This is the case with the odes of Horace. To understand all that they meant to say to contemporaries, one must imagine Roman society as it was then, hardly out of a century of conquests and revolutions, in disorder, unbalanced, and still crude, notwithstanding the luxuries and refinements superficially imitated from the Orient; a society eager to enjoy, yet still ill educated to exercise upon itself that discipline of good taste, without which civilisation and its pleasures aggravate more than restrain the innate brutality of men. During the first period of peace, arrived after so great disturbance, that poetry so perfect in form, which analysed and described all the most exquisite delights of sense and soul, infused a new spirit of refinement into habits, and co-operated with laborious education in teaching even the stern conquerors of the world to enjoy all the pleasures of civilisation, alike literature and love, the luxury of the city and the restfulness of the villa, fraternal friendship and good cookery. It taught, too—this master poetry of the senses—to enjoy wine, to use the drink of Dionysos not to slake the thirst, but to colour, with an intoxication now soft, now strong, the most diverse emotions: the sadness of memories, the tendernesses of friend-
