OVID (P. Ovidius Naso) was the last in order, of time of the poets of the Augustan age, whose works have given to it the distinction of ranking among the great eras in the history of human culture. As is the case with most other Roman writers, his personal history has to be gathered almost entirely from his own writings. The materials for his life are partly the record of the immediate impressions of the time in which they were written contained in the Amores, partly the reminiscences of his happier days, to which his mind constantly recurred in the writings from his place of exile.
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, 47.
Yet as time goes on he is painfully conscious of failure in power, and of the absence of all motive to perfect his work. He had access to no books except such as he may have brought with him, and the zest for reading, as for all other pleasure, was gone. He recalls the memories of the happy days he had spent at Rome; and the chief relief to the misery of his exile was the receipt of letters from his friends. Μ. Gaston Boissier says that he left his genius behind him at Rome; and it is true that the works written in exile have not the brilliant versatility, the buoyant spirit, or the finished art of his earlier writings. They harp eternally on the same theme. All his faults of diffuseness and self-repetition appear in an exaggerated form. But there is the same power of vivid realization and expression, the same power of making his thought, feeling, and situation immediately present to the reader. What they lose in art they gain in personal interest. They have, like the letters of Cicero to Atticus, the fascination exercised by those works which have been given to the world under the title of Confessions ∙, and they are the sincerest expression in literature of the state of mind produced by a unique experience,—that of a man, when well advanced in years, but still retaining extraordinary sensibility to pleasure and pain, withdrawn from a most brilliant position in the centre of social and intellectual life and material civilization, and cast upon his own resources in a place and among people affording the dreariest contrast to all that had gratified his eye, heart, and mind through the whole of his previous life. How far these letters and confidences are to be regarded as equally sincere expressions of his affection or admiration for his correspondents is another question, which need not be pressed. Even in those addressed to his wife, in which he might be supposed to pour out his heart naturally, there may perhaps be detected a certain ring of insincerity. He pays her compliments, addresses her in the studied language of gallantry, and compares her to Penelope and Laodamia and the other famous heroines of ancient legend. Had she been a Penelope or a Laodamia she would have accompanied him in his exile, as we learn from Tacitus was done by other wives 1 in the more evil days of which he wrote the record. There is a note of truer affection in the one letter to his daughter Perilla, of whose genius and beauty he was proud, and who in her tastes and character was more in sympathy with him. This is one of several points of resemblance in the position, feelings, and fortunes of Ovid with one whose career and character were so essentially different—Cicero. He shows a regard for many of his friends, and dependence on their sympathy and appreciation, and he recalls with some bitterness the coldness with which some of those in whom he had trusted treated him when his disgrace first overtook him. He was moved by the persistent hostility of one whom he had regarded as a friend to an act of retaliation for which neither his temper nor his genius was adapted,—the composition of a lampoon, the Ibis, in imitation of a poem of Callimachus, called by the same name. His affections, like his genius, were diffused widely rather than strongly concentrated, and he seems to have had rather a large circle of intimate acquaintances than any close friends to whom he was attached as Cicero was to Atticus, Horace to Maecenas, Catullus to Calvus and Verannius. He was evidently a man of gentle and genial manners; and, as his active mind induced him to learn the language of the new people among whom he was thrown, his active interest in life enabled him to gain their regard and various marks of honour. One of the last acts of his literary career was to revise the Fasti and re-edit it with a dedication to Germanicus. The last lines of the Ex Ponto sound like the despairing sigh of a drowning man who had long struggled alone with the waves :—
‘ ‘ Omnia perdidimus, tantum modo vita relicta est Praebeat ut sensum materiamque malis.”
Shortly after these words were written the poet died, at the age of sixty-one, in the year 17 a.d., the third year of the reign of Tiberius.
The natural temperament of Ovid, as indicated in his writings, has more in common with the suppleness and finesse of the modern Italian than with the strength and direct force of the ancient Roman. That stamp of her own character and understanding which Rome impressed on the genius of those other races, Italian, Celtic, or Iberian, which she incorporated with herself, is fainter in Ovid than in any other great writer. He ostentatiously disclaims the manliness which in the republican times was regarded as the birthright not of Romans only but of the Sabellian races from which he sprung. He is as devoid of dignity in his abandonment to pleasure as in the weakness with which he meets calamity. He has no depth of serious conviction, no vein of sober reflexion, and is sustained by no great or elevating purpose. Although the beings of a supernatural world fill a large place in his writings, they appear stripped of all sanctity and mystery. It is difficult to say whether the tone in which the adventures of the gods and goddesses of mythology are told, or his prayer offered to the gods of heaven and of the sea, when in danger of shipwreck,
“Pro superi viridesque dei, quibus aequora curae,” implies a kind of half-believing return to the most childish elements of paganism, or is simply one of mocking unbelief. He has absolutely no reverence, and consequently almost alone among the greater poets of Greece or Rome (the “sancti” of Lucretius, the “pii vates” of Virgil) he inspires no reverence in his reader. With all a poet’s feeling for the life, variety, and subtlety of nature, he has no sense of her mystery and majesty. Though he can give dramatic expression to pathetic emotion, the profound melancholy of Lucretius, the spiritual sadness, half-relieved by dim spiritual hopes, of Virgil, the thoughtful renunciation with which Horace fronts “the cloud of mortal destiny,” are states of mind which were seemingly inconceivable by him. Nor is he more capable of sounding the deeper sources of joy than of sorrow. The love which he celebrates is sensual and superficial—a matter of vanity as much as of passion. He prefers the piquant attraction of falsehood and fickleness to the charm of truth and constancy. Even where he follows Roman tendencies in his art he perverts them. Didactic poetry has set before itself many false ends in ancient Roman as in modern English literature; but the pedantry of systematic teaching has never been so strangely misapplied, as it never has been so strangely combined with brilliant power of execution, as in the methodical teaching of the art—“corrumpere et corrumpi.” The Fasti is a work conceived in the prosaic spirit of Roman antiquarianism. But this conception might have been made poetical had it been penetrated by the religious and patriotic spirit in which Virgil treats the origin of ancient ceremonies, or the serious, half mystic spirit in which he accepts the revelations of science. The contrast between the actual trivialities of ancient science and ancient ceremonial, on the one hand, and the new meaning which both were capable of receiving from a reverential treatment, could not be more effectually enforced than by a comparison of passages in the Georgies and Aeneid treating the astronomical fancies and religious ceremonies of early ages with the literal definiteness or the light persiflage of the Fasti.
These grave defects in strength and gravity of character had an important effect on the artistic result of Ovid’s writings. Though he wanted neither diligence, perseverance, nor literary ambition, he seems incapable of conceiving a great and serious whole. Though his mind works very actively in the way of observing and reflecting on 1 “Comitatae profugos liberos matres, secutae maritos in exilia conjuges” (Tac., Hist., i. 3).
the superficial aspects of life, yet he has added no great thoughts or maxims to the moral or intellectual heritage of the world. With a more versatile dramatic faculty than any of his countrymen, he has created no great character, comparable either with the grand impersonations of Greek tragedy, or with the Dido and Turnus of Virgil. He has both the psychological power of reading and the rhetorical power of expressing passion and emotion of different kinds; but he has not a genuine and consistent sense of human greatness or heroism. He represents with impartial sympathy the noble heart of Laodamia and the unhallowed lust of Myrrha. His spirit seems thoroughly ironical or indifferent in regard to the higher ideals or graver convictions of men.
But with all the laxity and levity of his character he must have had qualities which made him, if not much esteemed, yet much liked in his own day, and which have perpetuated themselves in the genial amiability of his writings. He claims for himself two social virtues, highly prized by the Romans, “fides” and “candor,”—the qualities of social honour and kindly sincerity, the qualities which made a man a pleasant member of society and a friend who might be relied on in the ordinary relations of life. There is no indication of anything base, anything ungenerous, or anything morose in his relations to others. The literary quality of “candor,” the generous appreciation of all sorts of excellence, he possesses in a remarkable degree. He heartily admires everything in the literature of the past, Greek or Roman, that had any merit. In him more than in any of the other Augustan poets we find words of admiration more than once applied to the rude genius of Ennius and the high spirit of Accius. It is by him, not by Virgil or Horace, that Lucretius is first named and the sublimity of his genius is first acknowledged. The image of Catullus that most haunts the imagination is that of the poet who died so early—
.... “hedera juvenalia cinctus Tempora,”
as he is represented by Ovid coming to meet the shade of the young Tibullus in Elysiuni. To his own contemporaries, known and unknown to fame, he is as liberal in his words of recognition. He enjoyed society too in a thoroughly amiable and unenvious spirit. He lived on a friendly footing with a large circle of men of letters, poets, critics, grammarians, &c., but he showed none of that sense of superiority which is manifest in Horace’s estimate of the “tribes of grammarians” and the poetasters of his day. Like Horace, too, he courted the society of the great, and probably he did not maintain an equally independent attitude towards it; but unlike Horace he expresses no contempt for the profane world outside. With his gifts of irony and knowledge of the world one might have expected him to be the social satirist of the later phase of the Augustan age. But he wanted the censorious and critical temper necessary for a social, and the admixture of gall in his disposition necessary for a successful personal satirist.
“Candidus a salibus suffusis feile refugi”
is a claim on our regard which he is fully justified in making. In his exile, and in imitation of his model Callimachus, he did retaliate on one enemy and persistent detractor; but the Ibis is a satire more remarkable for irrelevant learning than for epigrammatic sting.
But his chief personal endowment was his vivacity, and his keen interest in and enjoyment of life. He had no grain of discontent in his composition. He had no regrets for an ideal past nor longings for an imaginary future. The age in which his lot was cast was, as he tells us, that in which more than any other he would have wished to live.
He is its most gifted representative, but he does not rise above it. The great object of his art was to amuse and delight it by the vivid picture he presented of its actual fashions and pleasures, and by creating a literature of romance which reflected these fashions and pleasures, and which could stimulate the curiosity and fascinate the fancy of a society too idle and luxurious for serious intellectual effort. The sympathy which he felt with the love adventures and intrigues of his contemporaries, to which he probably owed his fall, quickened his creative power to the composition of the Heroides and the romantic tales of the Metamorphoses. Catullus, by his force of concentration, makes the actual life of his age more immediately present; but none of the Roman poets can people a purely imaginary world with such spontaneous fertility of fancy as Ovid. In heart and mind he is inferior to Lucretius and Catullus, to Virgil and Horace, perhaps to Tibullus and Propertius; but in the power and range of imaginative vision he is surpassed by no ancient and by few modem poets. This power of vision is the counterpart of his lively sensuous nature. He has a keener eye for the apprehension of outward beauty, for the life and colour and forms of nature, than any Roman or perhaps than any Greek poet. This power, acting upon the wealth of his varied reading, gathered with eager curiosity and received into a singularly retentive mind, has enabled him to body forth scenes of the most varied and picturesque beauty in all the lands of Europe and Asia famous in ancient song and story. If his tragedy the Medea, highly praised by ancient critics, had been preserved, we should have been able to judge whether Roman art was capable of producing a great drama. In many of the Heroides, and in several speeches attributed to his imaginary personages, he gives evidence of true dramatic creativeness. Catullus, in his Ariadne and his Attis, has given a voice to deeper and more powerful feeling, and he presents an idyllic picture of the heroic age with a purer charm. But the range and variety of his art were limited by the shortness as well as the turmoil of his life. Catullus is unsurpassed as the author of an epic idyll. Ovid is not idyllic in his art, or whatever there is of idyllic in it is lost in the rapid movement of his narrative. But he is one, among the poets of all times, who can imagine a story with most vivid inventiveness and tell it with most unflagging animation. An ideal world, poetical and supernatural, but never fantastic or grotesque, of beings rich with the beauty and fulness of youth, playing their part in scenes of picturesque beauty, is brought before us in verse and diction of apparently inexhaustible resource and unimpeded flow, partly created or rising up spontaneously for the occasion, partly borrowed boldly and freely from all his predecessors in Latin poetry, but always full of genuine life and movement. The faults of his verse and diction are those which arise from the vitality of his temperament,—too facile a flow, too great exuberance of illustration. He has as little sense of the need of severe restraint in his art as in his life. He is not without mannerism, but he is quite unaffected, and, however far short he might fall of the highest excellence of verse or style, it was not possible for him to be rough or harsh, dull or obscure.
As regards the school of art to which he belongs, he may be described as the most brilliant representative of Roman Alexandrinism. The latter half of the Augustan age was, in its social and intellectual aspects, more like the Alexandrian age than any other era of antiquity. The Alexandrian age was like the Augustan, one of refinement and luxury, of outward magnificence and literary dilettanteism flourishing under the fostering influence of an absolute monarchy. Poetry was the only important branch of literature cultivated, and the chief subjects of poetry were mythological tales, various phases of the passion of love, the popular aspects of science, and some aspects of the beauty of nature. These, too, were the chief subjects of the later Augustan poetry. The higher feelings and ideas which found expression in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, Varius, and the writers of an older generation no longer acted on the Roman world. It was to the private tastes and pleasures of individuals and society that Roman Alexandrinism had appealed both in the poetry of Catullus, Cinna, Calvus, &c., and in that of Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Ovid was the last of this school of writers; he profited at the very entrance on his poetical career by the artistic accomplishment in form, metre, and diction which had been gained by the slow labours of his predecessors; his fancy was much more active and brilliant than that of any of them; and his spirit was more unreservedly satisfied with the conditions imposed both by the art to which he devoted himself and the political and social circumstances by which he was surrounded. Like all his countrymen, he wanted power to create a new form of art and a new vehicle of expression. But if he could have foreseen his future fame his literary ambition would have been completely satisfied by the consciousness that he had not only immeasurably surpassed, but had, for all after time, practically superseded his Greek models. He has confined himself to two vehicles of expression—the elegiac metre and the hexameter. In the first the great mass of his poetry is written,—the Heroides, the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, the Remedia Amoris, the Fasti, the Tristia, the Ex Ponto, the Ibis, the Medicamina Faciei; in the hexameter we have the work which he regarded as that on which his hope of immortality was based, the Metamorphoses, and a fragment of a didactic poem written in the style of the Alexandrians, probably with the mere desire to kill time in the place of his exile, called the Halieutica. Of the first metre he is the acknowledged master. He brought it to its highest perfection, and all the immense mass of elegiac verse published and written in modern times has merely endeavoured to reproduce the echo of his rhythm and manner. In the direct expression and illustration of feeling, his elegiac metre has much more ease, vivacity, and sparkle than that of any of his predecessors, while he alone has communicated to it, without altering its essential characteristic of recurrent and regular pauses, a fluidity and rapidity of movement which makes it an admirable vehicle for tales of pathetic and picturesque interest. It was impossible for him to give to the hexameter a greater perfection than it had already attained, but he imparted to it also a new character, wanting indeed the weight, and majesty, and intricate harmonies of Virgil, but rapid, varied, animated, and in complete accord with the swift, versatile, and fervid movement of his imagination. One other proof he gave of his irrepressible energy and vitality by composing, during his exile, a poem in the Gothic language, in praise of Augustus,—the loss of which, whatever it may have been to literature, is one much to be regretted in the interests of philological science.
Ovid would, in any previous century since the revival of classical studies, have been regarded as a more important representative of ancient life and feeling, and as a greater poet, than he is in the present day. During the earlier period of this revival, the beauty and refinement of ancient literature, and of the life to which that literature is the key, were better appreciated than their moral and intellectual greatness. As the representative writer of an age of great material civilization and luxury, he gained the attention of a time and a class struggling towards a similar civilization and animated by the same love of pleasure. It was in his writings that the world of romance and wonder, created by the early Greek imagination, was first revealed to the modem world. The vivid, sensuous fancy through which he reproduced the tales and beings of mythology, as well as the transparent lucidity, the unfailing liveliness, the ease and directness of the medium through which this is done, made his works the most accessible and among the most attractive of the recovered treasures of antiquity. His influence was first felt in the literature of the Italian Renaissance. But in the most creative periods of English literature he seems to have been more read than any other ancient poet, not even excepting Virgil; and it was on the most creative minds, such as those of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, that he acted most powerfully. The continuance of his influence is equally unmistakable during the classical era of Addison and Pope. The most successful Latin poetry of modern times has been written in imitation of him; and the accomplishment by which the faculty of literary composition and the feeling for ancient Roman culture were most developed in the great schools of England and France was the writing of Ovidian elegiacs. His works gave also a powerful stimulus and supplied abundant materials to the great painters who flourished during and immediately subsequent to the Renaissance. The mythological figures and landscapes which crowd the great galleries of Europe reproduce on canvas the forms, life, colour, and spirit which first were clothed in words anc. metre in his Elegies and Metamorphoses.
But, whatever charm individual readers of ancient literature may still find in him, no one would claim for him anything like the same influence on literature, art, and education in the present day as he formerly enjoyed. Judged by the attention given to their works by professional scholars and also in current criticism, not only Virgil and Horace, but Lucretius and Catullus, appear to be more in esteem than Ovid. This may perhaps be due as much to a loss in imagination as to a gain in critical power. Although the spirit of antiquity is better understood now than it was in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet in the capacity of appreciating works of brilliant fancy we can claim no superiority over the centuries which produced Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, nor over those which produced the great Italian, French, and Flemish painters. Still, whatever be the cause of the change in taste, Ovid is not one of those poets who seem to have much to teach us, or much power to move and interest us now. Perhaps the very liveliness and clearness of his style and manner, which made him the most accessible of ancient authors in times of less exact learning, have tended to deaden curiosity about him in the present day. There is no deep or recondite meaning to be extracted from him. The sensuous and more superficial aspects of the later phase of ancient civilization, of which he is the most brilliant exponent, have much less interest for us than the heroic aspects of its earlier phase, and the spiritual, ethical, and political significance of its maturity. The art which chiefly ministers to pleasure, though it had its place in the great ages of antiquity, had then only a subordinate one; and it is to that place that it has been relegated by the permanent judgment of the world. It is of that art that Ovid is the chief master, and it is that with which he is identified. There might almost seem to be some danger of his falling into the neglect which has deservedly overtaken the authors of the epics of the Flavian era. It is therefore perhaps worth while to indicate some of the grounds on which his works must continue to hold an important place in any comprehensive study of Roman literature or human culture.
His first claim on the attention of modern readers is that already indicated—the influence which he exercised on the earlier development of modern art and literature. Just as certain Greek poets and literary periods (the Alexandrian for instance) claim attention as much on account of their influence on the development of Roman literature as on their own account, so, if for no other reason, the works of Ovid must always retain an importance, second only to those of Virgil and Horace, as one of the chief media through which the stream of ancient feeling and fancy mingled with the great river of modern literature.
He is interesting further as the sole contemporary exponent of the last half of the Augustan age. The whole of that age is a time of which the outward show and the inner spirit are known from the works, not of contemporary historians or prose-writers, but of its poets. The successive phases of feeling and experience through which the world passed during the whole of this critical period of human affairs are revealed in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Virgil throws an idealizing and religious halo around the hopes and aspirations of the first rise of the empire. His aim seems to be to bring the new regime into living connexion with the past, not of Rome only but of the civilized world. Horace presents the most complete image of his age in its most various aspects, realistic and ideal. Ovid, in all his earlier writings, reflects the life of the world of wealth and fashion under the influence of the new court. It is a life of material prosperity, splendour, refinement, of frivolity and intrigue, of dilettanteism in literature, of decay in all the nobler energies, of servility and adulation. He is the most characteristic painter such a time could have found. For the continuous study of the Roman world in its moral and social relations, his place is important as marking a stage of transition between the representation of Horace, in which the life of pleasure and amusement has its place, but one subordinate to the life of reflexion and of serious affairs, and the life which reveals itself in the cynicism of Martial aud the morose disgust of Juvenal.
From the times of Ennius and Lucilius, Roman poetry occupied itself much with the lives, pursuits, and personal feelings of its authors, and this is one element of interest which it has in common with such works as the Letters of Cicero and of Pliny. Few poets of any age or country bring themselves into such close relation with their readers as Catullus, Horace, Ovid, aud Martial. Ovid is in mind and character perhaps the least interesting of the four. But an exceptional interest attaches to his history. He attracts curiosity by having a secret, which, though it may be guessed with an approach to certainty, is not fully revealed. He excites also personal sympathy by the contrast presented in his writings between the unclouded gaiety of his youth and prime and the long heart-break of his exile. If we knew him only from the personal impression which he makes in the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, it would be allowed that few men of equal genius had so little claim on the esteem of the world. In the ten books of complaint which he pours out from his place of exile, though he shows no sign of a manlier temper than when he wrote his “imbelles elegi,” yet by the vividness with which he realizes the contrast between his past and present, by his keen capacity for ι>leasure and pain, by the unreserve with which he exposes all his èelings, he forces himself on our intimacy, and awakens those sympathies which all sincere and passionate confessions create, where there is nothing base or malignant in the temper of their author to alienate them. Though his fate does not rouse the powerful interest inspired by the “fiery courage” and “Titanic might” with which Byron struggled during his self-imposed exile, yet to it, too, apply the sympathetic words of Virgil—“Mentem mortalia tangunt.”
But it was not owing to the historical and personal interest of his works that he gained his great name among his countrymen and the readers of a former generation, nor is it on that ground solely that he claims attention now. He is the last true poet of the great age of Roman literature,—which begins with Lucretius and closes with him,—of the age which drew the most powerful stimulus from the genius and art of Greece, from the sentiment inspired by Rome, and from the Italian love of nature. Among the five or six great poets of that time Ovid is distinguished both as a brilliant artist who brought one branch of poetry to the highest perfection and also as a poet in whom one rich vein of the genius of I taly most conspicuously manifested itself. It is mainly through his reproduction of the forms, metres, and materials of the chief Alexandrian poets that these have maintained an enduring place in literature. But, great as he was,in art and imitative faculty, his spontaneous gifts of genius were still more remarkable. If his works had perished we should have had a most inadequate idea of what the fervid Italian genius could accomplish in ancient times. No other Roman poet can invent and tell a story and make an outward scene and dramatic situation present to the eye and mind with such vivid power. If he does not greatly move the deeper sources of emotion, he has the power of lightly stirring many of them. No Roman poet writes with such ease, life, and rapidity of movement None is endowed with such fertility of fancy, such quickness of apprehension. In respect of his vivacity and fertility we recognize in him the countryman of Cicero and Livy. But the type of genius of which he affords the best example is more familiar in modern Italian than in ancient Roman literature. While the serious spirit of Lucretius and Virgil reappeared in Dante, the qualities attributed by his latest and most accomplished critic to Ariosto may be said to reproduce the light-hearted gaiety and the brilliant fancy of Ovid.
There were several editions of Ovi i’s collected works in the 16th and 17th centuries, the time in which he enjoyed his greatest popularity. Recent editions of the text have been published by R. Merkel and A. Riese. The most important aids to the study of Ovid recently made in England are the editions of the Ibis by Mr Robinson Ellis, and those of the Her aides, by Mr A. Palmer. Much light is thrown on the diction of Ovid by Zingerle in his Ovidius und sein Verhältniss zu den Vorgängern. The most interesting discussion on the cause of his exile is that of Μ. Gaston Boissier, which originally appeared in the Revue des beux Mondes, and norç forms part of his volume entitled L'Opposition sous les Césars.
