closely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at
a later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of
the most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of
contrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of
their life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city
life of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6),
after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and the
fast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not from
such as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the
seas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and
direful Hannibal," concluding in words which contrast by their
suggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparison
with the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:--

"But they, of rustic warriors wight
The manly offspring, learned to smite
The soil with Sabine spade,
And faggots they had cut, to bear
Home from the forest, whensoe'er
An austere mother bade;

"What time the sun began to change
The shadows through the mountain range,
And took the yoke away
From the o'erwearied oxen, and
His parting car proclaimed at hand
The kindliest hour of day."

Another of Horace's juvenile poems, unique in subject and in treatment
(Epode 5), gives evidence of a picturesque power of the highest kind,