The Roman poets of the pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlike
Horace, were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his great
predecessors in lyric poetry, were men of old and noble family Virgil,
born five years before Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of good
property. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six,
fourteen, and twenty years his juniors, were all of equestrian rank.
Horace's father was a freed-man of the town of Venusia, the modern
Venosa. It is supposed that he had been a _publicus servus_, or
slave of the community, and took his distinctive name from the
Horatian tribe, to which the community belonged. He had saved a
moderate competency in the vocation of _coactor_, a name applied
both to the collectors of public revenue and of money at sales by
public auction. To which of these classes he belonged is uncertain--
most probably to the latter; and in those days of frequent
confiscations, when property was constantly changing hands, the
profits of his calling, at best a poor one, may have been unusually
large. With the fruits of his industry he had purchased a small farm
near Venusia, upon the banks of the Aufidus, the modern Ofanto, on the
confines of Lucania and Apulia, Here, on the 8th of December, B.C. 65,
the poet was born; and this picturesque region of mountain, forest,
and river, "meet nurse of a poetic child," impressed itself indelibly
on his memory, and imbued him with the love of nature, especially in
her rugged aspect, which remained with him through life. He appears to
have left the locality in early life, and never to have revisited it;
but when he has occasion to describe its features (Odes, III. 4), he
does this with a sharpness and truth of touch, which show how closely
he had even then begun to observe. Acherontia, perched nest-like among
the rocks, the Bantine thickets, the fat meadows of low-lying
Forentum, which his boyish eye had noted, attest to this hour the