which was in continual travail with great and uncertain movement. Never
has Fortune taken greater delight in her bitter and insolent game, never
displayed a greater pertinacity in the derision of men. In the period
from Horace's birth at Venusia in southeastern Italy, on December 8,
B.C. 65, to November 27, B.C. 8, when

"M_ourned of men and Muses nine_,
T_hey laid him on the Esquiline_,"

there occurred the series of great events, to men in their midst
incomprehensible, bewildering, and disheartening, which after times
could readily interpret as the inevitable change from the ancient and
decaying Republic to the better knit if less free life of the Empire.

We are at an immense distance, and the differences have long since been
composed. The menacing murmur of trumpets is no longer audible, and the
seas are no longer red with blood. The picture is old, and faded, and
darkened, and leaves us cold, until we illuminate it with the light of
imagination. Then first we see, or rather feel, the magnitude of the
time: its hatreds and its selfishness; its differences of opinion,
sometimes honest and sometimes disingenuous, but always maintained with
the heat of passion; its divisions of friends and families; its
lawlessness and violence; its terrifying uncertainties and adventurous
plunges; its tragedies of confiscation, murder, fire, proscription,
feud, insurrection, riot, war; the dramatic exits of the leading actors
in the great play,--of Catiline at Pistoria, of Crassus in the eastern
deserts, of Clodius at Bovillae within sight of the gates of Rome, of
Pompey in Egypt, of Cato in Africa, of Caesar, Servius Sulpicius,
Marcellus, Trebonius and Dolabella, Hirtius and Pansa, Decimus Brutus,
the Ciceros, Marcus Brutus and Cassius, Sextus the son of Pompey, Antony