We are shown all the quaint and quiet
life of the countryside.
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_.
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