assert, amid the general chaos of morals public and private, the
higher principles of the philosophic schools from which he had so
recently come, irritated by the thousand mortifications to which a man
of cultivated tastes and keenly alive to beauty is exposed in a
luxurious city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yet
scarcely valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to the
besetting temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to write
it in a merciless spirit. As he says of himself (Odes, I. 15),

"In youth's pleasant spring-time,
The shafts of my passion at random I flung,
And, dashing headlong into petulant rhyme,
I recked neither where nor how fiercely I stung."

Youth is always intolerant, and it is so easy to be severe; so
seductive to say brilliant things, whether they be true or not. But
there came a day, and it came soon, when Horace, saw that triumphs
gained in this way were of little value, and when he was anxious that
his friends should join with him in consigning his smart and scurril
lines (_celeres et criminosos Iambos_) to oblivion. The _amende_ for
some early lampoon which he makes in the Ode just quoted, though
ostensibly addressed to a lady who had been its victim, was probably
intended to cover a wider field.

Personal satire is always popular, but the fame it begets is bought
dearly at the cost of lifelong enmities and many after-regrets. That
Horace in his early writings was personal and abusive is very clear,
both from his own language and from a few of the poems of this class
and period which survive. Some of these have no value, except as
showing how badly even Horace could write, and how sedulously the