prian the enthusiast
and martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications of
familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they
did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero,
Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the intense, the irascible,
Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christian
poets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the late
sixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still a
native tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a love
for him.

The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of the
centuries called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to the
name of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they must
at any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light was
not totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters was
due to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leaving
the era of ancient Rome.

Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have considered
only his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admiration
which represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was another
phase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though its
first cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was the
phase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations had
probably appeared in his own life-time. It was the immortality of the
text-book and the commentary.

Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the _Institutes_ is an indication
that the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latter
half of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next,
gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where little
boys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lamp
shining upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discolored
by soot from the wicks,

_totidem olfecisse lucernas_,
Q_uot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset_
F_laccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni_.
(VII. 225 ff.)

The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as well
as lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. The
first critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appeared
as early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut,
disappo