    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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