is the ideal language for the expression of platitudes. His patriotic eloquence is Roman rhetoric of the best kind. But perhaps his real strength lies in drama. It is strange that Latin of the classical period failed at producing a native drama so completely as it did. Perhaps it was because the writers of that age were so completely under Greek influences that their natural Italian genius for the theatre was stifled under the load of a classical convention. Certainly Horace had the gift, and in such passages as the dramatic duologue (Ode ix. of Book III.) _Donec gratus eram tibi_, or the Epode of the witches (v.) _At, o deorum_, or the still more famous Epistle about the bore, he exhibits himself, like Browning, as a dramatist gone astray. Regarded from the purely lyrical point of view, the Century Hymn, which he wrote to order as Rome’s laureate in succession to Vergil, is perhaps his greatest achievement. The Secular Games of 17 B.C. were intended to bring visibly before men’s eyes the glories of the new monarchy and incidentally to carry in their train the salutary but unpopular measures of the Julian moral reform. So the choir of noble youths and maidens were taught to sing in their prayer to Diana: diua, producas subolem patrumque prosperes decreta super iugandis feminis prolisque nouæ feraci lege marita,[48] where the goddess is besought to increase the population of Rome and favour the _senate’s_ decrees about marriage. The fourth book of the _Odes_ was added after a long interval at the direct request of Augustus. It is intended to bring the achievements of Augustus and his family, particularly the triumphs of Tiberius and Drusus, into favourable comparison with the heroic stories of republican history. It is most melancholy to observe that Mæcenas, to whom Horace was genuinely attached and whose name constantly occurs in his earlier writings, here drops out of the poet’s verse because he had fallen out of Cæsar’s favour. Although Horace is in his _Odes_ as classical and conventional as all the Roman writers of his age, his _Satires_ and _Epistles_ are more intimate than any other Latin work of the great period. In them we get real glimpses of life at Rome, or on a country estate. We cannot fail to be struck with its idleness and emptiness. In the city he saunters from the forum to the baths, from the baths to the dinner-table with time and boredom for his only enemies. In the country he sometimes, it is true, toys with husbandry, or shows a faint interest in landscape-gardening or loiters among his books, but the life is to the last degree super-civilised and unreal. The very ideas of hope and progress were alien to the ancient world. The eyes of the Romans were always turned behind them, so that they could not see the greatness of the vista that was now opening for them in front.