of Dedemsvaart has been mostly reclaimed. This industry is now most active on the eastern borders between Almelo and Hardenberg, Vriezenveen being the chief fen colony. Cotton-spinning, together with bleaching-works, has come into prominence in the 19th century in the district of Twente. The reason of its isolated settlement here is to be found in the former general practice of weaving as a home craft and its organization as an industry by capitalist Baptist refugees who arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries. The chief town of the province is Zwolle, and other thriving industrial centres are Deventer, famous for its carpets and cake, and Almelo, Enschede, Hengelo and Oldenzaal in Twente. Kampen, Genemuiden, Vollenhove and Blokzyl, on the Zuider Zee, carry on some fishing trade. Near Vollenhove was the castle of Toutenburg, built in 1502–1533 by the famous stadtholder of the emperor Charles V., George Schenk. The castle was demolished in the beginning of the 19th century and the remains are slight. The railway system of the province is supplemented by steam tram-lines between Zwolle, Dedemsvaart and Hardenberg.
OVID [Publius Ovidius Naso] (43 B.C.–A.D. 17), Roman poet, the last of the Augustan age, was born in 43 B.C., the last year of the republic, the year of the death of Cicero. Thus the only form of political life known to Ovid was that of the 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 his writings. The spirit inherited from his ancestors was that of the Italian country districts, not that of Rome. He was born on the 20th of March (his self-consciousness has preserved the exact day of the month)[1] at Sulmo, now Sulmona, a town of the Paeligni, picturesquely situated among the mountains of the Abruzzi: its wealth of waters and natural beauties seem to have strongly affected the young poet’s imagination (for he often speaks of them with affectionate admiration) and to have quickened in him that appreciative eye for the beauties of nature which is one of the chief characteristics of his poems. The Paeligni were one of the four small mountain peoples whose proudest memories were of the part they had played in the Social War. But in spite of this they had no old race-hostility with Rome, and their opposition to the senatorial aristocracy in the Social War would predispose them to accept the empire. Ovid, whose father was of equestrian family, 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 vigorous vitality was apparently a gift transmitted to him by heredity; 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,”[2] and that his father did what he could to dissuade him from poetry, and force him into the more profitable career of the law. He and his brother had been brought early to Rome for their education, where they attended the lectures of two most eminent teachers of rhetoric, Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro, to which influence is due the strong rhetorical element in Ovid’s style. He 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,”[3] 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. “Virgil,” he informs us, “he had only seen”; but Virgil’s friend and contemporary Aemilius Macer used to read his didactic poems to him; and even the fastidious Horace some times delighted his ears with the music of his verse. He had a close 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 he nowhere mentions. The time of his influence was past when Ovid entered upon his poetical career. But the veteran politician Messalla, the friend of Tibullus, together with his powerful son Cotta Messallinus and Fabius Maximus, who are mentioned together by Juvenal[4] along with Maecenas as types of munificent patrons of letters, and other influential persons whose names are preserved in the Epistles from Pontus, encouraged his literary efforts and extended to him their support. He enjoyed also the intimacy of poets and literary men, chiefly of the younger generation, whose names he enumerates in Ex Ponto, iv. 16, though, with the exception of Domitius Marsus and Grattius, they are scarcely more than names to us. With the older poet, Macer, he travelled for more than a year. Whether this was 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 is unknown, but it is in his later works, the Fasti and Metamorphoses, that we chiefly recognize the impressions of the scenes he visited. In one of the Epistles from Pontus (ii. 10) to his fellow-traveller there is a vivid record of the pleasant time they had passed together. Athens was to a Roman then what Rome is to an educated Englishman of the present day. Ovid speaks of having gone there under the influence of literary enthusiasm, and a similar impulse induced him to visit the supposed site of Troy. The two friends saw together the illustrious 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[5] and Virgil,[6] by its manifold charm of climate, of sea-shore and inland scenery, and of legendary and poetical association. He recalls with a fresh sense of pleasure the incidents of their tour, and the endless delight which they had in each other’s conversation. We would gladly exchange the record of his life of pleasure in Rome for more of these recollections. The highest type of classic Roman culture shows its affinity to that of modern times by nothing more clearly than the enthusiasm for travel among lands famous for their natural beauty, their monuments of art and their historical associations.
When settled at Rome, although a public career leading to senatorial position was open to him, and although he filled various minor judicial posts 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 was three times married; when little more than a boy to his first wife, whom he naïvely describes as unworthy of himself:[7] but he was soon separated from her and took a second wife, with whom his union, although through no fault of hers, did not last long. She was probably the mother of his one daughter. Later he was joined to a third wife, of whom he always speaks with affection and respect. She was a lady of the great Fabian house, and thus connected with his powerful patron Fabius Maximus, and was a friend of the empress Livia. It therefore seems likely that he may 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. His liaison with his mistress Corinna, whom he celebrates in the Amores, took place probably in the period between his first and second, or between his second and third marriages. It is doubtful whether Corinna was, like Catullus Lesbia, a lady of recognized position, or whether she belonged to
- ↑ Trist. iv. 10. 13.
- ↑ Am. i. 3. 10.
- ↑ Trist. iv. 10. 26 “et quod temptabam scribere, versus erat.”
- ↑ Juv. vii. 95.
- ↑ Lucret. i. 726—
“quae cum magna modis multis miranda videtur
gentibus humanis regio visendaque fertur.” - ↑ Sueton. (Donatus), Vita Virg. 13 “quamquam secessu Campaniae Siciliaeque plurimum uteretur.”
- ↑ Trist. iv. 10. 69-70.
