(1) ’They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face bowed earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel as never mortal gave he might strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and through his mourning friends go forth, a hero, into exile.  Yet well he knew what things were being prepared for him at the hands of the tormenters, who, none the less, put aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the people that would fain have held him back, passing through their midst as he might have done, if, his retainers’ weary business ended and the suits adjudged, he were faring to his Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum.’

We talk of the Greeks as your teachers.  Your teachers they were, but that poem could only have been written by a Roman!  The strength, the tenderness, the noble and monumental resolution and resignation—­these are the gift of the lords of human things, the masters of the world.  Your country’s heroes are dear to you, Horace, but you did not sing them better than your country’s Gods, the pious protecting spirits of the hearth, the farm, the field, kindly ghosts, it may be, of Latin fathers dead or Gods framed in the image of these.  What you actually believed we know not, you knew not.  Who knows what he believes? Parcus Deorum cultor you bowed not often, it may be, in the temples of the state religion and before the statues of the great Olympians; but the pure and pious worship of rustic tradition, the faith handed down by the homely elders, with that you never broke.  Clean hands and a pure heart, these, with a sacred cake and shining grains of salt, you could offer to the Lares.  It was a benignant religion, uniting old times and new, men living and men long dead and gone, in a kind of service and sacrifice solemn yet familiar.

     Te nihil attinet
 Tentare multa caede bidentium
  Parvos coronantem marino
   Rore deos fragilique myrto.

 Immunis aram si tetigit manus,
 Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
   Mollivit aversos Penates
    Farre pio et salienta mica. (1)

(1) Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods with slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest thy tiny deities with myrtle rare and rosemary.  If but the hand be clean that touches the altar, then richest sacrifice will not more appease the angered Penates than the duteous cake and salt that crackles in the blaze.’

Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise and kindly heathen; of mortals the most human, the friend of my friends and of so many generations of men.