The above is a good instance both of the supernatural powers attributed to the poet, and the supernatural interpretation put upon his supposed exercise of them. This curious mythology lasted throughout the fourteenth century, was vehemently opposed in the fifteenth by the partisans of enlightened learning, and had not quite died out by the middle of the sixteenth. CHAPTER III. HORACE (65-8 B.C.). If Virgil is the most representative, Horace is the most original poet of Rome. This great and varied genius, whose exquisite taste and deep knowledge of the world have made him the chosen companion of many a great soldier and statesman, suggesting as he does reflections neither too ideal nor too exclusively literary for men of affairs, was born at or near Venusia, on the borders of Lucania and Apulia, December 8, 65 B.C. [1] His father was a freedman of the Horatia gens, [2] but set free before the poet's birth. [3] We infer that he was a tax-gatherer, or perhaps a collector of payments at auctions; for the word _coactor_, [4] which Horace uses, is of wide application. At any rate his means sufficed to purchase a small farm, where the poet passed his childhood. Horace was able to look back to this time with fond and even proud reminiscences, for he relates how prodigies marked him even in infancy as a special favourite of the gods. [5] At the age of twelve he was brought by his father to Rome and placed under the care of the celebrated Orbilius Pupillus. [6] The poet's filial feeling has left us a beautiful testimony to his father's affectionate interest in his studies. The good man, proud of his son's talent, but fearing the corruptions of the city, accompanied him every day to school, and consigned him in person to his preceptor's charge, [7] a duty usually left to slaves called _paedagogi_, who appear to have borne no high character for honesty, [8] and at best did nothing to improve those of whom they had the care. From the shrewd counsels of his father, who taught by instances not by maxims, [9] and by his own strict example, Horace imbibed that habit of keen observation and that genial view of life which distinguish him above all other satirists. He also learnt the caution which enabled him to steer his course among rocks and shoals that would have wrecked a novice, and to assert his independence of action with success even against the emperor himself.