s we find him
invited to join Maecenas on a journey to Brundusium, of which he has
left us an amusing journal (Sat. I, v); and about three years later
still was presented by him with a country house and farm amongst the
Sabine hills, a few miles to the east of Tibur, or, as it is now
called, Tivoli.

With this a new chapter in his life begins. During six years he had
lived in Rome, first as an impecunious clerk, then as a client of
Maecenas. To all Roman homes of quality and consequence clients were a
necessary adjunct: men for the most part humble and needy, who attended
to welcome the patron when issuing from his chamber in the morning,
preceded and surrounded his litter in the streets, clearing a way for
it through the crowd; formed, in short, his court, rewarded by a daily
basket of victuals or a small sum of money. If a client was involved in
litigation, his patron would plead his cause in person or by deputy; he
was sometimes asked to dinner, where his solecisms in good breeding and
his unfashionable dress, the rustic cut of his beard, thick shoes, gown
clumsily draped, made him the butt of the higher guests. Juvenal, in a
biting satire, describes the humiliation of a poor client at a rich
man's table. "The host," he says, "drinks old beeswinged Setian wine,
served to him in a gold goblet by a beautiful boy; to you a coarse black
slave brings in a cracked cup wine too foul even to foment a bruise.
His bread is pure and white, yours brown and mouldy; before him is
a huge lobster, before you a lean shore-crab; his fish is a barbel or
a lamprey, yours an eel:--and, if you choose to put up with it, you
are rightly served." The relation, though not held to be disgraceful,
involved sometimes bitter mortifications, and seems to us inconsistent
with self-respect. We remember how it was resented in modern times,
though in a much milder form, by Edmund Spenser, Dr. Johnson, and the
poet Crabbe. Even between a Horace and a Maecenas it must have caused
occasional embarrassment: we find the former, for instance, dedicating
poems to men whose character he could not respect, but to whom, as his
patron's associates, he was bound to render homage; while his supposed
intimacy with the all-powerful minister exposed him to tedious
solicitants, who waylaid him in his daily walks. He had become sick of
"the smoke and the grandeur and the roar of Rome" (Od. III, 29, 12); his
Sabine retreat would be an asylum and a haven; would "give him