MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT is old-fashionable, I know, to indulge in classical allusions; and among those who follow the advance of the armies in Italy there are few perhaps who recall another journey which took place along that road one thousand nine hundred and eighty-two years ago. It was at Sinuessa, near Mondragone,—only a few kilo- metres behind the front line of the Fifth Army—that upon an autumn morning in B.C. 38 Horace and Virgil met. Virgil was thirty-two years old at the time and Horace twenty-seven or twenty- eight ; neither of them had any conception of the immense fame which would be theirs. Virgil had already written the Eclogues, but they were only published in the following year ; and Horace had only just started to apply his pupil pen to the writing of satires. For them the poetical phoenix of the century was Varius ; and as they travelled on together through Capua and Benevento to Bari it can. never have occurred to them that they were anything more than humble adjuncts to the diplomatic baggage of the magnificent Maecenas. Up. and up they went through mountains which now gaze on carnage, sleeping in villas and in tiny inns, and then down upon the plain of Bari and on to Brindisi. Horace during that arduous but exciting fortnight kept some sort of diary: on returning to Rome he worked up his material into a Satire in the manner of Lucilius: and when today we read again the Journey to Brundisium we are half fascinated by the information that he gives us and half enraged that it should be so meagre and so vague.
It is not clear even what were the purposes or the date of this embassy. We know only that it must belong to that uncertain period between Philippi and Actium when Octavian and Antony were seeking to divide between them the empire of the world. The Conference can scarcely have been that of B.C. 4o, since we know that Horace was only introduced to Maecenas two years later. It can scarcely have been that of B.C. 37, since that meeting took place, not at Brindisi, but at Taranto. It is almost certain that the story concerns the negotiations between Maecenas and Antony which were held at Athens in the autumn of B.C. 38 ; and that Horace and his fellow-poets accompanied the Minister as far only as his
port of embarkation. It is natural that Maecenas should have had with him as fellow-delegates M. Cocceius Nerva, who had been employed on previous negotiations, and L. Fonteius Capito, who was such a friend of Antony that he was later entrusted with the delicate task of accompanying Cleopatra to Syria. But why on earth were Varius, Plotius Tucca, Horace, Apollodorus and Virgil brought along? Mr. Eden does not drag all Bioomsbury with him when he flies to Moscow or Teheran.
It is possible, even upon a modern map, to follow Horace's slow progress from the capital to the Adriatic. Leaving Rome by what is now the Porta S. Sebastiano he would have followed the Appian Way, past the catacombs and the tomb of Caecilia Metella, past Castel Gondolfo and Albano, to the town of Ariccia, where he spent the first night. From there he went to the Three Taverns, or Forum Appii, the place to which the brethren came out to meet St. Paul. Feeling ill from the effects of the marsh water of Forum Appii, he embarked upon a barge on the canal which then drained the Pomp- tine marshes. He spent a miserable night. The boatmen shouted at each other ; the frogs in the' marshes croaked without ceasing ; the mosquitos sang and stung. He was relieved at nine o'clock next morning to leave the barge and to wash his sore eyes in the fresh spring of Feronia. Then on to Terracina, Fondi, Formia and Sinuessa. It would have been between Formia and Sinuessa that he crossed the Liris or Garigliano River, where the front line now runs. And thus on to Capua, where the party rested for some hours while Maecenas went off to play tennis, and Virgil and Horace eased their limbs and aching eyes. Then the mule train was formed again, and up into the mountains wound the column, past Benevento, Trevico, Canusi and the field of Cannae, and so down to Bari. And then, by careful stages, to Brindisi, where the great triremes waited to take Maecenas and his embassy across the sea to Antony. We are not told whether Horace and Virgil retraced their course alon.f. We know only that Horace (in spite of the fact that he felt mos un- well) made a good impression during the journey to Brundisium ; it was only a few months later that Maecenas presented him with the Sabine farm.
It is easy for those who have also ridden on mule back through mountainous country to imagine the details and the incidents of this Apennine journey. The slaves and the muleteers would have risen early and one would have woken to the sound of stirring around the camp. Horace and Virgil packed their own little bundles and waited rather shyly until the great men were ready for the road. And then they would start off in single file, the sun flashing on the armour of Maecenas' guard, the mules picking their way between rocks and arbutus bushes with obstinate delicacy, climbing high among the eagles and the peaks. A pause probably at midday, when the slaves would spread a carpet under the stunted trees and serve sausages and curdled milk. And then on again above the valleys until they reache3 the end of the day's marching and would be met by the slaves who had preceded them and prepared fires and bedding and warm water and rows of little thrushes upon spits.
* * * * It was then, we may suppose, that Maecenas, reclining upon cushions and dipping bread into mulled wine, would speak to the exhausted poets whom he had dragged with him from Rome. Virgil. Varius and Plotius were already on easy terms with the great Minister and would listen with trained respect to his suggestions as to the kind of poems which, now that a new order was estab- lished, they ought to write. But Horace, having only been intro- duced into that company but a few weeks before, must have been acutely shy. His weak eyes smarting from the smoke of the inn fire, he sought desperately to amuse Maecenas, to make a good impression upon the man who could cause so vast a difference to his life. Gay and garrulous he must have been in those days, with a certain natural dignity and a fund of common sense of which Maecenas much approved. Such was the beginning of a famous friendship, such the first intimacies between the son of a freedman and the luxurious and effeminate aristocrat who boasted, perhaps too frequently, that he was descended from Etruscan kings. And behind it all, while the wood crackled on the hearth and the smoke hung heavily in the tavern room, would come the sound of frogs croaking in the valleys of the Liris, the Volturno or the Sangro. " Remember Horatius Flaccus as you would remember me," wrote Maecenas thirty years later in his final testament to the Emperor. Few literary friendships have been so decent or so deep.
* * * *
It seems strange to me that men from Vezelay or Saskatoon, from Wilton or Wisconsin, should in some Apulian valley rest for a moment under rocks which once shaded the midday meal of Virgil and Horace. Have they caught some vision across all those years of a shy and virginal young man with a slight stammer and the glow of candour in his face? Of a plump little man beside him, rubbing black ointment gingerly upon his aching eyes? Can they see the wraith of the great Maecenas, epicene and shrewd, sur- rounded by his poets, his Greek secretaries, his Roman soldiers and his Illyrian. slaves? And does some officer of General Juin's triumphant forces, looking down on the hard-won road from Venafro, wonder why the name of that battered hamlet should be so familiar, and murmur to himself the half-forgotten chords of lye& days:
" Tender's Venafranos in agros Aut LacedaemonMm Tarentum"?
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