His life is almost coincident in extent with that of the Augustan age. The year of his birth, 43 B.c.,—the year of the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, which intervened between the death of Julius Caesar and the partition of the Roman world among the Triumvirs,—may be regarded as the last year of the republic. It was the year of the death of Cicero, which marks the close of the republican literature. Thus the only form of political life known to Ovid was that of the ascendency and absolute rule of Augustus and his successor. His character was neither strengthened nor sobered, like that of his older contemporaries, by personal recollection of the crisis through which the republic passed into the empire. There is no sense of political freedom in any of his writings. The spirit inherited from his ancestors was that of the Italian country districts and municipia, not that of Rome. He was sprung from the Peligni, one of the four small mountain peoples whose proudest memories were of the part they had played in the Social War. They had no old race-hostility with Rome, such as that which made the most powerful representative of the Sabellian stock remain till the last her implacable enemy; and their opposition to the senatorian aristocracy in the Social War would predispose them to accept the empire. Ovid belonged by birth to the same social class as Tibullus and Propertius, that of old hereditary landowners; but he was more fortunate than they in the immunity which his native district enjoyed from the confiscations made by the triumvirs. His native town and district, Sulmo, lay high among the Apennines, and is described by Mr Hare as “grandly situated on an isolated platform, backed by snowy mountains.” The poet himself describes this district as remarkable for the abundance of its streams and for its salubrity—

‘ * Parva, sed irriguis ora salubris aquis;” and he recalls the fresh charm of its scenery from the desolate waste of his Scythian exile. To his early life in such a district he may have owed his eye for natural beauty, and that interest in the common sights of the country which relieves the monotony of his life of pleasure in Rome and the dreary record of the life spent within the walls of Tomi, and enables him to add the charm of natural scenery to the romantic creations of his fancy. The pure air of this mountain home may have contributed to the vigorous vitality which prevented the life of pleasure from palling on him, and which beats strongly even through all the misery of his exile. But if this vitality —with its natural accompaniment, a keen capacity for enjoyment—was a gift due to his birthplace, it was apparently a gift transmitted to him by inheritance: for he tells us that his father lived till the age of ninety, and that he performed the funeral rites to his mother after his father’s death. While he mentions both with the piety characteristic of the old Italian, he tells us little more about them than that “their thrift curtailed his youthful expenses,” and that his father did what he could to dissuade him from poetry, and to force him into the more profitable career of the law courts. He had one brother, exactly a year older than himself, who, after showing promise as a speaker, died at the age of twenty. The tone in which Ovid speaks of him is indicative of sincere affection, but not of such depth of feeling as was called forth in Catullus by a similar loss. The two brothers had been brought early to Rome for their education, where they attended the lectures of the most eminent rhetoricians of their time. Education had become more purely rhetorical and literary, less philosophical and political, than it had been in a previous generation. Ovid is said to have attended these lectures eagerly, and to have shown in his exercises that his gift was poetical rather than oratorical, and that he had a distaste for the severer processes of thought. Like Pope, “he lisped in numbers,” and he wrote and destroyed many verses before he published anything. The earliest edition of the Amores, which first appeared in five books, and the Heroides were given by him to the world at an early age. He courted the society of the older and younger poets of his time, and formed one among those friendly coteries who read or recited their works to one another before they gave them to the world. “He had only seen Virgil”; but Virgil’s friend and contemporary Aemilius Macer used in his advanced years to read his didactic epic to him; and, although there is no indication in the works of either the reigning or the rising poet of any intimacy between them, even the fastidious Horace sometimes delighted his ears with the music of his verse. He had a closer bond of intimacy with the younger poets of the older generation, Tibullus, whose death he laments in one of the few pathetic pieces among his earlier writings, and Propertius, to whom he describes himself as united in the close ties of comradeship. The name of Maecenas occurs nowhere in his poems. The time of his paramount influence both on public affairs and on literature was past before Ovid entered on his poetical career, but Messala and Fabius Maximus, whose name is mentioned by Juvenal along with that of Maecenas as the type of a munificent patron of letters in the Augustan age, encouraged his earliest efforts. With their sons he lived in intimacy in after years, and, as he speaks of having known the younger Fabius in his cradle, his friendship with his family must have begun early in his career. He enjoyed also the intimacy of poets and men of literary accomplishment belonging to a younger generation; and with one of them, Macer, he travelled for more than a year. It is not mentioned whether he travelled immediately after the completion of his education, or in the interval between the publication of his earlier poems and that of the Medea and Ars Amatoria; but it is in his later works, the .Fasti and Metamorphoses, that we seem chiefly to recognize the impressions of the scenes he visited. In one of the epistles written from Pontus to his fellow-traveller there is a vivid record of the pleasant time they had passed together. Athens was to a Roman of that time , what Rome is to an educated Englishman of the present day. Ovid speaks of having gone there under the influence of literary enthusiasm (“studiosus ”); but the impression of his visit which remains on his writings is not of the wisdom taught “among the woods of Academus,” but of the flowers that grow on the neighbouring Hymettus. A similar impulse induced him to visit the supposed site of Troy. The two friends saw together the splendid cities of Asia, which had inspired the enthusiasm of travel in Catullus, and had become familiar to Cicero and Horace during the years they passed abroad. They spent nearly a year in Sicily, which attracted him, as it had attracted Lucretius and Virgil, by its manifold charm of climate, of sea-shore and inland scenery, and of legendary and poetical association,—a charm which has found its most enduring expression in some of his most delightful tales. He recalls with a fresh sense of pleasure the incidents of their tour (which they made sometimes in a pinnace or yacht, sometimes in a light carriage), and the endless delight which they had in each other’s conversation. We would gladly exchange the recorα of his life of pleasure in Rome for more of these recollections. The highest type of classic culture realized in ancient Rome—the type realized in such men as Cicero and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Germanicus—shows its affinity to a type which is the result of essentially similar studies in modern times by nothing more clearly than the enthusiasm for travel among lands famous for their natural beauty, their monumehts of art, and their historical associations.

When settled at Rome, although a public career, leading to senatorian position, was open to him, and, although he filled various judicial offices, and claims to have filled them well, he had no ambition for such distinction, and looked upon pleasure and poetry as the occupations of his life. He tells us that he was married, when little more than a boy, to a wife for whom he did not care, who, he implies, was not worthy of him, and from whom he was soon separated, and afterwards to a second wife, with whom his union, although through no fault of hers, did not last long. But he had other objects of his volatile affections, and one of them, Corinna, after the example of his predecessors Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and their Alexandrian prototypes Callimachus, Philetas, <fcc., he makes the heroine of his love elegies. It is doubtful whether, like Lesbia, Delia, and Cynthia, she belonged to the class of Roman ladies of recognized position, or to that to which the Chloes and Lalages of Horace’s artistic fancy evidently belong. If trust can be placed in the later apologies for his life, in which he states that he had never given occasion for any serious scandal, it is probable that she belonged to the class of “libertinae.” Ovid is not only a less constant but he is a much less serious lover than Catullus, Tibullus, or Propertius. His tone is that either of mere sensual selfregarding feeling or of persiflage. That tone is in many ways offensive to modern taste, but in nothing is it more characteristic of his age than in his light-hearted justification of his choice both of a theme and of a career. In his complete emancipation from all sense of restraint or wish for better things, Ovid goes beyond all his predecessors, although Tibullus and Propertius, and even Horace in the ironical disclaimers of his earlier Odes, give indication of the same state of feeling. In this Ovid reflects the tastes and tone of fashionable, well-born, and wealthy Roman society between the years 20 b.c. and the beginning of our era. The memory of the civil wars no longer weighed on the world. The career of ambition was so far from attracting men that they had to be urged and coerced into filling official places and carrying on the routine duties of the senate. Society was bent simply on amusement. There was less of coarseness in the pursuit of pleasure than had prevailed among the contemporaries of Catullus. We find little trace in Ovid of the convivial pleasures which Horace celebrates in his lighter odes, or of the excesses of which Propertius makes confession. Ovid says of himself that he drank scarcely anything but water, and from what he tells us of his appearance and constitution he was evidently not of the temperament to which convivial excesses bring any temptation. But probably it was not the fashion of the time to live intemperately. As a result of the loss of political interests, women came to play a more important and brilliant part in society, and the tone of fashionable conversation and literature was adapted to them. Julia, daughter of the emperor, was by her position, her brilliant gifts, and her reckless laxity of character the natural leader of such a society. The awakening of the Roman world out of this fool’s paradise of pleasure was due to the discovery of her intrigue with Iulus Antonius, son of Mark Antony, and to the open and violent display of anger with which Augustus resented what was at once a shock to his affections and a blow to his policy. Nearly coincidently with the publicity given to this scandal appeared the famous Ars Amatoria of Ovid, perhaps the most immoral and demoralizing work ever written, at least in ancient times, by a man of genius. Ovid was the favourite poet of the fashionable world; he lived on terms of intimacy with its leading members, the younger representatives of the old nobility, who had survived the proscriptions and the fatal day of Philippi. His poetical accomplishment would naturally recommend him to Iulus Antonius, of whose gifts Horace has spoken so eulogistically. His marriage with his third wife, a lady of the great Fabian house, and a friend of the empress Livia, had probably taken place before this time. It thus seems likely that he mav have been admitted into the intimacy of the younger society of the Palatine, although in the midst of his most fulsome flattery he does not claim ever to have enjoyed the favour of Augustus. Whether he was in anyway mixed up with this intrigue is not known. But that the work which appeared coincidently with it excited deep resentment in the mind of the emperor, as the pander to the passions by which the dignity of his family had been outraged and his state policy thwarted, is shown by his edict, issued ten years later, against the book and its author. Augustus had the art of dissembling his anger; and Ovid appears to have had no idea of the storm that was gathering over him. He still continued to enjoy the society of the court and of the fashionable world; he passed before the emperor in the annual procession among the ranks of the equites; he filled a more important judicial place; and he had developed a richer vein of genius than he had shown in his youthful prime. But he was aware that public opinion had been shocked, or professed to be shocked, by his last work; and after writing a kind of apology for it, called the Remedia Amoris, he directed his genius into other channels, and wrote during the next ten years the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. He had already written one work, the Heroides, in which he had imparted a modern and romantic interest to the heroines of the old mythology, and a tragedy, the Medea, which must have afforded greater scope for the dramatic and psychological treatment of the passion with which he was most familiar. In the Fasti Ovid assumes the position of a national poet by imparting poetical life and interest to the ceremonial observances of Roman religion; but it is as the brilliant narrator of the romantic tales that have got so strangely blended with the realistic annals of Rome that he succeeds in the part assumed by him. The Metamorphoses professed to trace the relations of the gods with human affairs from the reign of Chaos to the deification of Augustus; and in the later books that work also may claim something of a national character. But it consists for the most part of a series of tales of the love adventures of the gods with nymphs and heroines, told in a tone of mixed irony and romance. This work, which he regards as his most serious claim to immortality, had not been finally revised at the time of his disgrace, and he committed it to the flames; but other copies were in existence, and the book was given to the world in his absence. He often regrets that it had not obtained his final révisai. The Fasti also was broken off by his exile, after the completion and publication of the first six books, treating of the first six months of the year.

The actual offence which gave occasion for his banishment is not exactly known. In his frequent references to it he wavers between assertions of his innocence of anything beyond simplicity and error and the admission that, though he had done nothing, he yet deserved his punishment. He had witnessed something which was a cause of pain and offence to the emperor. In a letter to one of his intimate friends, to whom he had been in the habit of confiding all his secrets, he says that had he confided this one he would have escaped condemnation. In writing to another friend in reference to his disgrace, he warns him against the danger of courting too high society—“praelustria vita.” The cause which excited or renewed the anger of Augustus was connected with the old offence of writing and publishing the Ars Amatoria. All this points to his having been in some way mixed up with some scandal affecting the imperial family. He distinctly disclaims the idea that he had anything to do with any treasonable plot; and he certainly appears to have been the last man who ever could have been made the confederate of a serious conspiracy. All this seems to connect him with one event, coincident in time with his disgrace,—the intrigue of the younger Julia, granddaughter of the emperor, with Silanus,— mentioned by Tacitus in the third book of the Annals. Tacitus tells us how deeply Augustus felt these family scandals, looking upon them as acts of treason and sacrilege It seems, at first sight, strange that the chief punishment fell, not on the real offenders, but on Ovid, who at the worst could only have been the confidant of their intrigue, perhaps may have lent his house as a place of rendezvous for the lovers. To Julia herself was assigned the lighter penalty of seclusion in one of the towns of Italy, and Silanus had no other punishment than that of exclusion from the court. Augustus must have regarded Ovid and his works as, if not the corrupter of the age, yet the most typical representative of that corruption which in its effects on his own family might be regarded as the nemesis attending on, as it was the direct consequence of, the outward success of his policy. The date of this scandal must have been 7 or early in 8 a.d., as Tacitus, under the date 28 a.d., mentions the death of Julia after twenty years of seclusion.

A delay of nearly two years seems to have taken place between the disgrace and the sentence passed on Ovid, and it must have been during this interval that he visited his friend Fabius at Elba, probably with the view of inducing him to intercede for him. At last the edict, dictated by relentless policy rather than personal vindictiveness, was published. He was left in the enjoyment of the rights of citizenship and in the possession of his property (perhaps through the exercise of the influence of Livia in favour of his wife), but was ordered to leave Rome on a particular day, and to settle at the very outskirts of civilization,—in the semi-Greek semi-barbaric town of Tomi, near the mouth of the Danube. He tells vividly the story of the agony of his last night at Rome, of the dangers and hardships of his winter voyage down the Adriatic, and of his desolate feelings on his first arrival at his new abode. But this was merely the beginning of his miseries. For eight years he bore up in his solitude, in the dreariest circumstances, suffering from the unhealthiness of the climate and exposed to constant alarm from the incursions of the neighbouring barbarians. He continued to be buoyed up by hopes first of a remission of his sentence, afterwards of at least a change to another place of exile. He wrote his complaints first in a series of books sent successively to Rome, afterwards in a number of poetical epistles, also collected into books, addressed to all his friends who were likely to have influence at court. He believed that Augustus had softened towards him before his death, but his successor was inexorable to his complaints. Perhaps the person who most deeply resented the offence was the one who exercised the greatest influence over both, the empress Livia, whose life and example were a protest against the laxity of the age, and who was an unsympathetic stepmother to the members of the imperial family. His chief consolation was the exercise of his art, and the only expression of a worthy feeling of resistance to his misery is in a letter to his daughter Perilla, in which he asserts that over his genius Augustus had no control :—

“Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque: Caesar in hoc potuit juris habere nihil.”

— Tristia, iii. 7,...