Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent Upon a country life, called in amain The money he at usury had lent;-- But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again. In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see that Horace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaborate picture of the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Horace had obviously watched closely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at a later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of the most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of contrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of their life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city life of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6), after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and the fast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not from such as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the seas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and direful Hannibal," concluding in words which contrast by their suggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparison with the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:-- "But they, of rustic warriors wight The manly offspring, learned to smite The soil with Sabine spade, And faggots they had cut, to bear Home from the forest, whensoe'er An austere mother bade; "What time the sun began to change The shadows through the mountain range, And took the yoke away From the o'erwearied oxen, and His parting car proclaimed at hand The kindliest hour of day."