The works of Horace : with English notes, critical and ... - Cristo Raul

LIFE OP HORACE. XV
should associate 'with the genuine youthful nobility of mt capital
rather than the no less haughty, but more coarse and unpolished
gentry (the retired centurions) of the provinces, h^ took great care
that while he secured the advantages, he should be protected from
the dangers of the voluptuous capital. Even if his son should rise
no higher than his own humble calling as a public crier or collector,
his good education would be invaluable ; yet must it not be purchased
by the sacrifice of sound morals. He attended him to the different
schools ; watched with severe but affectionate control over his char-
acter ; so that the boy escaped not merely the taint, but even the reproach
of immorality.^ The poet always speaks of his father with
grateful reverence and with honest pride.
His first turn for satire was encouraged by his father's severe animadversions
on the follies aad vices of his compatriots, which he
neld up as warning examples to his son.* To one of his schoolmasters
the poet has given imperishable fame. Orbilius, whose
flogging propensities have grown into a proverb, had been an ap-
paritor, and afterward served in the army ; an excellent training for
a disciplinarian, if not for a teacher ;
but OrbUius got more reputa-
tion than profit from his ooenpation.' The two principal, if not the
only authors read in the school of Orbilius, were Homer in Greek,
ind Livius Andronicus in Latin.* Homer was, down to the time of
Julian, an indispensable part of Greek, and already of Roman education.^
Orbilius was, no doubt, of the old school ; a teacher to the
heart of rigid Cato ; an admirer of the genuine Roman poetry. Livius
Andronicus was not only the earliest writer of tragedy, but had
translated the Odyssey into the Satumian verse, the native vernacular
metre of Italy.' OrbUius may not merely have thought the Eu-
Smerism of Ennius, or the Epicurianism of Lucretius, unfit for the
study of Roman youth, but have considered Accius, Pacuvius, Or
Terence too foreign and Grecian, and as having degenerated from
the primitive simplicity of the father of Roman verse. The more
modem and Grecian taste of Horace is constantly contending with
1. Sat. L, 6, 81, seqq, 3. Sat. i., 4, lOS, seqq.
"3. "DocuitTnajorefamaquaizieiuoluniento." Sueton., deGrammat.
4. Bentley doubted whether any patrician schoolmaster, at that time, would use
the works of a poet so antiquated as Livius Andronicus. He proposed to read
LfiBvius, the name of aa jobscure writer of love-veraes CE/)£i)ro]racywo), to whom
he ascribes many of the fragments usually assigned to Livius, and which bear no
marks of obsolete antiquity. But^ with due respect to the great critic, the elder
Horace might have objected still more strongly to the modem amatory verses of
LsBvius than to the rude strains of Livius.
5. Epist. ii., S, 41-3. Compare Quint., L, 8; Plin., Kpist il, 15; Statius, Sylv.,
v., 3. D. Heinsius quotes &om Theodoret, Tovrtav 6i of irXeiaroi aiSe Trjv [irjvtv
iiraat riiv 'Ax