SOURCE: “The ‘Divini Gloria Buris’—Lucretius, Virgil, Horace” in The Love of Nature among the Romans: During the Later Decades of the Republic and the First Century of the Empire, John Murray, 1912, pp. 50-82.

In the following essay, Geikie explores the influence that country life had on Horace's poetry, both during his childhood years and in his adulthood, while he was living on a farm given to him by Maecenas.

… As another remarkable example of the influence of an early life in the country upon a poetic temperament we may look at the case of Horace (b.c. 65-8). His birthplace lay not in a luxuriant plain, like that of Virgil, but at Venusia, in a somewhat rugged and sterile territory on the eastern flank of the Apulian Apennines. Of that first home he retained some vivid impressions which are again and again alluded to in his poems...