When wine is a curse, it is not so because of itself, but because of
excess in its use. The cup was made for purposes of pleasure, but to
quarrel over it,--leave that to barbarians! Take warning by the
Thracians, and the Centaurs and Lapiths, never to overstep the bounds of
moderation. Pleasure with after-taste of bitterness is not real
pleasure. Pleasure purchased with pain is an evil.

Upon women he looks with the same philosophic calm as upon wine. Love,
too, was to be regarded as one of the contributions to life's pleasure.
To dally with golden-haired Pyrrha, with Lyce, or with Glycera, the
beauty more brilliant than Parian marble, was not in his eyes to be
blamed in itself. What he felt no hesitation in committing to his poems
for friends and the Emperor to read, they on their part felt as little
hesitation in confessing to him. The fault of love lay not in itself,
but in abuse. This is not said of adultery, which was always an offense
because it disturbed the institution of marriage and rotted the
foundation of society.

There is thus no inconsistency in the Horace of the love poems and the
Horace of the _Secular Hymn_ who petitions Our Lady Juno to prosper the
decrees of the Senate encouraging the marriage relation and the rearing
of families. Of the illicit love that looked to Roman women in the home,
he emphatically declares his innocence, and against it directs the last
and most powerful of the six _Inaugural Odes_; for this touched the
family, and, through the family, the State. This, with neglect of
religion, he classes together as the two great causes of national decay.

Horace is not an Ovid, with no sense of the limits of either indulgence
or expression. He is not a Catullus, tormented by the furies of youthful