Quitting Athens after a time to take command of the army which had been raised against Antony, Brutus carried Horace in his company with the rank of military tribune. He followed his patron into Asia; one of his early poems humorously describes a scene which he witnessed in the law courts at Clazomenae. (Sat. I, vii, 5.) He was several times in action; served finally at Philippi, sharing the headlong rout which followed on Brutus' death; returned to Rome "humbled and with clipped wings." (Od. II, vii, 10; Ep. II, ii, 50.) His father was dead, his property confiscated in the proscription following on the defeat, he had to begin the world again at twenty-four years old. He obtained some sort of clerkship in a public office, and to eke out its slender emoluments he began to write. What were his earliest efforts we cannot certainly say, or whether any of them survive among the poems recognized as his. He tells us that his first literary model was Archilochus (Ep. I, xix, 24), a Greek poet of 700 B.C., believed to have been the inventor of personal satire, whose stinging pen is said to have sometimes driven its victims to suicide. For a time also he imitated a much more recent satirist, Lucilius, whom he rejected later, as disliking both the harshness of his style and the scurrilous character of his verses. (Sat. I, x.) It has been conjectured therefore that his earliest compositions were severe personal lampoons, written for money and to order, which his maturer taste destroyed. In any case his writings found admirers. About three years after his return to Rome his friends Varius and Virgil praised him to Maecenas; the great man read the young poet's verses, and desired to see him. (Sat. I, vi, 54.)