Horace

This book is poems its site is tolerably certain. It was about thirty-two miles from Rome, reached in a couple of hours by pilgrims of the present time; to Horace, who never allowed himself to be hurried, the journey of a full day, or of a leisurely day and a half. Let us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-tailed mule (Sat. I, vi, 104), the heavy saddlebags across its loins stored with scrolls of Plato, of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the comedian, Archilochus the lyric poet. His road lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift waters of the Anio, amid steep hills crowned with small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites of Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A ride of twenty-seven miles would bring him to Tivoli, or Tibur, where he stopped to rest, sometimes to pass the night, possessing very probably a cottage in the little town. No place outside his home appealed to him like this.