Q. Horatius Flaccus
Satires 2.6 — the Sabine farm, and the town mouse and the country mouse
Sermones II.6 · About 30 BCE, published with the second book of Satires. Horace says the seventh year going on the eighth has passed since Maecenas took him up, which dates the poem to the years just after Actium.
Horace had been given a farm in the Sabine hills by Maecenas, and this is the poem in which he thanks the gods for it and asks for nothing more. Then it takes him back to Rome for a day: shoved through the streets, dragged into court as a guarantor, stopped by strangers who assume that a friend of Maecenas must know state secrets. Then back to the farm, to beans and bacon and dinners with neighbours where the talk is whether money or virtue makes people happy. And then the neighbour tells a story: a town mouse visits a country mouse and persuades him to come and taste the good life in the city, where they are nearly eaten by the dogs. It is the classic ancient picture of having enough.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Christopher Smart's prose translation, as revised by Theodore Alois Buckley (Harper, 1862) — the same edition as Satires 1.5 elsewhere on this site. It is prose, and the poem is hexameter verse, so what lives in the metre is gone; what survives is the argument and the anecdote. It is also a crib, made for schoolboys construing the Latin, so it follows the Latin word order more closely than English wants, and Buckley's square brackets mark words supplied to make it parse — '[ever]', '[than this]', '[the barking of]'. Those brackets are the edition's, not this site's, and they mark places where the Latin says less than the English needs. The register is flat and dutiful where Horace is quick. The famous opening, 'hoc erat in votis', comes out as 'This was [ever] among the number of my wishes', and the fable's closing line, the country mouse's farewell, loses its compression. One thing about this file: Perseus leaves the poem's first 58 lines outside the card structure that marks every other section, so they are published here as the unit starting at line 1. They are Smart's text and nothing has been added to them.