This is very pretty and picturesque; and Maecenas was sure to be charmed with it as a birthday Ode, for such it certainly was, whether there was any real Phyllis in the case or not. Most probably there was not,--the allusion to Telephus, the lady-killer, is so very like many other allusions of the same kind in other Odes, which are plainly mere exercises of fancy, and the protestation that the lady is the very, very last of his loves, so precisely what all middle-aged gentlemen think it right to say, whose "_jeunesse_," like the poet's, has teen notoriously "_orageuse_."
It was probably not within the circle of his city friends that Horace saw the women for whom he entertained the deepest respect, but by the hearth-fire in the farmhouse, "the homely house, that harbours quiet rest," with which he was no less familiar, where people lived in a simple and natural way, and where, if anywhere, good wives and mothers were certain to be found. It was manifestly by some woman of this class that the following poem (Odes, III. 23) was inspired:--
"If thou, at each new moon, thine upturned palms, My rustic Phidyle, to heaven shalt lift, The Lares soothe with steam of fragrant balms, A sow, and fruits new-plucked, thy simple gift,
"Nor venomed blast shall nip thy fertile vine, Nor mildew blight thy harvest in the ear; Nor shall thy flocks, sweet nurslings, peak and pine, When apple-bearing Autumn chills the year.
"The victim marked for sacrifice, that feeds On snow-capped Algidus, in leafy lane Of oak and ilex, or on Alba's meads, With its rich blood the pontiff's axe may stain;
"Thy little gods for humbler tribute call Than blood of many victims; twine for them Of rosemary a simple coronal, And the lush myrtle's frail and fragrant stem.
"The costliest sacrifice that wealth can make From the incensed Penates less commands A soft response, than doth the poorest cake, If on the altar laid with spotless hands."
When this was written, Horace had got far beyond the Epicurean creed of his youth. He had come to believe in the active intervention of a Supreme Disposer of events in the government of the world,--"_insignem attenuans, obscura promens_" (Odes, I. 34):--
"The mighty ones of earth o'erthrowing, Advancing the obscure;"--