The Cost of the Sabine Farm

M Y SUBJECT has nothing to do with economic conditions either in Horace's time or in ours. If we took seriously what Horace says somewhat too often about his comfortable life in the Sabine hills, and if we have had firsthand acquaintance with the delusion that by returning to the soil we can bring down the domestic budget, we might be concerned for Horace's nervous system at the end of the month, when the bills came in. That famous farm of his was quite an establishment, in some respects suggesting the eighteenth-century plantations of Virginia, what with Davus and the other slaves who worked or managed the estate, or who served as the poet's secretaries, or who kept in order the grounds, the large gardens, and the fountains, or who practiced their admirable arts in the busy kitchens, or who raised and pressed grapes, and in due time brought from the cellar for the entertainment of the poet and his guests jars of literary and non-literary inspiration. In our modern days Horace's frugal tastes have been imitated less frequently by college professors than by millionaires. Horace, to be sure, was not a millionaire, but Maecenas was. For reasons not always set forth in full by the poet's scholarly admirers, Horace led one kind of life and praised another. His worldly-wise verses owe something of their appeal to the felicitous combination of lofty, even austere, sentiments with just the right atmosphere of luxurious leisure to permit the reader to enjoy to the full the contemplation of his own merits. If Horace found the life he wanted on his Sabine farm, he paid high for it. We can judge him perhaps better than our fathers could fifty years ago. Tyrants and dictators are here again, and we need the great voices of our race to call us back to our ideals. Milton, thou shouldst be living at

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