As in most dualities not consciously assumed, both Horaces were genuine.
When Davus the slave reproaches his master for longing, while at Rome,
to be back in the country, and for praising the attractions of the city,
while in the country, it is not mere discontent or inconsistency in
Horace which he is attacking. Horace loved both city and country.

And yet, whatever the appeal of the city and its artificialities,
Horace's real nature called for the country and its simple ways. It is
the Horace of Venusia and the Sabines who is the more genuine of the
two. The more formal poems addressed to Augustus and his house-hold
sometimes sound the note of affectation, but the most exacting critic
will hesitate to bring a like charge against the odes which celebrate
the fields and hamlets of Italy and the prowess of her citizen-soldiers
of time gone by, or against the mellow epistles and lyrics in which the
poet philosophizes upon the spectacle of human life.


_i_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN
LANDSCAPE

The real Horace is to be found first of all as the interpreter of the
beauty and fruitfulness of Italy. It is no land of mere literary
imagination which he makes us see with such clear-cut distinctness. It
is not an Italy in Theocritean colors, like the Italy of Virgil's
_Bucolics_, but the Italy of Horace's own time, the Italy of his own
birth and experience, and the Italy of today. Horace is not a
descriptive poet. The reader will look in vain for nature-poems in the
modern sense. With a word or a phrase only, he flashes upon our vision
the beautiful, the significant, the permanent in the scenery of Italy.
The features which he loved best, or which for other reasons caught his