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

LIFE OF HORACE. xlv
ly no wound the fetters of his personal influence over the Roman
mind. Horace, on the other hand, may fairly be taken as a representative
of a large, particularly the more intellectual, class of Romans.
We see the government stooping to flatter that order of men
by familiarity, and receiving, in turn, that adulation -which could not
but work into the public mind. For the first timet probably, writers
began to have much effect on the sentiments of the Roman people
and when Virgil and Horace spoke in such glowing terms of Augus-
,
tus, when they deified him in their immortal verses, we may be fis-
sured that they found or made an echo in the hearts of multitudes.
This deification, indeed, though we can not altogether exculpate its
adulatory tone, must be judged according to the religious notions of
Rome, not of Christianity.
The religion of Horace is the religion of Rome—the religion of
the age of Augustus. Almost every god in the Pantheon receives
his tribute of a hymn from Horace ; each has his proper attributes,
his traditional functions ; but it is the painter or the sculptor framing
the divinity according to the rules of his art, and according to an
established type, and setting it up for the worship of others, not the
outpouring of real devotion. The very neatness and terseness of ex-
pression shows the poverty of religious sentiment. Almost the
latest of his lyric hymns is the Carmen Sseoulare. In this there is
something more of the energy and life of inspiration ; but even this
faint flash of enthusiasm is in character with the whole of the later
Roman religionj The worship of the gods is blended with natural
pride. They are the ancestral and tutelary deities of the Eternal
Omnipotent City -which are invoked ; the sun, which, in its course,
can behold nothing so great as Rome. It- is a hymn rather to the
majesty of Rome than to the gods. The poetical apotheosis of the
emperor is but this deification of Rome in another form ; in him centered
the administration of the all-powerful republic, and in him,
therefore, its divinity.
Yet Horace, if we pursue the subject of his religion, is not with
out his apprehensions, his misgivings, his yearnings after more serious
things ; the careless and Epicurean soorner of Pivine worship is, or
fancies, or feigns himself to be, startled fi:om his thoughtless apathy
by thunder from a clear sky; he is seized with a sudden access of
respect for all-ruling Providence. As in tie. romantic adventure of
his youth, so in the later accidents of life, his escape from perils by
land and sea—from the falling flf a tree— ^he speaks with gratitude,
apparently not insincere, of the Divine protection; nor is he without
some vague sentiment of the general moral government of the gods.
The depravation of manners is at once the cause and the consequence
if neglected religion i
' Delicta majorum immeritus lues,
Romane, donee templa refeceris.
iEdesque labentes deorum et
Fceda nigro simulacra f>mio.
;