From an essay on “The Roman’s Villeggiatura.”

IF Virgil remained always a man of the country, in spite of living mostly in cities, no amount of country life could make Horace other than a man-about-town. When he speaks of the country, it is not as Virgil or as Tibullus spoke of it; he knows nothing of Nature’s mysteries, nothing of the eternal sentiment of the field-building, nothing of the religion of the plow. He is not one of the initiated, but he enjoys, and within his limitations he appreciates. The country is good for his health and for his appetite. It gives him a rest from the hundred thousand requests and questions with which he is importuned as he walks the streets of Rome. The friend of Mæcenas is supposed to be able to arrange any little affair; to know all the news before it is divulged; in vain he pleads inability or ignorance. It is all very flattering, and Horace is the last person not to be flattered by it, but too much of it becomes tedious. The whole day goes by frittered away in trifles, and on such days he ardently desires his rural retreat where sleep and leisure, and the Greek poets fill up the tranquil hours, and the evening brings a supper fit for the gods; beans and bacon washed down by wholesome wine which costs nothing since it is made on the estate. A friend or two, staying in the house, enliven the board, but the discourse does not run on other people’s houses, or on somebody’s dancing; serious themes are discussed, such as the nature of good, and what constitutes true happiness; till for a break, an old neighbor tells the story of “The Town and the Country Mouse,” or some other ever-young ancient tale. When Mæcenas was going to dine with him, Horace told him that he must not expect Falernian or Formian vintages; there would be only the humble Sabine wine which he had sealed up in a Grecian cask with his own hands, in commemoration of some popular triumph of the illustrious friend to whose generosity, he owed the estate where it was grown.

  The poet preferred the rusticity of the Sabine farm to the Rome-out-of-town life at Tibur, where he also had a villa. Tibur in the season provided more society than the capital itself; people ran to and fro between the houses of acquaintances as they do between the villas on the lake of Como. In the Sabine valley the real business of the country occupied every one around altogether if not the poet. In one ode he laments that there will be soon no real country; mansions and parks and ornamental waters replace simple cottages like his own “white country-box”; banks of myrtle and violets encroach on the olive groves; the elms, which supported the vines, are cut down to plant plane trees or shady laurel walks; ploughed fields disappear in lawns. In this ode it is by chance mentioned that the Romans then liked to build their houses facing north, contrary to the present preference. Chi paga per il sole non paga per il dottore is a proverb which shows the faith put in a sunny aspect by the Romans of to-day. Horace regrets the time when stately public buildings were raised, but each man was content with a poor place for his personal habitation. But the Italian private citizen was already the greatest lover and builder of palaces in the world.

  Horace was in all things the poet of moderation (the only one). He could honestly disclaim earth-hunger, and declare that he never went round his fields longing to make crooked boundaries straight by adding a bit here and inclosing an angle there. Perhaps the fact proves him an amateur; was there ever a man really bred to possess land who was quite free from this form of madness? Of his father’s farm in Apulia he seems to have preserved no pleasant childish memories; he remembers how poor the soil was, and he never expresses pain that it went the common way of confiscation. His father, a freedman, eked out his livelihood as a tax gatherer; it must have strained his every resource to send his son, well provided for, to be educated in Rome, instead of placing him in a provincial grammar school, as most of his richer neighbors did with their sons….

  Horace made only one real study of a husbandman, but it is remarkable for original insight. With few but sure touches he fixes the type of the peasant who, after all, has the best right to represent his class; a type far removed from the open-mouthed yokel to be so well described by Calpurnius, who would not have missed the show in the Arena for all the kine of Lucania. The Ofellus of Horace has a profound contempt for the luxuries of great cities. His predominating quality is a serious patience; his single passion is thrift. He is the peasant who paid the French war indemnity out of his savings; the rustic of whom Euripides wrote:—

	“No showy speaker, but a plain, brave man,
	Who seldom visited the town or courts;
	A yeoman, one of those who save a land,
	Shrewd, one whose acts with his professions squared;
	Untainted, and a blameless life he led.”

Ofellus is not, like Melibæus, consumed by helpless rage at injustice which he cannot fight against. He has realized the fact that man may command his conduct, not his circumstances, and having acquired this knowledge, he lets the learning of the Schools alone. It is a fact that Nature herself is constantly repeating to the tillers of the soil; they live with her in a primitive relationship which allows no artificial screen to hide her might and their impotence. A fatalist at heart, Ofellus rises superior to fate. Wealth could give him nothing he cares to have, and he has the sense to see (in which he departs, somewhat, from his modern brother) that wealth is an entirely idle word except in so far as it stands for what it can give. When he owned the land which he now cultivates for the spendthrift soldier who turned him out, he and his children lived no more luxuriously than they do now. No meat was eaten in the house on workdays except a piece of smoked bacon, served with pot herbs. If a friend came to see him, why, he prepared a reasonable feast, for he was no miser; but a chicken or a kid, with figs and grapes, and his own pure wine (of which a libation was duly offered to Ceres), made up the bill of fare—not turbot or oysters brought at a ruinous expense from Rome. Now that he and his sons work for hire, their labor places them above want, and permits them to lead much the same life as before. Fortune can hurt him no more, while she may easily hurt the spoiler by robbing him of his ill-acquired acres; nay, who knows (though Horace does not say so) that Ofellus will not again become the owner of his land if he save long enough while the other wastes?

  This contribution to the long tale of confiscation is characteristic of the poet who at the age of twenty-five (when the satire was written), looked on life already with a calm, unemotional eye, strictly resolved to walk round windmills, not to charge them. His was the wit of a contented heart, as Heine’s was the wit of a broken heart. He had not eaten his bread with sorrow, and did not know the heavenly powers, but what he did know of life and Nature he could express with a felicity that left little more to be said. Horace’s feeling for the country had no depths or heights: it is the feeling of every Roman, from the senator to the tradesman, from the consul to the money lender.