SOURCE: “Later Life and Works” in Horace, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 117-62.

… After the publication of Odes 4, Horace may have ceased to write. He died on November 27, 8 b.c., shortly after Maecenas's death in the same year. So his promise in Odes 2.17 to accompany Maecenas on every road, even the last, came true; whether from grief or by coincidence, there is no evidence. One thing about his death sounds strange for a Roman who figured in business and society as importantly as Horace did. Death came to him suddenly, Suetonius claims, so suddenly that he only had time to summon witnesses and dismiss his property into Augustus's hands. Augustus is known from other sources to have been a careful administrator of estates left to him, and Horace could well have trusted him to distribute any secondary bequests that he had promised to friends and to free slaves who had been promised their freedom. Such “nuncupatory” or declaratory wills were legal by Roman law as they are in ours, if reduced to writing as soon as possible after death and subscribed by the witnesses. But Romans of rank customarily made their wills into lengthy farewell-card lists of friends and favored acquaintances, using small bequests and namings to residuary legacies in the second and third degree to make sure every amicus received his due mention. That elaborate form of Roman politeness the poet dispensed with. It was unusual behavior; Horace's will is apparently the only recorded example in Roman history of a declaratory will, legal though they were. Was the Horace of real life so withdrawn from everyone in his last years except Maecenas that he disdained this social gesture? Or so involved with life that he regarded the writing of a will at all with distaste? Like much of our limited knowledge about the historical Horace, this story leaves us uncertain.

One or other of the three poems in the so-called second book of Epistles may belong to this late period, but modern scholarship tends to hold that they belong rather to the period 20-12 b.c. At various times after the publication of the first book of Epistles Horace added three longer poems to the collection that make a second “book”: an epistle to Augustus (2.1), another (2.2) to the Florus who was the addressee of Epistles 1.3, and a treatise on the art of poetry (2.3) addressed to a Calpurnius Piso and his two sons, the polite fiction being that the sons are young poets of promise who need Horace's advice. The date of The Art of Poetry is so uncertain that it may even have been written before Epistles 1, in the late 20s. The dates of their composition may perhaps have come in the reverse of their conventional order, 3-2-1, with The Art of Poetry the earliest, the epistle to Florus second (not very long after Epistles 1). The epistle to Augustus would then come last, after 17 b.c. and perhaps even just after Odes 4: it refers to the Carmen saeculare, and Suetonius says it was provoked by Augustus's desire to have at least one of Horace's hexameter poems, not just his lyric poems, addressed to himself.

The three poems have many themes in common, because they are all three “Artes poeticae” of a kind. The Art of Poetry offers instruction to a younger generation of poets, symbolized by the Pisones. They are to continue further—for example, by the conquest of the tragic and comic genres—the triumphs already won by the poets of Horace's time in creating a more sophisticated kind of poetry and literature than the Republic had known. The epistle to Augustus considers the progress of Roman poetry and literature from the point of view of the emperor's duty to help in this process. Augustus's successful fostering of the kind of writing that Vergil, Varius, and Horace have done for him already should be continued to a new generation of poets whom Horace hopes he will encourage to be equally creative, subtle, and free. The epistle to Florus integrates some great statements of Horace's arduous personal ideals as a poet with a more complete and explicit life-review. Horace works his way, through powerful images of death and resignation, to a positive statement of a new life and a new kind of poetry. The great subjects of his earlier lyrics are like a banquet to be left to the young; Horace himself is on a new quest both in life and in art.

Horace treats thoughts throughout his work like pieces in a mosaic, to be transformed by rewriting and replacement and a different context. He is never ashamed to repeat them in varied form. And thus many a topic reappears in all three epistles, stated variously to suit the three themes: poetry from the point of view of pure art; from that of Augustus, the state, and society; and considered as part of a personal statement about Horace himself. All three poems stress in impressive passages the importance and dignity of the poet's role in Roman society, contrasting them with the low, acquisitive ideals of Roman business life that distract Romans from valuing the contribution of the arts. In the epistle to Augustus Horace tells the emperor that though poets look too unsoldierly and too unconcerned with property to be good Romans, they are in fact among the best, and he pointedly cites his own Carmen saeculare as the climactic example. If Augustus believes it was any use to propitiate the gods and ask them through Horace's chorus for peace and good harvest, Horace implies, he has already tacitly assented to the highest old-fashioned view of the sacred character of poetry and its necessity to the state (Epistles 2.1.102-38).

The epistle to Florus pictures the work of the poet, dazzingly, as combining the spirit of a Roman censor, with authority to expel without mercy or protect and naturalize any word in the Roman language, with the arduous physical labors of a ballet dancer: the true poet thus works twice as hard as even the highest-ranking senatorial magistrate (2.2.109-25). The Art of Poetry tells the Pisones that if the Greeks were truer poets than any Romans yet, it is because they were not corrupted by the concentration on account books and splitting pennies into farthings that characterizes Roman business education (2.3.323-32). Horace reminds them, both ironically and seriously, that the true value of poetry is such as to make the truths symbolized in the ancient Greek legends about the lyres of Orpheus, Amphion, and Apollo as real now as ever (lines 391-408).

All three poems teach throughout that in so advanced and sophisticated a society as Rome's, the spirit of the great ancient Greeks, by whatever process of free inspiration Homer and Pindar and the tragic poets achieved their results, can be brought over only at the price of endless labor in the spirit of Callimachus and the Alexandrians. Study, sleepless labor, and above all submission to the real pain, indignity, and disappointment of cancellation, revision, acceptance of criticism from the qualified, and revision again, are recommended over and over. The result should be a style so perfect and so apparently simple that the labor that went into its making is invisible until those who think it really simple try to imitate it. In The Art of Poetry this is the poet's chief task, and the Pisones are reminded pointedly that their riches and high standing in society cannot exempt them from it.

In the epistle to Augustus the true poet's devotion to labor and inattention to material things both qualify him as a true Roman and give him his claim to be Augustus's true celebrator against mere flattering amateurs. In the epistle to Florus Horace gives his most explicit and moving account of the emotionally and physically, as well as intellectually, exhausting task. He pictures the composition of poetry as combining the demands made on the attention of a Roman magistrate of the highest rank with the physical demands made on a professional dancer. Only a young poet will be equal to these demands in their full strength. An old poet will have to find different and less exhausting (but not less satisfying) expedients, both in life and in art.

This severe ideal hardly exaggerates the amount of technical labor and learning that went into the formal Latin poetry of all ages from Ennius to Claudian. But the genre allows Horace to soften his presentation of the poetic ideal considerably by humor and irony. In all three poems contrasts to this ideal are drawn, humorously and at length, with the mad poet who hopes to succeed by inspiration and optimism alone, with the mad poems he produces, and with the short life and evil fate of his writings. The looseness and gracefulness of the poems' conversational transitions suggest a freer model for art than the classicism of their explicit precepts at first seems to demand.

The three poems are also united in their attitude to language: they are all meant to encourage a more restricted, purist view of the kind of Latin proper to poetry, especially in the higher genres, than had prevailed under the Republic. Horace is only expressing here a movement in his own time that became the wave of the future; even he and Vergil were regarded by many later poets as sometimes too adventuresome in meter and language. But he is already very unfair to Republican poetry because of it. In the epistle to Augustus and The Art of Poetry it is implied at length, and without any really sufficient qualification, that the poets of the Republic had as their chief virtue raw genius without study, that they never blotted a verse. In the epistle to Florus Horace saves his hostility for his contemporaries.

The three poems are still very different pieces, each with its own character. The epistle to Augustus has the clearest and simplest argumentative structure of the three, though it is not without subtle and pregnant “conversational” transitions and spirited ironies, particularly concerning any concept of poetry as mere court flattery. The Art of Poetry, as a poem about poems, is on the surface not just conversationally informal but joltingly arbitrary in its succession of topics. Its precepts taken one by one recommend the strictest sort of Aristotelian decorum in art. But it is so audacious and shapeless in its structure and argument that it seems to express more sympathy than one would at first think with the wild formless artwork and the mad poet it condemns with hilarious satire at the beginning and end. The epistle to Florus, which we can examine here as an example of the three, is a sort of middle term: a personal poem, in which the theme of poetics is movingly united with that of self-examination and the loss and gain that come with aging. Through a succession of subtle but never jarring transitions, it builds the most poetically satisfying and unified structure of all Horace's hexameter poems, early or late.

It is the perfect late-Horatian poem, a seamless flow, over easy conversational transitions, of exquisite, autumn-colored verse and valediction. Horace begins with a hilarious picture of a slave dealer selling a native Italian slave boy who is full of beauty and has a talent for literature and song, yet is surprisingly inexpensive. But the slave dealer, to be sure the sale is legal, slips in briefly at the end (in small print, so to speak, and in deliberately ambiguous language) that the slave is apt to wander off and disobey orders.

“No professional dealer would give you this price. In fact
I
would only do it for you. He did slack off once;
and as happens, hid out from the hanging whip under the stairs.”
You can give him his money, if “runaway” doesn’t hurt
you.

[Epistles 2.2.13-16]

In law the slave dealer was liable to a lawsuit from the buyer if he left that unmentioned, for even “making himself scarce” against orders, let alone being a runaway (the dealer tries to say this as ambiguously as possible), diminished a slave's price.

“I told you I was lazy when you left,” Horace says abruptly (line 20). He is himself the clever hider-out and the tricky slave dealer at once. He told Florus in advance that he was too lazy to write this poem (which he is of course writing: the old joke again), and no lawsuit can lie against him. What sounds like an army story of Horace's youth follows, and another moral is immediately drawn. A soldier in Lucullus's army in the 60s b.c. had his savings stolen by a cutpurse and immediately became the bravest man in the army, conquering one of the enemy King Mithridates' royal citadels single-handed. He was brilliantly rewarded with money. That was the end of his ambition. The next time Lucullus asked for his services in conquering another citadel, he was told: “Someone will go—someone who’s lost his wallet” (lines 39-40). Without pause, Horace draws the moral of this story by reviewing his own earlier history. I paraphrase: “I was brought up at Rome and learned there my Homer; Athens added more to my education; but I went from there into warfare that did not prevail against Caesar Augustus's might and power. I came home impoverished and was driven by the audacity of poverty into being a poet. What sort of fool would I be if I had not rather sleep late than write verse?”

But this sarcastic tone suddenly turns into pathos. Verse is indeed what he called it in The Art of Poetry, an arduous profession worth the efforts of a man's whole lifetime. But Florus does not appreciate that it is a physical effort, an exhausting one.

The years rob us of everything as they go by:
they’ve taken good-humor and love and banquets and play.
They want to twist poems away from me: what should I do?

[Epistles 2.2.55-57]

To write for the various tastes of the public, to keep up one's business duties and rounds of social calls in Rome, to participate in its hypocritical and backbiting literary society—all these are distracting enough. Horace is being his intentionally two-faced self here. He means that he has in fact pleased various publics with his satires, epodes, and odes, that he is still important in Roman business and society, and is still loaded down with business whenever he visits the city, and that he is still a major figure in literary society.

But Horace himself dismisses all these “strains” of success in Rome as superficial. The real reason for his despair of writing poetry like that of his youth is the strain and anguish of composition, of perpetually correcting, reworking, discarding. His own exhausting and tiring work at his art he describes under the metaphor (an unusually extended one) of a censor. In the real world the censor's responsibility was to revise the rolls of Senate, knights, and people without fear of those he struck out; also to admit new citizens, whatever their parentage, who seemed worthy. He supervised building contracts for the beautification of the city, and enforced sumptuary laws against unnecessary luxury in dress and dinner giving. But the poet's arduous “magistracy” is exercised over the phantom-world of language. At the end it collapses into what seems to the public, though not to the anguished poet, merely the effortless dance of a great mime.

A man who wants to make what is really a poem
takes up with his tablets the soul of a harsh Roman censor:
He will not flinch from canceling what is not splendid,
what is weightless and flighty, unworthy of high place,
from crossing out words, though they seem unwilling to go
and plead residence rights in his inmost hearth and shrine.
He will also firmly restore words forgotten
by the Roman people, and bring fine words for real things
to light that our nobles in Cato's day used
but are now deserted and old and gray with decay.
He’ll inscribe new ones whose only parent is Usage.
Then flowing, and clear, and liquid as the full river,
he will pour out wealth and enrich Latium with words,
but repress luxuriance, soften all that is harsh
with intelligent pruning, and cast out all that is nerveless;
he will appear as if playing and be in real torture: like dancers
that must twist to be satyr and Cyclops in the same play.

[Epistles 2.2. 109-25]

For this effort, Horace says, he is too old; the study of philosophy and the acceptance of life are more proper. His reputation concerns him less, too, because he is only involved with what is really and philosophically true about his life (another anticipation of the modern language of the psychology of aging: the results Horace attributes to “philosophy” often cross with those of modern psychology). Horace here seems to glance around his own large country possessions as he discusses the avoidance of avarice. Does he own them, or merely have the use of them, as anyone who bought their produce might be said to as well? The law gives him their possession in fee simple. But life and the passage of time tell a different law. Human beings have only the usufruct of their possessions for life. Nothing is permanent. Heir follows heir like wave on wave (lines 158-79).

Horace takes his old theme of avarice for the example of his new style of self-searching because it continues themes in the poem and because it brings in a new one: the review of life ends in the thought of death. The sale of the clever runaway slave at the beginning started a theme of legal imagery which continues in the long metaphor of the censor and ends in this passage full of parody references to the Roman law of real property. It also started the theme of the fugitiveness and impermanence of everything in life, which comes to a climax here: as in the great lyrics about death, property and the thought of ownership bring up only the sad thought of the brevity and impermanence of the owner. This time the prosperous landowner is Horace himself, and he frees himself as part of his life-review from the illusion of ownership and possession. His lands are as fugitive as his youth and his earlier lyric style. A reputable Roman was almost defined by his attention to increasing the family estate during his lifetime and passing it on to his heirs improved. But that means nothing to Horace, a bachelor, and doubly not now:

There’s a difference, whether you scatter wealth on the
ground
or, neither in pain at spending nor greedy for more,
behave as you did when a boy on spring holidays
and enjoy your brief and pleasant time as you can …
My sails are taut with no violent following north winds,
my life is not spent in fighting storms from the South;
strength, genius, beauty, courage, station, and wealth
put me low among great men but far above the low.
“You’re no miser: Dismissed.” Well then: You’re
free of this vice,
are you free of the rest? Is your heart done with empty fame?
Is it free of the fear of death? Is it free of rage?
Do you give dream-symbols and magical curses and miracles,
fortune-tellers, ghosts in the night, and witches a horselaugh?
Do you number your birthdays with thanks to the gods and forgive
your friends, ever milder, more generous, as you grow old?
What does it help you to pluck out one thorn of many?
If you really cannot live well, give place to the experts.
You have had enough pleasure, and eaten and drunk enough;
it’s your time to leave, before you drink far too much more
and the young, more decently horny, laugh and put you outdoors.

[Epistles 2.2.195-98, 201-16]

Many themes are united and transformed in these apparently simple last lines. Horace, in borrowing from Lucretius and his own earlier self the image of the satisfied/unsatisfied departing guest in life, adds to it the image of rejection by the young. The Latin echoes the language of the Old Woman lyrics of Odes 1-3; but now it is not Lyce's or Canidia's hideousness that is satirized, but Horace's own fear of rejection by the young in love. At last, and more explicitly than in Odes 4, he here applies the same images against himself.

But the image is a hopeful one: the banquet is not all there is to life. In Lucretius and in his own early satires, the image of departing satisfied from the banquet had been a figure of speech for death. Horace here makes it a figure for departing from the life of lyric poetry and its banquets to a new life and a new style. Wisdom and self-understanding make it possible to leave the banquet, as age comes, for something new. If the epistle to Florus was written before 15 b.c., as seems probable, not only the epistle to Augustus and the Carmen saeculare but the immense new lyric world of the fourth book of odes were still before Horace.