"Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde Of rustic boors to sway, my name Shall be a household word; "As one who rose from mean estate, The first with poet fire Aeolic song to modulate To the Italian lyre. "Then grant, Melpomene, thy son Thy guerdon proud to wear, And Delphic laurels, duly won. Bind thou upon my hair!" CHAPTER IX. HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS.--HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE. No intimate friend of Maecenas was likely to be long a stranger to Augustus; and it is most improbable that Augustus, who kept up his love of good literature amid all the distractions of conquest and empire, should not have early sought the acquaintance of a man of such conspicuous ability as Horace. But when they first became known to each other is uncertain. In more than one of the Epodes Horace speaks of him, but not in terms to imply personal acquaintance. Some years further on it is different. When Trebatius (Satires, II. 1) is urging the poet, if write he must, to renounce satire, and to sing of Caesar's triumphs, from which he would reap gain as well as glory, Horace replies,-- "Most worthy sir, that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or Parthian stricken from his steed." Then why not sing, rejoins Trebatius, his justice and his fortitude, "Like sage Lucilius, in his lays To Scipio Africanus' praise?" The reply is that of a man who had obviously been admitted to personal contact with the Caesar, and, with instinctive good taste, recoiled from doing what he knew would be unacceptable to him, unless called for by some very special occasion:-- "When time and circumstance suggest, I shall not fail to do my best; But never words of mine shall touch Great Caesar's ear, but only such As are to the occasion due, And spring from my conviction, too; For stroke him with an awkward hand, And he kicks out--you understand?" an allusion, no doubt, to the impatience entertained by Augustus, to which Suetonius alludes, of the indiscreet panegyrics of poetasters by which he was persecuted. The gossips of Rome clearly believed (Satires, II. 6) that the poet was intimate with Caesar; for he is "so close to the gods"--that is, on such a footing with Augustus and his chief advisers--that they assume, as a matter of course, he must have early tidings of all the most recent political news at first hand. However this may be, by the time the Odes were published Horace had overcome any previous scruples, and sang in no measured terms the praises of him, the back-stroke of whose rebuke he had professed himself so fearful of provoking.