“He has been married more than a hundred times,” said Seneca, “although he has had but one wife.”  To these domestic troubles illness was added.  His health had never been good, and age and sorrows made it worse.  Pliny tells us that he passed three whole years without being able to sleep.  Enduring pain badly, he grieved his friends beyond measure by his groans.  Horace, with whom he continually conversed about his approaching end, answered him in beautiful verses:—­

“Thou, Maecenas, die first!  Thou, stay of my fortune, adornment of my life!  The gods will not allow it, and I will not consent.  Ah! if Fate, hastening its blows, should tear from me part of myself in thee, what would betide the other?  What should I henceforth do, hateful unto myself, and but half of myself surviving?”

In the midst of these sorrows, Horace himself felt that he was growing old.  The hour when one finds one’s self face to face with age is a serious one.  Cicero, when approaching it, tried to give himself courage in advance, and being accustomed to console himself for everything by writing, he composed his ‘De Senectute,’ a charming book in which he tries to deck the closing years of life with certain beauties.  He had not to make use of the consolations which he prepared for himself, so we do not know whether he would have found them sufficient when the moment came.  That spirit, so young, so full of life, would I fear have resigned itself with difficulty to the inevitable decadences of age.  Nor did Horace love old age, and in his ‘Ars Poetica’ he has drawn a somewhat gloomy picture of it.  He had all the more reason to detest it because it came to him rather early.  In one of those passages where he so willingly gives us the description of his person, he tells us that his hair whitened quickly.  As a climax of misfortune he had grown very fat, and being short, his corpulence was very unbecoming to him.  Augustus, in a letter, compares him to one of those measures of liquids which are broader than they are high.  If, in spite of these too evident signs which warned him of his age, he had tried to deceive himself, there was no lack of persons to disabuse him.  There was the porter of Neaera, who no longer allowed his slave to enter; an affront which Horace was obliged to put up with without complaining.  “My hair whitening,” said he, “warns me not to quarrel.  I should not have been so patient in the time of my boiling youth, when Plancus was consul.”  Then it was Neaera herself who declined to come when he summoned her, and again resigning himself with a good enough grace, the poor poet found that after all she was right, and that it was natural love should prefer youth to ripened age.

       “Ahi,
     Quo blandae juvenum te revocant preces.”