In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,
  Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
      Who, striking the tyrant down,
      Made Athens a freeman’s town.

  Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead! 
  Thou liv’st in the isles of the blest, ’tis said,
      With Achilles, first in speed,
      And Tydides Diomede.

  In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,
  Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
      When the twain on Athena’s day
      Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Translated by John Conington.]

Even now, more than thirty years later, the breeze in the Sabine ilex seemed to be playing a wraith of the same tune.  And suddenly there began to follow, creeping out of long closed fastnesses, a spectral troop of loftier reminders.  Horace stirred a little uneasily.  Was it only hot youth and Brutus that had carried him off on that foolhardy expedition?  Was it possible that Athens herself had driven him forth, furnishing him as wings superb impulses born of the glory of her past?  For many years now he had been accustomed to feel that he owed to Greece a quickening and a sane training of his artistic abilities; a salvation from Alexandrian pedantry, through a detailed knowledge of the original and masterly epochs of Greek literature; a wholesome fear of Roman grandiosity in any form, engendered by a sojourn among perfect exemplars of architecture and sculpture.  For many years, too, he had been in the habit of regarding Brutus as nobly mistaken; of realising that Julius Caesar might have developed a more rational freedom in Rome than one enshrined merely in republican institutions.  Even great men like Brutus and Cicero, although they were above the private meanness and jealousy that in so many cases adulterated the pure love of liberty, had not seen far enough.  What could a theory of freedom give the country better than the peace and the prosperity brought about by the magnanimous Emperor?  Horace’s part in the battle of Philippi had long since become to him a laughable episode of youth.  He had even made a merry verse about it, casting the unashamed story of his flight in the words of Archilochus and Alcaeus, as if the chief result for him had been a bit of literary experiment.

But now, like the phantom in Brutus’s tent at Philippi, a grim question stole upon him out of the shadows of his memory.  Was it possible that his fight on that field of defeat had been, not a folly, but the golden moment of his life?  Had Athens taught him something even profounder than the art which had made him Rome’s best lyric poet?  He had forgotten much of her humiliation, and of his own Roman pride in her subjection during those days when he had lived, in youthful hero-worship, with the spirits of her great past.  Had she, after all, not only taught the sons of her masters philosophy and the arts, but taken them captive, as well, by the imperious ideals of her own youth, by her love of freedom and of truth?