osures of Nero's golden house to
learned archaelogists, and let our imagination find wonder and delight in
their accounts of its porticos three thousand feet long, its game park,
its baths, its thousands of columns with their gilded capitals, and its
walls encrusted with mother-of-pearl. And we may realize the depth of
Rome's abhorrence for the dead tyrant, as we think of how Vespasian and
his son Titus pulled down the enchanted palace for the people's sake,
and built the Colosseum where the artificial lake had been, and their
great baths on the very foundations of Nero's gorgeous dwelling.

[Illustration: BRASS OF TRAJAN, SHOWING THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS]

[Illustration: BRASS OF ANTONINUS PIUS, IN HONOUR OF FAUSTINA, WITH
REVERSE SHOWING VESTA BEARING THE PALLADIUM]

III

It is impossible to conceive of the Augustan age without Horace, nor to
imagine a possible Horace without Greece and Greek influence. At the
same time Horace is in many ways the prototype of the old-fashioned,
cultivated, gifted, idle, sarcastic, middle-class Roman official, making
the most of life on a small salary and the friendship of a great
personage; praising poverty, but making the most of the good things that
fell in his way; extolling pristine austerity of life and yielding with
a smile to every agreeable temptation; painting the idyllic life of a
small gentleman farmer as the highest state of happiness, but secretly
preferring the town; prudently avoiding marriage, but far too human to
care for an existence in which woman had no share; more sensible in
theory than in practice, and more religious in manner than in heart;
full of quaint superstitions, queer odds and ends of knowledge, amusing
anecdotes and pictures of personal experience; the whole compound
permeated with a sort of indolent sadness at the unfulfilled promises of
younger years, in which there had been more of impulse than of ambition,
and more of ambition than real strength. The early struggles for Italian
unity left many such half-disappointed patriots, and many less fortunate
in their subsequent lives than Horace.

Born in the far South, and the son of a freed slave, brought to Rome as
a boy and carefully taught, then sent to Athens to study Greek, he was
barely twenty years of age when he joined Brutus after Caesar's death,
was with him in Asia, and, in the lack of educated officers perhaps,
found himself one day, still a mere boy, tribune of a Legion--or, as we
shou