The Temple of the Muses

FROM THE TRANSLATOR. XI

(a) Horace, On the Art of Poetry, verses 391 and following.

The Lyric Poet Referring to the Roman poet Horace gives, among others, this explanation of it, when he says (a):

Orpheus, the priest and sacred interpreter of the Gods, original Latin: Sylvestres homines sacer interpresque Deorum...
deterred wild men from slaughter and a foul way of life;
for this reason, he was said to soothe tigers and raging lions.

Which Mr. Pels Andries Pels (1631–1681), a prominent Dutch poet and critic who famously translated Horace translates as follows:

— — — Orpheus, so esteemed in his time,
That interpreter of the Gods, has the human race
Deterred from murder and a beastly life through verses,
Which is why that noble name has remained with the Hero:
That he was able to tame the lions and the tigers.

The works of all the poets who followed him, such as his pupil Musaeus, Linus, Melampus, Arion, Hesiod, Homer, etc., were cut from the same cloth original: op dien leest geschoeid; a Dutch idiom meaning modeled on the same principle or standard; for many centuries they were held in high esteem as systems in which all theology, rules of justice and equity, and the foundations of a perfect political and moral philosophy were contained. The aforementioned poet [Horace] gives that testimony a little later concerning the writings of the poets who came before Homer:

— — — This was wisdom in former times: original Latin: fuit hæc sapientia quondam...
To distinguish public things from private, sacred from profane;
To prohibit wandering lust, to give rights to the married,
To build towns, and to carve laws into wood.
Thus honor and renown came to the divine bards and
their songs.

The translation by Mr. Pels again reads as follows:

— — — In this art [poetry] formerly lay the intellect,
The power, and the law, so that it distinguished the private from the
Common, and the holy from the unholy;
Indeed, it led the unbridled into lawful marriage,
Binding marriage closely through privilege and through punishment;
It built entire cities, and gave the people their laws.
These are the steps, these the means and ways,
Through which Poetry and Poets obtained such a name of honor.