What do we expect of a Poet Laureate, of a poet who handles national themes?¹ He records and he interprets events of national importance. But how does this differ from the function of the historian? Clearly the poet is more free; he is not bound to record merely what was and what is, and the causes of both; he may treat of what may be—what might have been.² He may handle, not the whole of an event, but only such part of it as seems to him permanent and significant; just so much as appears important when seen, in the mediaeval phrase, sub specie aeternitatis. In a word, the poet can idealise; that is to say, he can connect events with great ideas.

All this is commonplace; but what is not so clearly seen is that such idealism tends to become true even of the actual past. It is commonly said and thought that the past cannot be altered, that when an event has once happened, its character is for ever determined. But what do we mean by an event? The rise of ten degrees in the thermometer? Hardly an event to most of us,—unless we have spent a dusty morning in finding and furbishing up an old pair of skates. The loss of a ten-pound note? Hardly perhaps to a Carnegie, but to humbler folk certainly an event, possibly even a tragic one. The death of Julius Caesar? To a physiologist the phrase only means that a certain physiological organism has ceased to respond to the stimuli of its surroundings, a certain heart has ceased to beat. But that is not what we mean when we speak of the event of the Ides of March. The truth is that what we mean in ordinary speech by an event, though it always includes some nucleus of physical fact, includes also a great deal more. It means, I think, in our ordinary usage, nothing less than this,—a certain physical fact plus all the human feelings that led up to it, and all the human feelings that flowed from it.

If this definition be sound, it follows that if one can change those feelings one does in fact change the event, even when the physical fact has already happened.

Take a simple illustration. The name of Spion Kop recalls one of the most painful incidents of the Boer War. Some hundreds of brave lives were sacrificed in an effort to take a waterless and shelterless summit of rock which had to be abandoned within an hour or two of its capture. Many of us remember the controversy that arose on the question who was responsible for the tragedy; and that, I suppose, is the chief part of what the name represents in our minds. We should be very much surprised to hear that the survivors held an annual dinner to keep alive its memory. “Some one had blundered,” that is all. But then think of the other event which these words recall—the Balaclava charge:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die;
Into the valley of death
Rode the six hundred.

Tennyson's genius seized on the heroic obedience of the common troopers as being the heart and centre of the event, and set it once for all upon the roll of great deeds.

Another example from modern history may be found in the French conception of Napoleon, shaped by poets like Béranger and Victor Hugo who dwelt on the liberative aspect of his wars. In his Feuilles d’Automne (xxv.)³ Hugo describes his childish recollection of the great commander in a procession marching to the Panthéon:

Ce qui me frappa et me resta gravé,
Ce fut de voir parmi des fanfares de gloire
Dans le bruit qu’il faisait cet homme souverain
Passer muet et grave ainsi qu’un dieu d’airain.

The child pondered on this “deity of bronze,” and next day he questioned his father as they watched the sunset together:

                                                            O mon père, lui dis-je,
Pourquoi notre empereur, cet envoyé de Dieu,
Lui qui fait tout mouvoir et qui met tout en fer,
A-t-il ce regard froid et cet air immobile!

His father replied by pointing to the fields outstretched before them, with their inexhaustible springs of vital energy:

Dans son sein que n’épuise aucun enfantement
Les futures moissons tremblent confusément.
Ainsi travaille, enfant, l’âme active et féconde
Du poète qui crée et du soldat qui fonde,
Mais ils n’en font rien voir.

Even now, he said, the earth is yawning beneath the old decaying thrones; and from amid their fragments there rises to bless mankind a second Charlemagne with a new world in his grasp:

La terre à chaque instant sous ses vieux trônes
s’ouvre,
Et de tous leurs débris sort pour le genre humain
Un autre Charlemagne, un autre globe en main.

This ideal portrait, at the supposed date, was probably wide of the truth, if we take it as a picture of Napoleon's own motives. And yet it tended to become true through the influence that such conceptions had upon Napoleon himself; and still more through their influence upon the French people, in whom they alloyed and ennobled a merely national ambition.

Again, in the war of 1864 in America, the motives of the Northern leaders were at first almost wholly political, nor could they well have been otherwise. Abraham Lincoln, though he had always supported the movement against slavery, did not venture to proclaim the Abolition till the war was nearly ended. The truth is that in the meantime the cause of the North had been changed into something new, transfigured and transmuted by the idealists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell. Lowell's Stanzas on Freedom are too well known to be repeated here; but I must be forgiven for quoting Walt Whitman's lines on the death of Abraham Lincoln, which are less familiar than they should be on this side of the Atlantic:

O Captain, my Captain, our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring—
                                        But O heart! heart! heart!
                                        O the bleeding drops of red,
                                        Where on the deck my Captain lies
                                                            Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain, my Captain, rise up and hear the bells!
Rise up, for you the flag is flung, for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths, for you the shore a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.
                                        Here, Captain, dear father,
                                        This arm beneath your head!
                                        It is some dream on the deck
                                                            You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse or will.
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won—
                                        Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
                                        But I with mournful tread
                                        Walk the spot(4) my Captain lies
                                                            Fallen, cold and dead.

With such a cry ringing in men's hearts, who could doubt that the great struggle had been for a great cause? By that time it was clear that whatever the motives from which the war had been begun, it had been fought out to its end to liberate the slaves.

May I hope, then, that I have made clear the point for which I am contending, which amounts simply to this, the power of a great idealism—in religious language, it would, I suppose, be called by a shorter name—to mould and change even what seems to us to be past. This is the side of human life on which is based the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. It is a kind of intense and immeasurable capacity for new growth somehow intermingled in the plastic foundations of the universe. And what we call pessimism, in one degree or another, is merely a blindness to this permanent and continually miraculous fact.

Let us turn our thoughts from this modern experience to the same influence in the history of the ancient world, at what was perhaps the greatest turning-point which the course of human affairs has yet passed.

In the hundred years before this crisis, that is in the last century of the Republic at Rome, the suffering of the world from what Horace called⁵ the delirium of its rulers, had reached an unbearable pitch. Between 133 and 31 b.c. Italy had seen twelve separate civil wars,⁶ a long series of political murders, beginning with the Gracchi and ending with Caesar and Cicero; five deliberate massacres, from the drum-head court-martial⁷ which sentenced 3000 supposed followers of Gaius Gracchus, down to the second proscription dictated by Mark Antony⁸ and Octavian. Men still spoke with a shudder⁹ of the butchery of 7000 Samnite prisoners by Sulla, in the hearing of the assembled Senate; and as a boy Horace must have met many men who had seen the end of the struggle with Spartacus and his army of escaped gladiators—a scene which has seized the imagination of a modern artist, 6000 prisoners, nailed on crosses, dying and dead, one at every fifty yards¹⁰ of the busiest road in Italy, from Rome to Capua. And the record of the oppression of the provinces year by year under every fresh set of governors is hardly less terrible.

As we all know, the chief causes of this chaos may be reduced to two, both of them factors in history which have been remarkably renewed in the modern world. The first was the growth of the power of capital and its concentration in the hands of the governing class at a particular centre of power; and the second was the decay, or perhaps the inadequate development, of civil control over the military forces and the military spirit of a great empire; so that the armies of Rome and their commanders, instead of being the servants, were continually the masters of the community. In the world as it then was these conditions gave a standing invitation to any particular commander to make himself a despot; and Octavian himself was only the last of a series of political adventurers. When we read the story of the Proscription in 43 b.c., of which he was one of the authors, and by which in time of peace 2000 citizens (among them the venerable Cicero) were driven or dragged from their houses to be butchered, it is not surprising that two years afterwards, on the fresh outbreak of civil war, Horace should have begun his first public utterance (Epode vii.) with a cry of despair:

Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?

It was renewed in even more sombre tones two years later (Epode xvi.¹¹):

In endless civil war imperial Rome
Plunges by her own strength to find her doom.
Not neighbouring nations, fiercely leagued in arms,
Not Porsena, with insolent alarms,
Not conquering Hannibal whose name of dread,
On kindly mothers' lips deep curses fed,—
Not one had compassed yet Rome's overthrow;
But by her children's hands she lieth low.

The last victor in the struggle was Octavian, and with the story of his rise to power before us, it is difficult to feel, and men of his own time at first were very far from feeling, that his victory was in itself an occasion for any thanksgiving. If ever there were events that badly needed to be altered it was surely those amid which Horace began to write.

How then did Horace deal with the prospect before him, and by what power was the unscrupulous Octavian converted into the divine Augustus, whose reign marks what, down to our own Victorian age, was perhaps the most beneficent epoch in history?

Three features in Horace's treatment of public affairs are worthy of note. They are three great refusals. In all of them Horace shows his loyalty to Roman ideals, and his resolve to have no compromise with any superficial view of events. The first of these is that, like Mr. Kipling, he will not forget. We have seen his outspoken condemnation of the Civil Wars; but the same thought appears many times in his first volume containing the first three Books of the Odes, published in 23 b.c.,¹² eight years after those wars had all ceased. Take for example the first Ode of Book ii.:

Methinks I hear of leaders proud
          With no unworthy conflict stained,
And all the world by conquest bowed,
          And only Cato's soul unchained.
Yes, Juno and the power on high
          That left their Carthage to its doom
Have led the victors' progeny
          As victims to Jugurtha's tomb.
What field by Latin blood-drops fed,
          Proclaims not the unnatural deeds
It buries, and the earthquake dread
          Whose distant thunder shook the Medes?
What gulf, what river has not seen
          Those sights of sorrow? Nay, what sea,
Has Daunian carnage yet left green?
          What coast from Roman blood is free?(13)

Nor did Horace forget what was perhaps the most miserable element in the struggles of the preceding century—the greed of the governing class; men had coveted political power because it brought enormous wealth, and had used their wealth for little but their own pleasure. Set beside the last passage a quieter utterance,¹⁴ not less deeply felt, describing the tyranny of the rich. It has a strangely modern ring, and might have been written by some socialist poet who had watched a body of Highland crofters being expelled from their holdings that the land might be made into a deer-forest:

You find hands to square and hew
          Vast marble blocks, hard on your day of doom,
Ever building mansions new,
          Nor thinking of the mansion of the tomb.
Now you press on ocean's bound,
          Where waves on Baiae beat, as earth were scant,
Now absorb your neighbour's ground,
          And tear his landmarks up, your own to plant.
Hedges set round humble farms
          Your avarice tramples; see, the outcasts fly,
Wife and husband, in their arms
Their father's gods, their squalid family.
Yet no hall that wealth e’er planned
Waits you more surely than the wider room
Traced by Death's yet greedier hand.
Why strain so far? You cannot leap the tomb.

I must be content to state without illustration the second refusal which Horace made; its importance is easily seen. He refused to forget his nation in his patron, refused to think of his patron save as the servant of the nation. The exalted and impersonal character of the praise which Horace gives to Augustus ought to be familiar to his readers, though his commentators have not always understood it. It is always as one who has accomplished, or is accomplishing great service to mankind that the Emperor is praised. And when it is said that Horace and Vergil praised too highly and too soon what Augustus accomplished, let me suggest to you that it would be truer to say that they both dictated and inspired it. We owe it to them that for all time the notion of supreme power, the power of an actual monarch, not of a dreamland body of philosophers, was identified with transcendent but practical goodness, with beneficent toil, of which the whole world was the province. A simple means of realising the significance of this attitude is to contrast¹⁵ it with that of Pindar towards his patrons. For example, in the second Olympian he praises the tyrant Theron for his success, his wealth, his hospitality and his love of poetry; but there is not a word about Theron's subjects.

In the third place, Horace refused to be content with appearances, refused to accept the picture of external splendour which impressed the world around him. He pierces beneath the show to what is real. In a word, he is the enemy of vulgarity; for that is what vulgarity means, to take the shows of things for their essence. And in this lies the secret of the peculiar refining power of his poetry. If I were asked what can make a gentleman out of a raw youth from the plough, the mine, or the counter, I would answer—not with Montaigne, “He must know his Rabelais”; not with Kingsley, “He must know his Bewick”; but—“he must know his Horace” and learn from Horace, more easily perhaps than from Milton, to despise the “glistering foil” and the “broad rumour.” Persicos odi, puer, apparatus; a poet must dislike and distrust the vulgarities of wealth. Notice the intentional contrast in the word puer.

Now there is a striking example of this attitude in a poem whose meaning has been rather strangely unnoticed. It is a common experience, I think, that there is no occasion which unlooses so many springs of vulgarity as the opening of new buildings. Recall for a moment the kind of things that we hear (if we do not say): “What a fine building, to be sure! how good to think that we can afford it! how generous to have found the money! how clever to have been born now and not in the time of our unenlightened grandfathers! what a cultured community we may claim to be!” Or perhaps, if the buildings have some religious object, our comments take an even more solemn tinge. “How good to erect such a structure for such an object! how worthy the building of its purpose! what a splendid conception it should afford of the object of our worship!” And the underlying thought that is not often put into words, but is nevertheless transparent, is something like this: “When you come to think of it, really, how grateful and pleased the Higher Authorities must (in reason) be that we should have taken so much trouble for their sake!” In Arnold Bennett's witty play this is the kind of thing that Sir Charles Worgan knows that “the Public wants,” and he keeps gallons of it in store. But it is not the Worgans only; when the fastidious Tennyson writes and prints in a serious composition two such lines of fustian as

Make it regally gorgeous,
Some Imperial Institute,

he warns us of the temptation to which even poets are exposed.

Now the greatest of all the buildings of Augustus,—that which commemorated one, indeed two, of his greatest victories, which crowned the most conspicuous hill in Rome, was the Temple of Phoebus Apollo with its Library on the Palatine. It had taken eight years to build, and was completed and dedicated in 28 b.c. Let us see what the poet Propertius has to say about it.¹⁶

You ask why I come to you so late? The golden porch of Phoebus has been opened by great Caesar. It was all laid out with Carthaginian columns of marble to such ample length that in the spaces between them was room for the crowd of the daughters of old Danaus. Here I saw a figure that surely seemed more beautiful than Phoebus himself, as he opened his lips in song, a singer of marble with a silent lyre. And around the altar stood Myron's drove, four bulls, masterpieces of life-like statuary. Then in the midst rose a temple of brilliant marble, and dearer to Phoebus than his ancestral home Ortygia. Upon which was the Sun's chariot above the gable peak; likewise the doors, a famous piece of handicraft in Libyan ivory tusk, did mourn, one for the Gauls cast down from Parnassus' Peak, the other for Tantalus' daughter Niobe, and all her deaths. Anon there was the god of Pytho himself between his mother and his sister, in a long robe, playing music.¹⁷

Now contrast with this the treatment which the same incident receives both from Vergil and from Horace. Vergil's comment in Aen. viii. is so characteristically subtle and modest that its meaning has escaped the commentators. When Aeneas first sets foot on the site of the Capitol, Vergil describes it as “now golden but then covered thick with wild woodland,” and the first word with which Aeneas is received by his host on the Palatine is a bidding to think scorn of wealth: Aude, hospes, contemnere opes.

Let us see what Horace says of the dedication of this temple to Phoebus; consider Ode xxxi. of his First Book:

What blessing shall the bard entreat
          Of new-shrined Phoebus as we pour
The wine-cup? Not the mounds of wheat
          On some Sardinian threshing floor;
Not Indian gold(18) or ivory—no,
          Nor flocks that o’er Calabria stray,
Nor fields that Liris, still and slow,
          Is eating, unperceived, away. …
Oh grant me, Phoebus, calm content,
          Strength unimpaired, a mind entire,
Old age without dishonour spent
          Not unbefriended by the lyre!

In other words: “Grant me the modest competence I now have, but not increased; health of body and a mind unclouded; an old age free from avarice or regret, and always cheered by poetry.”

“Turn your thoughts away,” said Horace in effect, “from such material display as you see before you; pray only and strive only for the real blessings which will not decay.”

Consider a second and last example of Horace's refusal to be dazzled by the prospect of external splendour; a refusal made now on behalf of his country in a problem of national, and more than national, gravity. It is contained in one of his greatest Odes (iii. 3), whose meaning as a whole has been till recent years quite unknown. It is the famous poem which begins by praising constancy and firmness of purpose, and then turns, rather curiously, to describe a celestial debate, in which a feminine speaker intervenes with success; indeed her speech is the only one reported. Now the purpose of what she says is to denounce the wickedness of Troy, a city which had been extinct for some eleven centuries before Horace wrote; and the speech ends with a prophecy of victory and universal empire for Rome, on one condition—that Troy be not re-built.

This curious prohibition had always been counted a puzzle and was interpreted in more than one allegorical way. It was not till 1889 that its political reference was explained. Mommsen then¹⁹ pointed out that the Ode must be read as a definite comment upon a definite proposal, attributed to Julius Caesar, as Suetonius tells us (Jul. 79), and entertained for a time by Augustus himself, to change the seat of the Empire. Supporting Mommsen, Wilamowitz pointed to a passage in Livy (v. ad fin.), the speech put into the mouth of Camillus in 390 b.c. when Rome was recovering from the invasion of the Gauls. The aged soldier speaks for some five eloquent pages against the project of transferring the government and people of Rome to what had been the site of the Etruscan town of Veii. And there is an even more conspicuous passage, which has been hitherto unnoticed, in another poem written at just the same time, or perhaps even earlier, containing another speech of Juno and making precisely the same condition for the future greatness of Rome. In her last speech in the Aeneid, Juno finally promises to abandon her hostility to Aeneas and to acquiesce in the foundation of the Roman race; but she makes three conditions, all of which Jupiter solemnly and precisely accepts. The Latin people is not to change its fashions of dress, nor its language, nor its name. They are to remain Latins, not to become Trojans.

In dust lies Troy, there leave it and its name.

That²⁰ is the climax of the epic story.

Now what does this protest mean to which such impressive utterance is given by the three greatest spirits of their age? It means that the capital of the Empire must not be transferred to the Troad, a project almost literally carried out by Constantine some 350 years later. It means a protest against substituting an oriental despotism for the limited principate which Augustus was learning to build up on the basis of republican traditions.

When you’ve heard the East a-calling, you won’t never
heed naught else,

sings Mr. Kipling; and in Rome, as Horace knew, many great men had heard it,—Lucius Scipio, Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, to name no lesser men, had all in turn succumbed to its allurement. In all these Roman nobles the oriental traditions of unbridled monarchy had drowned the sober instinct of the Roman statesman and soldier. For Caesar and Antony the sinister beauty of Cleopatra had made a part of the fatal mirage. In Vergil, in Horace, in Livy, we hear the old Roman spirit uttering a profound refusal; a refusal which saved Western Europe, which gave it time to learn to be Christian, while Rome still stood warden of the gates of the North.²¹ Who shall say what the fate of humanity would have been if the Teutonic barbarians had succeeded in overrunning Italy as well as Pannonia, not in the fifth century a.d., but in the years 14-11 b.c., more than half a century before St. Paul set foot in it? That they did not do so we owe to the sturdy resistance of the forces of the Empire; and that these forces were there to resist them we owe in no small measure to Vergil and Horace and Livy, who strengthened Augustus to resist the greatest temptation of his life.

In 17 b.c., six years after this ode was published, Horace was called upon to write a hymn for the Saecular games, to be sung on the Palatine and the Capitol,²² the two most ancient sacred spots of Rome. We may be sure that it was with no small thankfulness that both the poet and the Emperor looked back then on their decision. Those time-honoured seats of power and worship were still at the centre of the Empire. In the last stanza of the Carmen the poet turns to Apollo, whose great temple had now been dedicated for more than ten years.

Lov’st thou thine own Palatial hill?
          Then keep the glorious life of Rome
To other cycles, brightening still
                                        Thro’ time to come.

That prayer has been fulfilled and yet will be. The “glorious life of Rome” has continued through nearly twenty centuries, and despite the rudest challenge will continue, in all those who have learnt her great ideals. And among the pupils of the Augustans few have done the world greater service than the rulers of men whom our own country has produced.

A long line of statesmen and governors through more than a thousand years—King Alfred, Thomas à Becket, Thomas More, Philip Sidney, Clive, Pitt, Durham, Dufferin, Cromer, to mention no other names—have all learnt to understand the poetry of Horace in the years when a boy's training makes the deepest imprint in what Roger Ascham called “the faire, cleane wax of his mind.” In no other country of Europe has the study of Latin struck deeper, if even so deep, into the fibres of national life; and in spite of the abuses which grow round every ancient custom, it has borne great fruit. The standards of public conduct in this country—and, we may add, in America²³—have been formed on Roman models. This whole chapter of practical ethics has been drawn not so much from the New Testament as from Cicero and Horace, Vergil and Livy. In the Gospels every Christian community finds the deepest springs of ethical life; but where in the New Testament is there any counsel how to govern a conquered dependency, how to administer a public office?

Let us test this briefly and simply. What do we think to be the typical British virtues in public life? This question admits of many answers; but among them every one would wish to count at least four: justice in administration; moderation in victory; a saving sense of humour; and, chief of all, steadfastness,—sticking grimly to the guns.

Now these virtues are the favourite themes of Horace; you cannot read a page of his writings in which some one of them is not enforced. Beneath the portrait²⁴ of Warren Hastings in the Council Chamber at Calcutta is written the motto from Horace, Aequa mens rebus in arduis. And you may read in Lord Roberts' story of Forty-one Years in India how at the height of the India Mutiny, in the midst of one of the fateful struggles on Delhi Ridge, young Quentin Battye, as he fell mortally wounded, whispered to an old school friend beside him, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Let me end with a few familiar lines from Book iii. of the Odes, in praise of steadfast endurance; lines which can be true of nations as well as of men.

To suffer hardness with good cheer,
          In sternest school of warfare bred,
Our youth should learn; let steed and spear
          Make him one day our foeman's dread.
True Virtue never knows defeat;
          Her robes she keeps unsullied still,
Nor takes, nor quits her royal seat
          To please a people's veering will.(25)
The man of firm and righteous will,
          No rabble, clamorous for the wrong,
No tyrant, tho’ his frown may kill,
          Can shake the strength that makes him strong.
Not winds that chafe the sea they sway,
          Not Jove's right hand, with lightning red;
Should Nature's pillared frame give way,
          The wrack will strike one fearless head.(26)

Notes

1. Given as a public lecture first at Cardiff (to the Frogs Society) in November, 1903, and frequently elsewhere since then; first printed by the Leeds Branch of the Classical Association in January, 1917 (in a volume called Uvae Falernae), and subsequently, with some changes, in the Transactions of the Plymouth Institution under the title “The Power of Poetry in History.”

2. Aristotle, Poet. xi.; and see Butcher's noble essay (c. iii. in his edition of The Poetics) on Poetic Truth.

3. I owe this reference to the kind help of my friend Prof. C. E. Vaughan.

4. The earlier editions have “deck” instead of “spot.” Whitman no doubt made the change in the hope that the rather bold ellipse of “where” might be more easily understood.

5. Epistles, i. 2, 14. Any reader who has seen this paragraph in an earlier essay (The Messianic Eclogue of Vergil) will, I hope, pardon its use here for precisely the same purpose.

6. Bellum Sociale; Bellum Octavianum; the return of Sulla; the wars of Lepidus, Sertorius, Spartacus, Catiline, Julius Caesar, the Triumvirs; in 41 b.c. the Bellum Perusinum; and after that the naval war with Sextus Pompeius and the final conflict with Antony.

7. Orosius, v. 12.

8. The three others were those of Marius and Sulla, and the execution of the followers of Spartacus.

9. Caesar, ap. Cic. ad Att. ix. 7c, 1.

10. Some 150 miles; Appian, Bell. Civil. i. 120

11. The lines that follow are slightly modified from the version by Francis, London, 1809.

    In the other quotations from Horace the rendering in the main is Conington's, treated with a similar liberty, which I hope may be pardoned

12. This date appears to me to have been established more firmly than ever by the discussions of recent years, though the advocates of later dates have thrown welcome light on the meaning of many Odes, notably iii. 29. No doubt many of the Odes were written on particular occasions earlier than their appearance in collected form.

13. Qui gurges aut quae flumina lugubris
    Ignara belli? quod mare Dauniae
              Non decoloravere caedes?
                        Quae caret ora cruore nostro?

    The third line is probably the original of Shakespeare's image of Macbeth's terror (ii. 2, 60):

                                                                This hand will rather
    The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
    Making the green one red.

14. Odes, ii. 18.

15. This was suggested to me by one of the ablest pupils it has ever been my privilege to teach, the late Miss Constance Watson (B.A. Manc. 1907).

16. ii. 31; I quote Prof. Phillimore's translation, modifying only his rendering of femina turba and omitting his second “between.” The opening of the porticus (ll. 1-6) probably took place four years later, as Prof. Richmond points out (J. Rom. St. iv. (1914) p. 200); but ll. 9-16 speak of the temple itself.

17. Quaeris cur ueniam tibi tardior? Aurea Phoebi
              Porticus a magno Caesare aperta fuit.
    Tota erat in speciem Poenis digesta columnis
              Inter quas Danai femina turba senis.
    Hic equidem Phoebo uisus mihi pulchrior ipso
              Marmoreus tacita carmen hiare lyra.
    Atque aram circum steterant armenta Myronis
              Quattuor artifices, uiuida signa, boues.
    Tum medium claro surgebat marmore templum
              Et patria Phoebo carius Ortygia.
    In quo Solis erat supra fastigia currus,
              Et ualuae Libyci nobile dentis opus:
    Altera deiectos Parnasi uertice Gallos,
              Altera maerebat funera Tantalidos.
    Deinde inter matrem deus ipse interque sororem
              Pythius in longa carmina ueste sonat.

    In these 16 lines there are at least four otiose epithets (magno, tota, artifices, claro), two prosaic relatives, four meaningless particles, including atque at the beginning of a line, and a vain (though idiomatic) repetition of the disyllabic preposition inter. Marble is mentioned three times, really four times, since the vestis of the last line was also of marble. The last statement that Apollo “makes sound in song,” contains a feeble and colourless use of sonare with a personal subject which represents unmistakably the writer's profound weariness. Scholars have long disagreed about the order of the couplets, and with reason. Nowhere in the piece are there any four lines which can be put at the end without seeming wholly trivial. The only trace of poetry is one fine couplet (ll. 13-14) in which the splendour of the carver's art has lifted the poet for a moment into a region of sincere feeling. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to Professor Richmond's kindness and his profound knowledge of the text of Propertius, by which this note has been purged of several misconceptions. But even Prof. Richmond only defends the passage as a fragment of a poem whose better part, so he conjectures, has perished through one of the calamities which the text of the poet has certainly suffered: on this see his convincing article in Cl. Quart. xii. (1918) p. 59.

18. Horace hated ivory and gilded ornament (cf. Odes, ii. 18).

19. See Reden u. Aufsätze (Berlin, 1905), p. 168: “The poet only expresses what our imperfect historical record omits, but what is none the less infinitely more important than almost everything which it does record.”

20. Occidit occideritque sinas cum nomine Troia. Aen. xii. 828. [The last part of Jupiter's speech in Aen. i. (279 ff.) foreshadows this passage and like it has many affinities with Horace. Compare also Aen. vi. 62 with 1. 61 of the Ode, on the proverbial ill-luck of Troy. W. B. A.]

21. Since this lecture was first printed, Dr. Walter Leaf has published an article in the Journal of Philology (xxxiv. 1918, p. 283) in which he makes a strong case for referring to this danger the allegorical ode which has so long baffled interpretation (i. 14, O nauis, referent in mare te noui Fluctus). Incidentally he fixes the date when the gravest anxiety in the matter must have been felt at Rome as the winter of 31-30 b.c., when Octavian visited Brundisium and dealt with a mutiny, but then returned at once to the East without coming a step nearer to Rome (Dio. Cass. 51. 4 and 5, a reference kindly supplied me by Dr. Warde Fowler in discussing Dr. Leaf's discovery).

22. See Warde Fowler, Class. Quart. iv. (1910) p. 145.

23. Remarkable testimony to the value of classical study was borne in letters addressed to a Conference on June 2, 1917, at the University of Princeton, U.S.A., by President Woodrow Wilson, Ex-Presidents Taft and Roosevelt, Mr. Elihu Root and Mr. Secretary Lansing. The last, for instance, writes: “These studies are worth all the time and labour that can be given to them, because from them spring taste and refinement, the power and desire to enjoy the better things.” The Report of the Conference has been published as a pamphlet, see Cl. Rev. xxxi. p. 150 (1917).

24. This and the following illustration I owe to my friend Prof. D. Slater, now of Liverpool, who quoted them when the lecture was delivered at Cardiff.

25. Odes, iii. 2, 1-4, 17-20.

26. Ibid. 3. 1-8:

    Iustum et tenacem propositi uirum
    non ciuium ardor praua iubentium
              non uoltus instantis tyranni
                        mente quatit solida, neque Auster,
    dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae,
    nec fulminantis magna manus Iouis;
              si fractus inlabatur orbis
                        impauidum ferient ruinae.