardour, no deep tenderness, nor even much of light and joyous gaiety. But as works of refined art, of the most skilful felicities of language and of measure, of translucent expression, and of agreeable images, embodied in words which imprint themselves indelibly on the memory, they are unrivalled. According to Quintilian, Horace was almost the only Roman lyric poet worth reading.
As a satirist Horace is without the lofty moral indignation, the fierce vehemence of invective, which characterised the later satirists. In the Epodes there is bitterness provoked, it should seem, by some personal hatred, or sense of injury, and the ambition of imitating Archilocus; but in these he seems to have exhausted all the malignity and violence of his temper. In the Satires, it is the folly rather than the wickedness of vice, which he touches with such playful skill. Nothing can surpass the keenness of his observation, or his ease of expression : it is the finest comedy of manners, in a descriptive instead of a dramatic form. If the Romans had been a theatrical people, and the age of Augustus a dramatic age, Horace, as far at least as the perception of character, would have been an exquisite dramatic writer.
But the Epistles are the most perfect of the Horatian poetry -- the poetry of manners and society, the beauty of which consists in a kind of ideality of common sense and practical wisdom. The Epistles of Horace are with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and pert haps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original form of Roman verse. The title of the Art of Poetry for the Epistle to the Pisos, is as old as Quintilian, but it is now agreed that it was not intended for a complete theory of the poetic art. Wieland's very probable notion that it was intended to dissuade one of the younger Pisos from devoting himself to poetry, for which he had little genius, or at least to suggest the difficulties of attaining to perfection, was anticipated by Colman in the preface to his translation. (Colman's Works, vol. iii.; compare Wieland's Horazens Briefe, 2.185.)
The works of Horace became popular very soon. In the time of Juvenal they were, with the poems of Virgil, the common school book. (Juv. Sat. 7.227.)
The chronology of the Horatian poems is of great importance, as illustrating the life, the times, and the writings of the poet. The earlier attempts by Tan. Faber, by Dacier, and by Masson, in his elaborate Vie d'Horace, to assign each poem to its particular year in the poet's life, were crushed by the dictatorial condemnation of Bentley, who in his short preface laid down a scheme of dates, both for the composition and the publication of each book. The authority of Bentley has been in general acquiesced in by English scholars. The late Dr. Tate, with admiration approaching to idolatry, almost resented every departure from the edict of his master; and in his Horatius Restitutus published the whole works in the order established by Bentley. Mr. Fynes Clinton, though in general favouring the Bentleian chronology, admits that in some cases his dates are at variance with facts. (Fasti Hellenici, vol. iii. p. 219.) Nor were the first attempts to overthrow the Bentleian chronology by Sanadon and others (Jani's was almost a translation of Masson's life) successful in shaking the arch-critic's authority among the higher class of scholars.
Recently, however, the question has been reopened with extraordinary activity by the continental scholars. At least five new and complete schemes have been framed, which attempt to assign a precise period almost to every one of the poems of Horace. 1. Quaestiones Horatianae, a C. Kirchner, Lips. 1834. 2. Histoire de la Vie et des Poesiées dHorace, par M. le Baron Walckenaer, 2 vols. Paris, 1840. 3. Fasti Horatiani, scripsit C. Franke, 1839. 4. The article Horatius, in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopädie, by G. F. Grotefend. 5. Quintus Horatius Flaccus als Mensch und Dichter, von Dr. W. E. Weber, Jena, 1844. Besides these writers, others, as Heindorf (in his edition of the Satires), C. Passow, in Vita Horat. (prefixed to a German translation of the Epistles), C. Vanderbourg, Preface and Notes to French translation of the Odes, and Weichert, in Poetar. Latin. Reliq., have entered into this question.
The discrepancies among these ingenious writers may satisfy every judicious reader that they have attempted an impossibility; that there are no internal grounds, either historical or aesthetic, which can, without the most fanciful and arbitrary proofs, determine the period in the life of Horace to which belong many of his poems, especially of his Odes.
On the other hand, it is clear that the chronology of Bentley must submit to very important modifications.
The general outline of his scheme as to the period