Horace's Sabine Farm

Of course we have only the outline of a house. The walls and the roof have gone long ago, except for the lower courses which indicate the size and the style of the place; the fragmentary works of art and small utensils found during the dig are in a museum near by. Yet the floor-plan is clear, and some of the mosaic floors are still in place. As Horace himself says, it is a modest enough house. But anyone who has had the pleasure of visiting it will never again call it a farm. It was a charming country house, inhabited by a man who had good taste and loved comfort and seclusion.

Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2010; 1957), pp. 144-45.