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I, born by sounding Aufidus...
Horace, “Odes”
ONE OF APULIA’S GLORIES is to have given birth to Quintus Horatius Flaccus. You have to know Latin fairly well to read Horace properly, which is a pity, since his poetry is so beautiful. He has been compared to Bach varying a theme or Chopin developing a cadence, and his verse has lasted down the centuries, its devoted admirers including the Emperor Augustus, Milton, King Louis XVIII and Rudyard Kipling. “No ancient writer has been at once so familiarly known and so generally appreciated”, a Horatian addict wrote in the 1880s. “We seem to know his tastes and his habits, and almost to catch the tones of his conversation.” Nowadays, most people read him in translation –although almost impossible to translate – yet he still casts a spell.
Horace was born on 8 December 65 BC, at Venosa, then a staging post of the Via Appia and the largest colonia (colony) of veteran soldiers in the Roman world, with a population of 20,000. Although he left for Rome when he was about twelve, and spent most of his life there or in the villa given to him by Maecenas, he never lost his love of the country around Venosa. The River Aufidus is mentioned in many of the “Satires” and the “Odes” – as in the prophetic “Exegi monumentum”:
I have achieved a monument more lasting
than bronze, and loftier than the pyramids of kings...
I shall be renewed and flourish in further praise,
where churning Aufidus resounds, where Daunus
poor in water governed his rustic people...
His father, a freed slave, had settled at Venosa, becoming a tax-collector and auctioneer. He prospered, buying a small farm, sending his son to Rome and to Athens for his education. In 42 AD Horace joined the Roman republican army at Athens and, despite his being an insignificant young man, small and plump with a paunch, Brutus gave him command of a legion; he fought at Philippi against Octavian and Mark Antony, throwing away his shield and fleeing during the subsequent rout. Pardoned and given a post in the treasury at Rome, his wonderful verses soon gained him patrons.
In 37 BC he travelled to Brìndisi with Virgil and his patron Maecenas, who, as a friend and adviser of Octavian – afterwards the Emperor Augustus – was hoping to negotiate a reconciliation with Mark Antony. Horace immortalised the journey in the “Satires”.
A staging post whose name he does not give, because the water he bought there was “the worst in the world”, may have been Venosa where the road forked to join the future Via Traiana. At Canosa the bread was so vile that he thought the bakers must have mixed sand with the flour. No doubt he consoled himself with the excellent Canosan wine, afterwards much admired by Pliny the Elder. (Good even today, and getting better all the time.) Perhaps it was on this journey, too, that he heard of a miracle in a temple at Egnatia on the coast, when incense was said to have liquefied without being burned, a story that made him laugh.
Horace’s lifelong affection for Apulia stemmed from his love of its countryside, not of its inns, which sound on a par with those experienced by later travellers. The landscape around Venosa has apparently changed comparatively little during the last two thou-sand years. There are fewer of the woods that the poet loved, but it is still agricultural, with little or no industry. The beautiful, extinct volcano of Monte Vulture now has a road up to the lake in its crater, yet even now Horace would feel at home here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Italy. This is rolling, upland country, very different from the Murge, with pretty valleys and small towns perched on crags. This was where he had spent his childhood:
On pathless Vultur, beyond the threshold
of my nurse Apulia, when I was exhausted
with play and oppressed with sleep,
legendary wood-doves once wove for me
new fallen leaves, to be
a marvel to all who lodge in lofty
Acherontia’s eyrie and Bantia’s woodlands
and the rich valley farms of Forentum.
Crauford Tait Ramage, one of the few travellers to visit Venosa during the last century, describes the area as thickly wooded in 1828: “you cannot stroll through such a country as this without feeling that its poets develop a rich and animated conception of the life of nature.” The farms Horace knew had been given over to sheep from the Abruzzi and the hills of Basilicata, but today the farms have come back.
A famous link with Horace may lie a few miles to the east of Venosa, at Palazzo San Gervasio, possibly his “Fons Bandusiae” (“Spring of Bandusia”). Although most think that the spring is near the poet’s villa at Tivoli, as late as the twelfth century the district round Palazzo San Gervasio was called Bandusino Fonte. Two fountains claim to be the spring, the Fontana del Fico and the Fontana Grande. Norman Douglas preferred one of the many springs on the northern edge of the hill on which the village stands, suspecting that the terrain had been altered by earthquakes. Certainly, it would be pleasant to think of the shade of Horace coming here every October, to sacrifice a kid in celebration of the Fontinalia at the “Bandusian spring more brilliant than glass, worthy of flowers and classic wine.”
For once, however, Norman Douglas sounds a note of caution. “But whether this at San Gervasio is the actual fountain hymned by Horace – ah, that is quite another affair. Few poets have clung more tenaciously to the memories of their childhood than did he and Virgil... and yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his imagination... Here at San Gervasio I prefer to think only of the Roman singer, so sanely jovial, and of these waters as they flowed limpid and cool.”