27
eno
ugh, Horace's poetry said in subtle ways that the men who strove
for state honors were not very important after all. They were grasping
for something mean and low. They deserved far less respect than one
might think.
The men on whom all eyes should be fixed, the men who truly
merited respect (and by implication the men who merited the prestige
and power that follows where respect leads), were the artists who
labored contemplatively in their cottages. And who was the king of
the cottage artists? Who was the man to whom all the goods should
fall? Well Horace, of course.53
Over the generations that followed, Horace's ideal of meditative
withdrawal would take an ever greater hold on the Roman spirit. Men
who once had eagerly looked forward to their days on the racecourse
of honors became ashamed of their earthly ambition. Instead, they
went off to the country to contemplate their souls. The best men of
Rome were no longer eager to participate in bettering their state. And
Rome's vigor slowly slipped away. The frail ideas of Horace's poetry
had masked his personal desire for power. And they had shifted the
energies of the nation, re-ordering the Roman superorganism's values,
resculpting its psychic metabolism. The sublime ideals of the poet had
produced hard-nosed consequences in the real world.
Poetic exhortation and medical debate are the lambent dance of
the most insubstantial of all human phenomena--analysis, emotion and
imagination. Poetry and medicine have produced blessings of
sometimes awesome proportions. Yet the elevated and often incom-
prehensible colloquies in which doctors and poets indulge are
sometimes far more than at first they seem. They hide the greed of
superorganisms.
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