Few Roman writers are more frankly autobiographical than Horace. His odes, epodes, satires, and epistles are full of his own personality and history. From various references in these poems, we learn that he was born in 65 B. C., in Venusia, a municipal town in Apulia; that his father was a freedman, a small farmer, and debt collector by trade; that he was educated in Rome under his father's personal care; that he finished his education in Athens, where he eagerly imbibed Greek philosophy and literature. But now the long storm of civil war, which had attended the rise of Julius Cæsar and the struggle between that leader and Pompey for supremacy, and which had been temporarily allayed by the complete ascendency of Cæsar, broke out afresh with renewed violence upon the assassination of the great dictator. The verse of Horace, especially in his odes, is full of the consciousness of this civil strife, and of deep and sincere regret for its consequence to the state. The young student was just twenty-one years of age when the fall of Cæsar startled the world. And when Brutus reached Athens on his way to Macedonia, and called upon the young Romans there to rally to the republic and liberty, the ardent heart of the youthful Horace responded to the summons. He joined the ill-fated army of the liberators, was made a military tribune, and served as such until the disastrous day of Philippi, when Horace's military and political ambition left him forever, together with all hope which he may have cherished of the lost cause. He made his way back to Rome under shelter of the amnesty which the merciful conqueror had granted, and there found himself in an unfortunate plight indeed; for his father was now dead, his modest estate lost, probably swallowed up in the general confiscations, and he himself with neither money, friends, nor occupation. He managed in some way, however, to secure a small clerkship, the income from which served to keep the wolf from his humble door. But in this obscure, unfriended clerk one was now walking the streets of Rome to whom Rome's proudest and most princely mansions were before many years to open as to a welcome guest. For he carried within him, concealed in a most unpretentious personality, a rich store of education, experience, and genius, which was to prove the open sesame for him to the world's best gifts. To the exercise of this genius he now turned; and the appearance of the earliest of his satires, with perhaps some of his odes and epodes as well, was the result. All these things and much more the poet tells us, frankly giving the whole of his story with neither boasting on the one hand nor false pride on the other.