Part 9 (1/2)

If you wish a thing well done, You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!

We lance at the epitaph which he wrote for hirams, but it may properly be considered in connection with the medley of his satires In it he claims that unsubstantial ivouchsafed to him

Behold, O friends, old Ennius' carved stone, Who wrote your father's deeds with lambent pen; Let no tears deck my funeral, for lo, My soul immortal lives on lips of men

We have seen that the spirit of invective in Lucilius, which became in his hands the spirit of satire, is traceable to the old Greek comedy

The poetic form (the dactylic hexameter in which he wrote twenty of the thirty books of his satire) had already been naturalized in Roreat epic poe the first to incarnate this spirit in this form, and thus to establish an entirely new type in literature

His satires contain invectives against luxury, avarice, and kindred vices, and prevalent superstitions; an attack upon the rich; ridicule of certain rhetorical affectations; grammatical remarks, and criticisms on art; observations upon the Stoic philosophy; the poet's own political experiences and expectations, also other anecdotes and incidents gathered fro account of a journey to Sicily, from which Horace probably obtained the model for his famous journey to Brundisiuest by their wide range the old-ti times Born in 180 B C, eleven years before the death of Ennius, he died about 103 B C, three years after Cicero's birth and the year before the birth of Caesar He was thus conte events in Roman history--the third Macedonian War; the Third Punic War; the Nuht under Scipio Africanus in 133 B C; the troubled tiurthine War, and the rise of Caius Marius He was of equestrian rank, and lived on terms of intier Scipio and Laelius With such backing as this, of faood position to direct his satire against the wicked and unscrupulous ardless of their rank, without fear or favor

What did the Roe from the frequency and character of their references to him, the poet must have made a profound impression upon his countrymen A study of these references shows that in the main this impression was favorable He is _doctus_, that is, profoundly learned in the wisdo to Aulus Gellius, he was equally well versed in the language and literature of his own land He is to Juvenal the _h preempted the field, to follohoy on the part of the would-be satirist He is to Cicero _perurbanus_, pree in spirit and expression which marks at once the polished racilitas_, that plainness, directness, and sihness” of his ”eager” spirit and of his righteous indignation, ainst the vices of his day Persius says of him that he ”slashed the citizens of his time and broke his jaw-teeth on the: ”But whenever Lucilius with draord fiercely rages, his hearer, whose soul is cold within him because of his crimes, blushes with shauilty secrets”

Like those of so many of his predecessors in literature, the works of Lucilius rerammarians, who quote freely fro of so A coh quotations on account of their sentiment, as when Cicero says: ”Lucilius used to say that he did not write to be read by either of the extremes of society, because one would not understand him, and the other knew more than he did”

We shall now exa has been thought to be a vivid picture of the unworthy struggle of life as he saw it in the Rome of his own ti in a eneral way the unhappy, unrestful life ofreflections of philosophy

But now, froht, on holidays and work days, in the sah and low, all busy themselves in the forum and never depart To one and the same pursuit and practice have they all devoted theuardedly as possible, to strive craftily, to vie in flattery, to ood men, to lay snares just as if they were all the foes of all

There was a certain titus Albucius, who, it see Greek that he was continually affecting theafter foreign customs and speech has not yet wholly disappeared This weakness is the object of the poet's wit in the following passage, in which he tells how Scaevola, the propraetor of Asia, once ”took down” the silly Albucius in Athens:

A Greek, Albucius, you would be called, and not a Roman and a Sabine, a fellonsh they are both illustrious men, and first-rate standard-bearers And so, as praetor at Athens, when I n style which you are so fond of: ”+chaire+!”[A] I say; and my lictors and all my retinue inquire: ”+chaire+?” Fie, Albucius! for this thou art my country's foe, and my own enemy!

[A] Hail

The fourth satire, says an ancient scholiast, was an attack upon luxury and the vices of the rich The following passagelines of this satire, representing Laelius as exclailuttony:

”O sorrel, how praiseworthy art thou, And yet how little art thou really known!”

over hisone by one the gluttons of our day

And that he did not hesitate to call the glutton and spendthrift by nament, which is evidently a continuation of the same diatribe:

”O Publius Gallonius, thou spendthrift,” said he, ”thou art a wretched fellow Never in all thy life hast thou dined well, though all thy wealth on that lobster and that sturgeon thou consumest”

The last selection which we shall present froe is a somewhat elaborate definition of _virtue_ as the old Roman understood it We use the translation of Sellar

Virtue, Albinus, consists in being able to give their true worth to the things on which we are engaged, a which we live The virtue of a : to understand what is right, useful, honorable for hiood, what bad, what is unprofitable, base, dishonorable; to know the due liive its proper worth to wealth; to assign what is really due to office; to be a foe and eneood, to wish theh life Lastly, it is true worth to look on our country's weal as the chief good; next to that the weal of our parents; third and last, our oeal

2 QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS

Horace well sustains the character of preacher whose function it has already been said that satire performs He found in his world the sahteous scorn of Lucilius, and had led him to those bitter attacks upon the follies of his time for which his satire was justly dreaded But Horace is cast in a different mold fros of society, he has a realizing sense that he hiuilty of the same sins, subject to the same criticism