Horace’s place is not among the dim and uncertain figures of a hoary antiquity.  Only give him modern shoes, an Italian cloak, and a walking-stick, instead of sandals and toga, and he may be seen on the streets of Rome today.  Nor is he less modern in character and bearing than in appearance.  We discern in his composition the same strange and seemingly contradictory blend of the grave and gay, the lively and severe, the constant and the mercurial, the austere and the trivial, the dignified and the careless, that is so baffling to the observer of Italian character and conduct today.

2.  Horace the poet

To understand how Horace came to be a great poet as well as an engaging person, it is necessary to look beneath this somewhat commonplace exterior, and to discern the spiritual man.

The foundations of literature are laid in life.  For the production of great poetry two conditions are necessary.  There must be, first, an age pregnant with the celestial fires of deep emotion.  Second, there must be in its midst one of the rare men whom we call inspired.  He must be of such sensitive spiritual fiber as to vibrate to every breeze of the national passion, of such spiritual capacity as to assimilate the common thoughts and moods of the time, of such fine perception and of such sureness of command over word, phrase, and rhythm, as to give crowning expression to what his soul has made its own.

For abundance of stirring and fertilizing experience, history presents few equals of the times when Horace lived.  His lifetime fell in an age which was in continual travail with great and uncertain movement.  Never has Fortune taken greater delight in her bitter and insolent game, never displayed a greater pertinacity in the derision of men.  In the period from Horace’s birth at Venusia in southeastern Italy, on December 8, B.C. 65, to November 27, B.C. 8, when

  “M_ourned of men and Muses nine_,
  T_hey laid him on the Esquiline_,”

there occurred the series of great events, to men in their midst incomprehensible, bewildering, and disheartening, which after times could readily interpret as the inevitable change from the ancient and decaying Republic to the better knit if less free life of the Empire.

We are at an immense distance, and the differences have long since been composed.  The menacing murmur of trumpets is no longer audible, and the seas are no longer red with blood.  The picture is old, and faded, and darkened, and leaves us cold, until we illuminate it with the light of imagination.  Then first we see, or rather feel, the magnitude of the time:  its hatreds and its selfishness; its differences of opinion, sometimes honest and sometimes disingenuous, but always maintained with the heat of passion; its divisions of friends and families; its lawlessness and violence; its terrifying uncertainties and adventurous plunges; its tragedies of confiscation,