Yet he did not always stay at home, however great the pleasure he felt in being there.  This steady-going, regular man thought it right from time to time to put a little irregularity into one’s life.  Does not a Grecian sage—­Aristotle, I think—­recommend that one excess per month be indulged in, in the interest of health?  It serves at least to break the round of habit.  Such also was the opinion of Horace.  Although the most moderate of men, he found it pleasant to commit an occasional wildness ("dulce est desipere in loco").  With age these outbursts had become less frequent, yet he still loved to break the sage uniformity of his existence by some pleasure jaunt.  Then he returned to Praeneste, to Baiae, or to Tarentum, which he had loved so much in his youth.  Once he was unfaithful to these old affections, and chose for the goal of his journey spots that were new to him.  The occasion of the change was this:  Antonius Musa, a Greek physician, had just cured Augustus of a dangerous illness, which it had been thought must prove fatal, by means of cold water.  Hydrotherapeutics at once became fashionable.  People deserted the thermal springs, formerly so much sought after, to go off to Clusium, to Gabii, into the mountains, where springs of icy water were found.  Horace did like the rest.  In the winter of the year 730, instead of going as usual towards Baiae, he turned his little steed towards Salerno and Velia.  This was the affair of a season.  Next year Marullus, the Emperor’s son-in-law and heir, falling very ill, Antonius Musa was hastily sent for, and applied his usual remedy.  But the remedy no longer healed, and hydrotherapeutics, which had saved Augustus, did not prevent Marullus from dying.  They were at once forsaken, and the sick again began following the road to Baiae.

When Horace started on these extraordinary journeys, he took a change of diet.  “At home,” said he, “I can put up with anything; my Sabine table wine seems to me delicious; and I regale myself with vegetables from my garden seasoned with a slice of bacon.  But when I have once left my house, I become more particular, and beans, beloved though they be of Pythagoras, no longer suffice me.”  So before starting in the direction of Salerno, where he did not often go, he takes the precaution to question one of his friends as to the resources of the country; whether one can get fish, hares, and venison there, that he may come back home again as fat as a Phaeacian.  Above all, he is anxious to know what is drunk in those parts.  He wants a generous wine to make him eloquent, and “which will give him strength, and rejuvenate him in the eyes of his young Lucanian sweetheart.”  We see he pushes precaution a considerable length.  He was not rich enough to possess a house of his own at Baiae, Praeneste, or Salerno, the spots frequented by all the Roman fashionable world, but he had his wonted lodgings ("deversoria nota"), where he used to put up.  When Seneca was at Baiae, he lived above a public bath, and he has furnished us a very amusing account of the sounds of all kinds that troubled his rest.  Horace, who liked his ease and wished to be quiet, could not make a very long stay in those noisy places.  His whim gratified, he returned as soon as possible to his peaceful house amid the fields, and I can well imagine that those few fatiguing weeks made it seem more pleasant and more sweet to him.