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

LIFE OP HORACE XXXVl
y, therefore, be' earlier than A.U.C. 715. It is Impossible, therefore,
that this book could be completed before late in A.U.C. 722, th«
year before the battle of Aotium. If, however, there be an allusion
to the division of lands to the soldiers engaged in that war, the date
can not be before A.U.C. 721.'
The book of epodes may be considered as in one sense the transition
from satire to lyric poetry. Though not collected or completed
till the present period of the poet's life, this book appears to contain
soifte of the earliest compositions of Horace. In his sweet youth,
his strong passions drove him to express himself In the sharp iambic
verse (Carm. i., 16, 22-4). Bentley's observation, which all would
wish to be true, is perhaps more so than would appear from his own
theory ; that, as it proceeds, the stream of the Horatian poetry flows
not only with greater elegance, but with greater purity."
The moral character of the poet rises in dignity and decency ; he
has cast off the coarseness and indelicacy which defile some of his
earliest pieces ; in his odes he sings to maidens and to youths. The
two or three of the epodes which offend in this manner, I scruple not
to assign to the first year after the return of the poet to Rome. But
not merely has he risen above, and refined himself from, the grosser
licentiousness, his bitter and truculent invective has gradually softened
into more playful satire. Notwithstanding his protestation,
some of his earlier iambics have much of the spirit as well as the
numbers of Archiloohus.
The book of epodes was manifestly completed not long after the
last war between Octavianus and Antony. The dominant feeling in
the mind of Horace seems now to have been a horror of civil war.
The war of Perugia, two years after Philippi, called forth his first
indignant remonstrance against the wickedness of taking up arms,
not for the destruction of Carthage, the subjugation of Britain, but to
fulfill the vows of the Parthians for the destruction of Rome by hei
1. This part of the Bcntleian chronology ia, it may almost be asserted, impossi
Me. Bentley refers (he partUlon of land alluded to in the celebrated line,
•' Promissa Triquetra
Freedia Cffisar an est Itala tellure daturus,"
to the division which followed the defeat of Sex. Pompeiiu. This defeat took
place A.U.C. 718 ; the death of Pompeius A.U.O. 719. The eight years and a half
alone would throw the presentation to Meecenas above the date of the battle of
Philippi, A.U.C. 712. The only way of escape is to suppose that the division was
promised, not fulfilled, and took several years to carry out But this is irreconcila^
ble with the accounts of this division In the historians, and the allusion in Horace
to its first enactment aa to where the lands were to be assigned.
2. " In casteris autem singulis prfficedentis ajtataa gradua plenissimis signis in
dicat ; idque tali ex hac eerie jam a me demonatrata jucundum erit animadvertere
cum operibus juvenilibus multa obscena et flagitiosa insint, quanto annis provec
tior erat, tanto eum ct poeticavirtute et argumentorum dignitate gravitateque me-
liorem semper castioremque evasisse."
—
BmtUlus in preefat. But by Benfley'l
theory, the worst of the epodes were written when he was 32 or 33 years old
hardly " annis juvenilibus." The 14th bears date aftex' the intimacy was formed
with MsBcenas.