dual pagan who clung to the old
order, he represented more acceptably than anyone else, or anyone else
but Virgil, the ideal of a glorious past, and afforded consequently
something of inspiration for the decaying present. Upon men who, whether
pagan or Christian, were possessed by literary enthusiasms, and upon men
who delighted in contemplation of the human kind, he cast the spell of
art and humanity. Those who caught the fire directly may indeed have
been few, but they were men of parts whose fire was communicated.

As for the influence exercised by Horace upon Roman society at large
through generation after generation of schoolboys as the centuries
passed, its depth and breadth cannot be measured. It may be partly
appreciated, however, by those who realize from their own experience
both as pupils and teachers the effect upon growing and impressionable
minds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflect
upon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients,
by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle of
discipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself.

3. HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE

There is no such thing as a line marking definitely the time when
ancient Rome ceased to be itself and became the Rome of the Middle Age.
If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already,
whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian house
in order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus,
the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end of
the Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culmination
of the movement long since begun in the interferences of an army
composed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending
in a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion and
the permanent seizure of civil as well as military authority. The coming
of Odoacer is the ultimate stage in the process of Roman and Italian
exhaustion, the sign that life is not longer possible except through
infusion of northern blood.

The military and political change itself was only exterior, the outward
demonstration of deep-seated maladies. The too-successful
bureaucratization of Augustus and such of his successors as were really
able and virtuous, the development of authority into tyranny by such as
were neither able nor virtuous, but mad and wilful, had removed from
Ro