the same class as the Chloes and Lalages of Horace’s artistic fancy. If we can trust the poet’s 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. However that may be, Ovid is not only a less constant but he is a less serious lover than his great predecessors Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius. His tone is that either of mere sensuous feeling or of irony. In his complete emancipation from all restraint he goes beyond them, and thus reflects the tastes and spirit of fashionable Rome between the years 20 B.C. and the beginning of our era. Society was then bent simply on amusement; and, as a result partly of the loss of political interests, women came to play a more important and brilliant part in its life than they had done before. Julia, the daughter of the emperor, was by her position, her wit and beauty, and her reckless dissipation, the natural leader of such a society. But the discovery of her intrigue (2 B.C.) with Iulus Antonius, the son of Mark Antony, was deeply resented by Augustus as being at once a shock to his affections and a blow to his policy of moral reform. Julia was banished and disinherited; Antonius and her many lovers were punished; and the Roman world awoke from its fool’s paradise of pleasure. Nearly coincidently with this scandal appeared Ovid’s Ars amatoria, perhaps the most immoral work ever written by a man of genius, though not the most demoralizing, since it is entirely free from morbid sentiment. By its brilliancy and heartlessness it appealed to the prevailing taste of the fashionable world; but its appearance excited deep resentment in the mind of the emperor, as 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 the fashionable world; he passed before the emperor in the annual procession among the ranks of the equites; and he 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 turned to other subjects, and wrote during the next ten years the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. He had already written the Heroides, in which he had imparted a modern and romantic interest to the heroines of the old mythology,[1] 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[2] by imparting poetical life and interest to the ceremonial observances of the Roman religion; but it is as the brilliant narrator of the romantic tales that were so strangely blended with the realistic annals of Rome that he succeeds in the part assumed by him. The Metamorphoses is a narrative poem which recounts legends in which the miraculous involved transformations of shape. Beginning with the change from Chaos to Cosmos, legends first Greek and then Roman are passed in review, concluding with the metamorphosis of Julius Caesar into a star and a promise of immortality to Augustus. The long series of stories, which consist to a large extent of tales of the love adventures of the gods with nymphs and the daughters of men, is strongly tinged with Alexandrine influence, being in fact a succession of epyllia in the Alexandrine manner. This work, which Ovid regards as his most serious claim to immortality, had not been finally revised at the time of his disgrace, and in his despair he burnt it; but other copies were in existence, and when he was at Tomi it was published at Rome by one of his friends. He often regrets that it had not received his final revision. The Fasti also was broken off by his exile, after the publication of the first six books, treating of the first six months of the year.
Ovid assigns two causes for his banishment, his Ars amatoria, and an actual offence.[3] What this was is not known, but his frequent references to it enable us to conjecture its character. He tells us that there was no breach of law on his part; he distinctly disclaims having been concerned in any treasonable plot: his fault was a mistake of judgment (error), an unpremeditated act of folly. He had been an unintentional witness of some culpable act committed by another or others—of some act which nearly affected the emperor, and the mention of which was likely to prove offensive to him. Ovid himself had reaped no personal gain from his conduct. Though his original act was a pardonable error, he had been prevented by timidity from atoning for it subsequently by taking the straightforward course. In a letter to an intimate friend, 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.[4] In writing to another friend he warns him against the danger of courting too high society. This offence, which excited the anger of Augustus, was connected in some way with the publication of the Ars amatoria, since that fact was recited by the emperor in his sentence. All this points to his having been mixed up in a scandal affecting the imperial family, and seems to connect him with one event, coincident with the time of his disgrace (A.D. 9), the intrigue of the younger Julia, granddaughter of Augustus, with D. Silanus, mentioned by Tacitus.[5] Augustus deeply felt these family scandals, looking upon them as acts of treason and sacrilege. Julia was banished to the island of Trimerus, off the coast of Apulia. Silanus withdrew into voluntary exile. The chief punishment fell on Ovid, who was banished. The poet at the worst could only have been a confidant of the intrigue; but Augustus must have regarded him and his works as, if not the corrupter of the age, at least the most typical representative of that corruption which had tainted so direly even the imperial family. Ovid’s form of banishment was the mildest possible (relegalio); it involved no deprivation of civic rights, and left him the possession of his property. He was ordered to remove to the half-Greek, half-barbaric town of Tomi, near the mouth of the Danube. He recounts vividly the agony of his last night in Rome, and the hardships of his November voyage down the Adriatic and up the Gulf of Corinth to Lechaeum, where he crossed the isthmus and took ship again from Cenchreae to Samothrace, whence in the following spring he proceeded overland through Thrace to his destination. For eight years he bore up in his dreary solitude, suffering from the unhealthiness of the climate and the constant alarm of inroads of barbarians. In the hope of procuring a remission of his punishment he wrote poetical complaints, first in the series of the five books of the Tristia, sent successively to Rome, addressed to friends whose names he suppresses; afterwards in a number of poetical epistles, the Epistiilae ex Ponto, addressed by name to friends who were likely to have influence at court. He believed that Augustus had softened towards him before his death, but his successor Tiberius was inexorable to his appeals. His chief consolation was the exercise of his art, though as time goes on he is painfully conscious of failure in power. But although the works written by him in exile lack the finished art of his earlier writings, their personal interest is greater. 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; they are a sincere literary expression 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 brilliant social and intellectual position, and cast upon his own resources in a place and among people affording the dreariest contrast to the brightness of his previous life. How far these confidences are to be regarded as equally sincere expressions of his affection or admiration for his correspondents is another question. Even in those addressed to his wife, though he speaks of her with affection and respect, there may perhaps be detected a certain ring of insincerity in his conventional comparisons of her to the Penelopes and Laodamias of ancient legend. Had she been a Penelope or Laodamia she would have accompanied him in
