This is not said of adultery, which was always an offense
because it disturbed the institution of marriage and rotted the
foundation of society.
There is thus no inconsistency in the Horace of the love poems and the
Horace of the _Secular Hymn_ who petitions Our Lady Juno to prosper the
decrees of the Senate encouraging the marriage relation and the rearing
of families. Of the illicit love that looked to Roman women in the home,
he emphatically declares his innocence, and against it directs the last
and most powerful of the six _Inaugural Odes_; for this touched the
family, and, through the family, the State. This, with neglect of
religion, he classes together as the two great causes of national decay.
Horace is not an Ovid, with no sense of the limits of either indulgence
or expression. He is not a Catullus, tormented by the furies of youthful
passion. The flame never really burned him. We search his pages in vain
for evidence of sincere and absorbing passion, whether of the flesh or
of the spirit. He was guilty of no breach of the morals of his time, and
it is likely also, in spite of Suetonius, that he was guilty of no
excess.
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