The change and turmoil of the times that attended and followed the crumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production of letters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage.  Goth, Byzantine, Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil of Italy.  If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure of peaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart without which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation.  Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the people.  The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds.  Their language, never the facile language of the people and the partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to the general run of men.  Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, their metres forgotten.  Their substance, never grasped without effort, was now not only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people and another age.  To all but the cultivated few, they were known for anything but what they really were.  It was an age of Virgil the mysterious prophet of the coming of Christ, of Virgil the necromancer.  Real knowledge withdrew to secret and secluded refuges.

If the classical authors in general were beyond the powers and outside the affection of men, Horace was especially so.  More intellectual than Virgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost to their knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather than of men in the national or racial mass, the poet strictly of this world and in no respect of the next, he almost vanished from the life of men.

Yet the classics were not all lost, and not even Horace perished.  Strange to say, and yet not really strange, the most potent active influence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the most effective instrument of his preservation.  Through the darkness and the storms of the nine hundred years following the fall of the Western Empire, Horace was sheltered under the wing of the Church.

It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teaching absolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouths of such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed and nothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts of paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its religion that every part was anathema.  It was natural that Horace, more than Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its active enmity.  Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are of spiritual import.  The only immortality of which he takes account is the immortality of fame.  Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow.