Paul the
Deacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, is
declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but
ungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare with
dogs." In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh
century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic
legislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without special
permission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and the
struggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations
resulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems total
oblivion of the poet.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingian
favor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace's
presence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center of
manuscript activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars dating
from this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbio
contain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch
contained his complete works. The _Ecbasis Captivi_, an animal-epic
appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of
Horace in the manner of the _cento_, or patchwork.
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