Horace's Complete Works (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Horace's Complete Works We know from various references in his Satires and Epistles that his birthplace was Venusia, an old Roman colony among the Apennine Hills, which, standing as it did on the Appian Way, the Great High Road from Rome to Brundisium and so to Greece and the East, was regarded as a very important stronghold, and down to Horace's time it was a busy and prosperous place. Through a gorge a few miles off, the river Aufidus comes plunging down from the hills into a broad plain, across which it slowly winds to the Adriatic Sea, some fifteen miles distant. Horace frequently alludes to the noisy rush of this river. Towering high a few miles from the town is Mount Voltur, 4500 feet high, conical in shape, and with an extinct crater, indicating its volcanic origin. The hills behind the town are and were wild and bare, save here and there where forests cover them, and boars and other wild animals are still abundant. His father, as we shall read further on, was a freedman, i.e. he had been a slave, and therefore a foreigner, possibly a Greek. Slaves were not infrequently manumitted by their masters for good service, and what Horace tells of his father makes such a reason for his liberation probable enough. He must have been a man of some little education, as he was a tax-collector by profession, he had at least enough of education to make him wish for more, at any rate for his son. He must have been a thrifty man, for he managed to acquire a small farm, and to make such savings as enabled him to do for his son what we shall hear presently. Horace nowhere alludes specially to his mother, she probably died while he was an infant. We read of his residing with a nurse, Pullia (if the reading is correct), in a country place near Mount Voltur (Ode III. iv. 10), and of his wandering off and falling asleep in the woods, where, to the wonder of the country folks, he was found covered over with laurel leaves, which the doves had dropped upon him. If his father could not help young Horace in technical learning, he early sought to train him by example and precept to ways of prudence and virtue. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.