The page is often golden with homely precept or tale of the sort which for all time has been natural to farmer folk. There is the story of the country mouse and the town mouse, the fox and the greedy weasel that ate until he could not pass through the crack by which he came, the rustic who sat and waited for the river to get by, the horse that called man to aid him against the stag, and received the bit forever. The most formal and dignified of the _Odes_ are not without the mellow charm of Italian landscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first six _Odes_ of the third book, often called the _Inaugural Odes_, we get such glimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius on election day, the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships under the open sky, the restless Adriatic, the Bantine headlands and the low-lying Forentum of the poet's infancy, the babe in the wood of Voltur, the Latin hill-towns, the craven soldier of Crassus, and the stern patriotism of Regulus. Without these the _Inaugurals_ would be but barren and cold, to say nothing of the splendid outburst against the domestic degradation of the time, so full of color and heat and picturesqueness: 'T_was not the sons of parents such as these_ T_hat tinged with Punic blood the rolling seas_, L_aid low the cruel Hannibal, and brought_ G_reat Pyrrhus and Antiochus to naught_; B_ut the manly brood of rustic soldier folk_, T_aught, when the mother or the father spoke_ T_he word austere, obediently to wield_ T_he heavy mattock in the Sabine field_, O_r cut and bear home fagots from the height_, A_s mountain shadows deepened into night_, A_nd the sun's car, departing down the west_, B_rought to the wearied steer the friendly rest_. _iii_. THE INTERPRETER OF ROMAN RELIGION Still farther, Horace is an eloquent interpreter of the religion of the countryside. He knows, of course, the gods of Greece and the East,--Venus of Cythera and Paphos, of Eryx and Cnidus, Mercury, deity of gain and benefactor of men, Diana, Lady of the mountain and the glade, Delian Apollo, who bathes his unbound locks in the pure waters of Castalia, and Juno, sister and consort of fulminating Jove. He is impressed by the glittering pomp of religious processions winding their way to the summit of the Capitol. In all this, and even in the emperor-worship, now in its first stages at Rome and more political than religious, he acquiesces, though he may himself be a sparing frequenter of the abodes of worship. For him, as for Cicero, religion is one of the social and civic proprieties, a necessary part of the national mechanism. But the great Olympic deities do not really stir Horace's enthusiasm, or even evoke his warm sympathy. The only _Ode_ in which he prays to one of them with really fervent heart stands alone among all the odes to the national gods. He petitions the great deity of healing and poetry for what we know is most precious to him: