broad purple hem, his smooth-faced
clients at his elbows, his silent slaves before him and behind, meets
the low-chattering knot of Hebrew money-lenders, making the price of
short loans for the day, and discussing the assets of a famous
spendthrift, as their yellow-turbaned, bearded fathers had talked over
the chances of Julius Caesar when he was as yet but a fashionable young
lawyer of doubtful fortune, with an unlimited gift of persuasion and an
equally unbounded talent for amusement.

Between the contrasts lived men of such position as Horace occupied, but
not many. For the great middle element of society is a growth of later
centuries, and even Horace himself, as time went on, became attached to
Maecenas and then, more or less, to the person of the Emperor, by a
process of natural attraction, just as his butt, Tigellius, gravitated
to the common herd that mourned his death. The 'golden mean' of which
Horace wrote was a mere expression, taught him, perhaps, by his father,
a part of his stock of maxims. Where there were only great people on the
one side, and a rabble on the other, the man of genius necessarily rose
to the level of the high, by his own instinct and their liking. What was
best of Greek was for them, what was worst was for the populace.

But the Greek was everywhere, with his keen weak face, his sly look and
his skilful fingers. Scipio and Paulus Emilius had brought him, and he
stayed in Rome till the Goth came, and afterwards. Greek poetry, Greek
philosophy, Greek sculpture, Greek painting, Greek music everywhere--to
succeed at all in such society, Virgil and Horace and Ovid must needs
make Greek of Latin, and bend the stiff syllables to Alcaics and
Sapphics and Hexameters. The task looked easy enough, though it was
within the powers of so very few. Thousands tried it, no doubt, when the
three or four had set the fashion, and failed, as the second-rate fail,
with some little brief success in their own day, turned into the total
failure of complete disappearance when they had been dead awhile.

Supreme of them all, for his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil,
appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the
carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not
appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened into
night, and Ovid's tales of them and their goddesses move us by their own
beauty rather than by our sympathy for them, though we feel the te