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Maecenas had hesitated somewhat before accepting the intimacy of the young satirist: Horace had fought quite recently in the enemy's army, had criticized the government in his Epodes, and was of a class at least technically which Octavian had been warned not to recognize socially, unless he was prepared to offend the old nobility.
The former poet ran his course through the Epodes to the graceful pieces which form the great majority of his odes, and culminated in the loftier vein of lyric inspiration that characterises his political odes.
The celebrated passage in Keats' preface to Endymion, where he gives his reasons for publishing a poem of whose weakness and faultiness he was himself acutely conscious, is of very wide application; and it is easy to believe that, after the publication of the Epodes, Horace could turn with an easier and less embarrassed mind to the composition of the Odes.
Meanwhile he was content to be known as a writer of satire, one whose wish it was to bring up to an Augustan polish the literary form already carried to a high degree of success by Lucilius. The second book of Satires was published not long after the Epodes. It shows in every way an enormous advance over the first.
The fresh and enthusiastic, though somewhat diffuse, descriptions of country enjoyments in the second and sixteenth Epodes, and the vigorous word-painting in the fifth, bespeak the future master; and the patriotic emotion in the seventh, ninth, and sixteenth, strikes a note that was to thrill with loftier vibrations in the Odes of the third and fourth books.
Of the Epodes a large number are positively unpleasing; others interest us from the expression of true feeling; a few only have merits of a high order.
How elaborate and severe the self-education must have been which he undertook and carried through may be guessed from the vast interval that separates the spirit and workmanship of the Odes from that of the Epodes, and can partly be traced step by step in the autobiographic passages of the second book of Satires and the later Epistles.
But as a whole the Epodes stand far below his other works. Their bitterness is quite different from the genial irony of the Satires, and, though occasionally the subjects of them merited the severest handling, yet we do not like to see Horace applying the lash. It was not his proper vocation, and he does not do it well. He is never so unlike himself as when he is making a personal attack.
We are ignorant in what circumstances or under what pressure the Epodes were published; it is a plausible conjecture that their faults were just such as would meet the approbation of Maecenas, on whose favour Horace was at the time almost wholly dependent; and Horace may himself have been glad to get rid, as it were, of his own bad immature work by committing it to publicity.
'Sis pecore et multa dives tellure licebit, Tibique Pactolus fluat. 'Though wide thy land extends, and large thy fold, Though rivers roll for thee their purest gold. FRANCIS. Horace, Epodes, xv. 19. See Macaulay's Essays, ed. 1843, i. 404, for Macaulay's appropriation and amplification of this passage. See ante, ii. 168. Mr. Croker suggests the Rev.
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