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

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EXPLANATORY NOTES. BOOK II., EPISTLE I. 611
Bancas, being written on a bull's hide stretched on a wooden shield.—25.
Vel Gabiis vel cum rigidis aquata Sahinis. In construction, cum must
be supplied with Gabiis. Consult note on Epist. i., 11, 7.
S6, 27. 26. Pontificum libros. According^ to a well-known custom,
manifestly derived from very ancient times, the chief pontiff wrote on a
whited table the events of the year, prodigies, eclipses, a pestilence, a
scarcity, campaigns, triumphs, the deaths of illustrious men ; in a word,
what Llvy brings together at the end of the tenth book, and in such as
remain of the following ones, mostly when closing the history of a year,
in the plainest words, and with the utmost brevity ; so dry that nothing
could be more jejune. The table was then set up in the pontiff's house ;
the annals of the several years were afterward collected in books. This
custom obtained until the pontificate of P. Mucins, and the times of the
Grracchi ; when it ceased, because a literature had now been formed, and
perhaps because the composing such chronicles seemed too much below
the dignity of the chief pontiff. Annosa volumina vatum. Alluding to
the Sibylline oracles and other early predictions, but particularly the
former.—37. Albano Musas in monte locutas. A keen sarcasm on the
blind admiration with which the relics of earlier days were regarded, as
if the very Muses themselves had abandoned Helicon and Parnassus to
come upon the Alhan Mount, and had there dictated the treaties and proph-
ecies to which the poet refers. Under the terms Musas there is a particular
reference to the nymph Egeria, with whom, as it is well kiiown, Numa
pretended to hold secret conferences on the Alban Mountain. £3geria, besides,
was ranked by some among the number of the Muses. Compare
Dion. Hal., ii., 60. Alhano mante. The Alban Mount, now called Monte
Cavo, had the city of Alba Longa situate on its slope^ and was about
twenty miles &om Rome.
28-33. 28. Si quia Graiorum sunt antiquissypia. Sec. "If, because
the most ancient works of the Greeks are even the best, the Roman writers
are to be weighed in the same balance, there is no need of our saying
much on the subject," i. e., it is in vain to say any thing further. On the
force olvel here, consult Zumpt, $ 108.—31. Nil intra est olea, nil extra
est in nuce duri. " There is nothing hard within in the olive, there is
nothing hard without in the nut." The idea intended to te conveyed by
this line, and the two verses that immediately succeed, is as follows : To
assert that, because the oldest Greek writers are the best, the oldest Roman
ones are also to be considered superior to those who have come after,
is just as absurd as to say that the olive has no pit, and the nut no shell,
or to maintain that our countrymen excel the Greeks in music, painting,
and the exercises of the palaBstra,-^i7»c