On this soft autumn afternoon among the Italian hills Horace could still remember his startled amazement when he first saw the radiance of Greek colouring.  He had not realised that the physical aspect of mountains and sky would be so different from the landscape about Rome, and he had never lost his delight in the fresh transparency of the Athenian air.  One of his earliest experiments in translation had been with Euripides’s choral description of the “blest children of Erechtheus going on their way, daintily enfolded in the bright, bright air.”

His student life in the old home of learning had also proved to be more charming than he could have anticipated.  There had been the dual claims of literature and philosophy to stir his mind, and memories of the ancient masters of Greece to make honoured and venerable the gardens and the gymnasiums where he listened to his modern lectures, to enhance the beauty of the incomparable marble temples, to throw a glamour even over the streets of Athens, and so to minimise his Roman contempt for the weakness of her public life.  And then there were the pleasures of youth, the breaks in the long days, when he and his comrades would toss lecture notes, and even the poets, to the winds, buy sweet-smelling ointments for their hair in some Oriental shop in the lively market-place, pick out a better wine than usual, and let Dionysus and Aphrodite control the fleeting hours.  On the morrow Apollo and Athena would once more hold their proper place.

Of Roman affairs they knew little and thought less, in their charmingly egotistic absorption in student life.  But a violent shock was finally to shatter this serene oblivion.  Horace could remember the smallest details about that day.  It was in the spring.  The March sun had risen brightly over Hymettus, and the sky was cloudless.  Marcus, meeting him at a morning lecture of Cratippus, had surprised him by asking him to take his afternoon walk with him.  “My father,” he explained, “has written me about a walk that he and my uncle Quintus took to the Academy when they were students.  They felt that Plato was still alive there, and in passing the hill of Colonus they thought of Sophocles.  He wants me to take the same walk, and I wish you would come along, too, and tell me some Sophocles and Plato to spout back; my father will be sure to expect a rhapsody.”  Horace had joyfully assented, for Marcus was always an entertaining fellow, and might he not write to Cicero about his new acquaintance, and might that not lead to his some day meeting the great man, and hearing him talk about Greek philosophy and poetry?