Horace's Personality and Outlook on Life as Revealed in his Satires and Epistles

Extract

The writer of what we may call, for want of a better name, vers de société, usually wins a popularity that is merely fleeting; he must be in touch with the thought of his own generation, and in his poems reflect its sentiments, express its humour, and satirize its manners: but his subjects often fail to interest posterity, and in a few decades the poems are apt to be forgotten unless they contain a divine spark of intrinsic excellence. In like manner, the claim to a lasting reputation of the moral essayist is no less hazardous unless he can avoid, above all things, what a recent writer has termed ‘the dull insolence of technicality’. The Satires and Epistles still live after nineteen centuries, and require no apologist. They have earned immortality because of their influence both on the Roman world that Horace knew and on the minds of men, particularly Englishmen, for centuries afterwards. His world was not a very serious world, and he wrote of it as he found it, with his inimitable touches of half-cynical, but never unkindly moralizing; and yet, as these poems and the Odes show, he found it a pleasant enough place for those who knew where true joy was to be found. The Satires and Epistles would be interesting enough if only for the facts that Horace discloses about himself: his freedman father (a coactor), his own personal appearance (Epist. i. 20. 24), the simplicity of his early home (ib. 20, ‘me libertino natum patre, et in tenui re’), and his intense affection for his equally devoted father. He must have been more than thirty years of age when he wrote Satire i. 6, which, in lines 58–100, is one long tribute to his father, and expresses his gratitude for the sacrifices made by a father who was not too well-off; no snob could have written as sincerely as this about his humble family, and no man with any false pride would frankly confess that, in the reverse inflicted on the Republican army at Philippi, he was forced to leave his shield on the field of battle (Carm. ii. 7. 10: ‘relicta non bene parmula’). The disastrous war shattered any illusions he had of rising to eminence in the army, and left him a poor man; but it gave us the poet (Epist. ii. 2. 51, ‘paupertas impulit audax ut versus facerem’), and his subsequent introduction to Maecenas resulted in his fortune being assured.