Heroes of 2,000 years ago

BN Goswamy

“Whether a peaceful old age awaits me, or death circles around with black wings, rich or poor, at Rome, or if fate so orders, in exile, whatever the colour of my life, I will write.” — Horace (Rome, 65-8 BC)

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
“Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.” 
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”  — Cicero (Rome, 106-43 BC)

Someone sent me, recently, a slim little volume, a bit oddly titled, An Ode to Geniuses, but I leafed through it with a degree of pleasure, coming upon name after illustrious name and re-learning something about what these great men and women had achieved and the legacy they had left behind. I lingered a bit longer than usual on pages that spoke of two extraordinary men — Cicero and Horace — both near contemporaries, both from Rome of some 2,000 years ago, and both leaving a searing trail in the minds of the generations that came after them.

In the history of man, Rome is a name to conjure with: its rise and its decline, both as a republic and as an empire, its story filled with figures at once heroic and tragic, competing narratives pulsating with ambition and achievement, deceit and chivalry, morality and turpitude, generosity and mean-ness. The Greek-turned-Roman, Plutarch, who came not long after Cicero and Horace, wrote about so many lives that he knew or researched into, including those of these two, and we learn a great deal about them through him. What stands out in my mind, with all that keeps running like a shadowy film in the background, however, is the way in which both of these men engaged with the world of letters.

Cicero, whose fame as an orator has transcended both time and space, was also a statesman, lawyer, philosopher, politician, even a soldier. He lived in times of war and chaos, was forced to take sides, and eventually met a violent end, having been declared an ‘enemy of the state’ by a vengeful Mark Antony. He was beheaded, and his severed head and limbs were displayed in the Roman forum. [It has been recorded that when the executioner raised his axe, Cicero bent his neck and said to him: ‘There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but try to do itproperly.”]  But all along, in his life, he kept working on language and literature, besides all else that he remained involved in. Plutarch in his Lives records that as a young man, before he entered the maelstrom of life, Cicero was an extremely talented student. When he grew up, he wrote extensively. It is said about him that ‘his influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose, not only in Latin but in European languages up to the 19th century, was either a reaction against or a return to his style”. There is a Latin philosophical vocabulary associated with him, going back to Greek sources. It was all about ‘evidentia, humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia’ [clarity, humanity, quality, quantity, and substance, in other words.].When he said this, he was evidently speaking about life. Views about Cicero — chiefly his politics, his ambitions, his lofty arrogance — have differed sharply across the ages, but no one has doubted his having been a master of Latin prose. Cicero was “not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself”, as a discerning follower wrote. Somewhere in his heart, this man must have longed for a simpler life, too. For it was he who wrote to a friend once: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

That other great figure of the Roman age to whom I am greatly drawn — Horace — was also a soldier and a senator of Rome, but his life was not as full of tumult as Cicero’s was, and he certainly did not meet a violent end. His life, as someone said, was marked by ‘lack of political ambition, satisfaction with his life, gratitude for his land, and pride in his craft and the recognition it wins him’. Gentle, his life might not have been, for he also suffered the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, but poetry remained his driving, overarching passion every inch of the way, it seems. He befriended many of his peers, including the great Virgil. In his own time, he was greatly sought after, even the great Augustus, the first Emperor of the Roman Empire, approaching him to address one of his epistles, letters in verse, to him. The fame that his work attained in the centuries that followed his, and the influence that his work had on the great poets that we know better — Wordsworth, Keats, Byron — has been phenomenal. 

Horace worked tirelessly. On his Odes, he worked at least for seven years, it is said: ‘eighty-eight carefully arranged poems’. ‘I am like a bee’, he used to say, ‘fashioning my poems carefully’, the obvious reference being to the patient fashion in which those industrious insects build their hives. He was fond of satire, once having even written a satire on satires. With him is associated great poetry, like the Epistles, and the Odes, and the remarkable Ars Poetica. His voice still reverberates softly in the air for, in his lyrics, Horace ‘transformed many of the varieties of human experience and sensibility into unforgettable, immortal poetry’. He wrote of love, of joys and pangs of ordinary life: the gentle tone of complaint and understated jealousy reminds one somehow of the poetry of Faiz, when he speaks to his love, Pyrrha:

What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odours,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou in wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
On faith and changed gods complain, and seas
Rough with black winds, and storms.