is set before him must endure from boyhood the hardships of heat and
cold, and abstain from women and wine. The gift of God must be made
perfect by the use of the file, by long waiting, and by conscious
intellectual discipline.



3. HORACE THE INTERPRETER
OF HIS TIMES

HORACE THE DUALITY

Varied as were Horace's experiences, they were mainly of two kinds, and
there are two Horaces who reflect them. There is a more natural Horace,
simple and direct, of ordinary Italian manners and ideals, and a less
natural Horace, finished in the culture of Greece and the
artificialities of life in the capital. They might be called the
unconventional and the conventional Horace.

This duality is only the reflection of the two-fold experience of Horace
as the provincial village boy and as the successful literary man of the
city. The impressions received from Venusia and its simple population of
hard-working, plain-speaking folk, from the roaring Aufidus and the
landscape of Apulia, from the freedman father's common-sense instruction
as he walked about in affectionate companionship with his son, never
faded from Horace's mind. The ways of the city were superimposed upon
the ways of the country, but never displaced nor even covered them. They
were a garment put on and off, sometimes partly hiding, but never for
long, the original cloak of simplicity. It is not necessary to think its
wearer insincere when, constrained by social circumstance, he put it on.