6 Cf. Wiseman 1974 (в 197л) 26-39.
mouths of envoys from provincial communities, the dependence of any of these men on the support, financial or otherwise, of Roman patrons is impossible to determine.
The picture is much clearer for the most prominent of the Augustan poets. Horace, son of a freedman and starting badly by fighdng for the losing side at Philippi, became an accepted member of Maecenas' well- defined circle and was able in due course to give up his post as scriba and to settle down as a small country gentleman with a modest apartment in the capital. The later offer of the post of secretary to Augustus himself seems to have been rejected rather from aversion to regular employment than from any fear of subservience to the emperor's wishes (Suet. Vita Hor.). Virgil, losing his family estate near Mantua, sought and gained the support first of Pollio, a distinguished writer himself and an independent politician, and then of Maecenas to restore his posidon and presumably to promote his literary career. He appears to have given up his connexion with the north and lived for the most part near Naples (Suet. Vita Ver.). Financial considerations were to some extent involved in these and other cases, even if the claim to poetical poverty in Tibullus, as in Juvenal in the second century, is nothing but a literary convention. But the main objective appears to have been status and connexions.
It is hardly now believed that Maecenas (and still less Messalla, as patron of Tibullus and others) actually prompted the composition of particular works for quasi-political reasons, apart from such pieces d'occasion as Horace's Carmen Saeculare, written in 17 в.с. for a specific religious festival and with an obvious political aim; nor that Livy, close to the imperial family though he was and possibly financially rewarded for his help to the young Claudius in composing history, needed official direcdon to make him an active defender of ancient traditions and values, such as Augustus admired and wished to propagate.7 In fact, Livy was notorious for his republican sympathies and particularly for his support of the memory of Pompey, which excited Augustus' comment but did not lead to the withdrawal of his friendship.8 We certainly fail to find the sort of subservience which might have been expected of court poets. In the light of what we know of the war of propaganda which developed between Antony and Octavian during the late 30s, before Actium and probably earlier, it is noteworthy that there is no sign of the poets' involvement in this campaign. Even in Horace's Satires, where Lucilius had provided some precedent for attacking a patron's enemies, Antony appears only once (1.5.33), with an oblique reference four lines earlier to aversos amicos to be reconciled by the envoys, and there is no trace of criticism or hostility. In the diplomatic purpose of the trip to Brundisium, on which Horace and Virgil accompanied Maecenas,
7 Syme 1959 (в 177); Walsh 1974 (в 191л) j-6. 8 Suet. Claud. 41.1, Tac. Ann. 1v.34.j.
Horace assumes complete lack of interest. Again in the Epodes (vii and xvi) he twice laments the civil strife of the period without any suggestion of partisanship or idea of solution, while in the first of the series, whether written for the expedition against Sextus Pompeius or Antony, Horace gives no hint that the temptation to accompany Maecenas was due to anything but personal affection.[1115]
The Eclogues were a less likely medium for expressing political views, and Virgil does no more than address Octavian, unnamed but unmistakable, as patron and protector in the first poem; while in the fourth contemporaries may have been more confident than we can be of the extent to which Octavian, or indeed any specific individual, was the subject of hopes or praise. In the Georgics, once peace had been established, Octavian can be hymned as the greatest of benefactors, deserving the title of godhead in the same way as Lucredus had honoured Epicurus for his blessings to mankind (v. 76"); and in ш.16 Virgil promises a new poem centred on 'Caesar' as if on a god. Yet it is difficult to see how the four books, with their periodic outbursts of depression leading sometimes to despair, can be regarded as the sort of propaganda for an officially inspired revival of agriculture that historians used to claim they were.
When the next work came to be written, Virgil may have been aware that Augustus (as he now was) wanted a nadonal epic to indicate the position of the princeps in a re-born Rome and an extended empire, together with an exposition of the moral values on which the new age was to be based; but it cannot be supposed that the Aeneid was in any way what had been suggested or expected. The term 'propaganda' fits awkwardly here,[1116] despite the explicit recognidon in three major passages (i. 286-96, with its notorious ambiguities, vi. 791-805, and viii. 671-728); and there are all too many passages which appear to question the full worth of the leader's triumph. An epic intended simply to glorify and jusdfy the character and victories of the ideal ruler, with Aeneas in some degree representing and prescribing the pattern of the just and self- sacrificingprinceps, as Virgil's hero appears to do, could have reached the conclusion of the conflict against his rival without a savage killing, which, however acceptable in the context of heroic warfare and however justified in terms of statecraft, still has to be carried out in the madness of rage and revenge.[1117] The great majority of contemporary readers, like the majority since then, will have been sufficiently carried along by the force of the narrative to accept the death of Turnus as dramatically and morally appropriate; everything we can infer about Virgil indicates that he can never have been happy about this resolution of the problem. Likewise, the inflated praise of Augustus' young nephews and son-in-law can properly be seen as a tribute to the princeps and his bereaved sister Octavia, as if the poet might hope thereby to gain favour; but the fact that Marcellus' death concludes and crowns the long pageant of the glories of Rome suggests that what matters most to Virgil in the end is the price paid for military and political triumph and the irredeemable sorrow for the death of a young man.12 A whole-hearted panegyric of the Augustan achievement, however full of hope for the future, did not require both its halves to end in such a minor key.
The failure of Horace to realize what might have been expected of the laureate, who could produce the Carmen Saeculare and hymn the victories of Drusus and his brother in Carm. rv.4, is more obvious and less demanding of explanation. The Roman odes of the third book are full of noble sentiments and an expression of true Roman virtues; but they hardly add up to the direct propaganda that has often been seen in them. All too often, as in 111.4, overt praise of Augustus drifts off into the poet's private reactions and his addiction to wine and girls; while private odes on themes of self-indulgence and the shortness of human life not only predominate in the collection but are commonly felt to reveal Horace at his most effective. We appear to have another Augustan spokesman who can hardly be held to have produced exactly what the Augustan age demanded.