s aims, irreproachable in an
age of almost universal profligacy, the one pure member of a grossly
licentious family, modest and unobtrusive although steeped in all the
learning of old Greece, strong of will yet tolerant and gentle, his
austerity so tempered by humanism that he won not only respect but love;
he had been adored by the gay young patricians, who paid homage to the
virtue which they did not rouse themselves to imitate, honoured as an
equal by men far older than himself, by Cicero, by Atticus, by Caesar.
As we stand before the bust in the Palace of the Conservators which
preserves his mobile features, in that face at once sweet and sad, at
once young and old, as are the faces not unfrequently of men whose
temperaments were never young--already, at thirty-one years old, stamped
with the lineaments of a grand but fatal destiny--we seem to penetrate
the character of the man whom Dante placed in hell, whom Shakespeare,
with sounder and more catholic insight, proclaimed to be the noblest
Roman of them all:

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, _This was a man._

Quitting Athens after a time to take command of the army which had been
raised against Antony, Brutus carried Horace in his company with the
rank of military tribune. He followed his patron into Asia; one of his
early poems humorously describes a scene which he witnessed in the law
courts at Clazomenae. (Sat. I, vii, 5.) He was several times in action;
served finally at Philippi, sharing the headlong rout which followed
on Brutus' death; returned to Rome "humbled and with clipped wings."
(Od. II, vii, 10; Ep. II, ii, 50.) His father was dead, his property
confiscated in the proscription following on the defeat, he had to begin
the world again at twenty-four years old. He obtained some sort of
clerkship in a public office, and to eke out its slender emoluments he
began to write. What were his earliest efforts we cannot certainly say,
or whether any of them survive among the poems recognized as his. He
tells us that his first literary model was Archilochus (Ep. I, xix, 24),
a Greek poet of 700 B.C., believed to have been the inventor of personal
satire, whose stinging pen is said to have sometimes driven its victims
to suicide. For a time also he imitated a much more recent satirist,
Lucilius, whom he rejected later, as disliking both the harshness of his
style and the scurrilo