enough for
proscription by the triumvirate. His property, however, had been
confiscated, and he found employment in the lower grade of the civil
service to gain a livelihood.

It was at this period that poverty, he says, drove him to make verses.
His earliest were chiefly satires and personal lampoons; but it was
probably from some of his first lyrical pieces, in which he showed a
new mastery of the Roman language, that he became known to Varius and
Virgil, who in or about 38 B.C. introduced him to Maecenas, the
confidential minister of Octavianus and a munificent patron of art and
letters. The friendship thus formed was uninterrupted till the death
of Maecenas, to whose liberality Horace owed release from business and
the gift of the celebrated farm among the Sabine Hills.

From this time forward his life was without marked incident. His
springs and summers were generally spent at Rome, where he enjoyed the
intimacy of nearly all the most prominent men of the time; his autumns
at the Sabine farm, or a small villa which he possessed at Tibur; he
sometimes passed the winter in the milder seaside air of Baiae. Maecenas
introduced him to Augustus, who, according to Suetonius, offered him a
place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as
the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradually acquired the
position of poet-laureate; and his ode written to command for the
celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C., with the official odes
which followed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the
glories of the Augustan age, mark the highest level which this kind of
poetry has reached.

On November 27, 8 B.C., he died in his fifty-seventh year. Virgil had
died eleven years before. Tibullus and Propertius soon after Virgil.
Ovid, still a young man, was the only considerable poet whom he left
behind; and with his death the Augustan age of Latin poetry ends.

The following is the list of Horace's works arranged according to the
dates which have been most plausibly fixed by scholars. Some of the
questions of Horatian chronology, however, are still at issue, and to
most of the dates now to be given the word "about" should be prefixed.

The first book of Satires ten in number, his earliest publication,
appeared 35 B.C. A second volume of eight satires, showing more
maturity and finish than the first, was published 30 B.C.; and about
the same time the small collection of lyrics in iambic and com