his exile, as we learn from Tacitus was done by other wives[1] in the more evil days of which he wrote the record. The letters, which compose the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, are addressed either to his wife, the emperor, or the general reader, or to his patrons and friends. To his patrons he writes in a vein of supplication, beseeching them to use their influence on his behalf. To his rather large circle of intimate acquaintances he writes in the language of familiarity, and often of affectionate regard; he seeks the sympathy of some, and speaks with bitterness of the coldness of others, and in three poems[2] he complains of the relentless hostility of the enemy who had contributed to procure his exile, and whom he attacked in the Ibis. There is a note of true affection in the letter to the young lyric poetess Perilla, of whose genius and beauty he speaks with pride, and whose poetic talents he had fostered by friendly criticism.[3] 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 his last acts was to revise the Fasti, and re-edit it with a dedication to Germanicus. The closing lines of the Epistulae ex Ponto sound like the despairing sigh of a drowning man who had long struggled alone with the waves:—
“Omnia perdidimus: tantummodo vita relicta est,
Praebeat ut sensum materiamque mali.”
Shortly after these words were written he died in his sixty-first year in A.D. 17, the fourth year of the reign of Tiberius.
The temperament of Ovid, as indicated in his writings, has more in common with the suppleness of the later Italian than with the strength and force of the ancient Roman. That stamp of her own character and understanding which Rome impressed on the genius of those other races 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 sprang. 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 reflection, 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 of his references to the gods and goddesses of mythology 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 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. 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 the Roman tendencies in his art he perverts them. The Fasti is a work conceived in the prosaic spirit of Roman antiquarianism. It is redeemed from being prosaic by the picturesqueness and vivacity with which the legends are told. But its conception might have been more poetical if it had been penetrated by the religious and patriotic spirit with which Virgil invests ancient ceremonies, and the mysticism with which he accepts the revelations of science. In this respect the contrast is great between the reverential treatment which the trivialities of legend and science receive in the Georgics and Aeneid, and the literal definiteness of the Fasti.
These defects in strength and gravity show a corresponding result in Ovid's writings. Though possessing diligence, perseverance and literary ambition, he seems incapable of conceiving a great and serious whole. Though a keen observer of the superficial aspects of life, he has added few great thoughts to the intellectual heritage of the world.[4] But with all the 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 are apparent in the genial amiability of his writings. He claims for himself two virtues highly prized by the Romans, fides and candor—the qualities of social honour and kindly sincerity. There is no indication of anything base, ungenerous or morose in his relations to others. Literary candor, the generous appreciation of all sorts of excellence, he possesses in a remarkable degree. He heartily admires everything in literature, Greek or Roman, that had any merit. In him more than any of the Augustan poets we find words of admiration applied to the rude genius of Ennius and the majestic style of Accius. It is by him, not by Virgil or Horace, that Lucretius is first named and his sublimity is first acknowledged.[5] The image of Catullus that most haunts the imagination is that of the poet who died so early—
“hedera iuvenalia cinctus
Tempora,”
as he is represented by Ovid coming to meet the shade of the young Tibullus in Elysium.[6] To his own contemporaries, known and unknown to fame, he is as liberal in his words of recognition.[7] 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, though probably not with equal independence; but unlike Horace he expresses no contempt for the humbler world outside. With his irony and knowledge of the world it might have been expected that he would become the social satirist of his age. But he lacked the censorious and critical temper, and the admixture of gall necessary for a successful satirist. In his exile he did retaliate on one enemy and persistent detractor in the Ibis, a poem written in imitation of a similar work by Callimachus; but the Ibis is not a satire, but an invective remarkable rather for recondite learning than for epigrammatic sting.
But Ovid's chief personal endowment was his vivacity, and his keen interest in and enjoyment of life. He had no grain of discontent in his composition; no regrets for an ideal past, or longings for an imaginary future. The age in which he lived was, as he tells us, that in which more than any other he would have wished to live.[8] 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 fashions and pleasures, and by creating a literature of romance which reflected them, 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 for the love adventures of his contemporaries, to which he probably owed his fall, quickened his creative power in the composition of the Heroides and the romantic tales of the Metamorphoses. 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 modern 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 depict with consummate skill and sympathy legendary scenes of the most varied and picturesque beauty. If his tragedy, the
- ↑ Tac. Hist. i. 3 "comitatae profugos liberos matres, secutae maritos in exilia coniuges.”
- ↑ Trist. iii. 11, iv. 9, v. 8.
- ↑ Trist. iii. 7. Perilla has by many been erroneously supposed to have been the poet's own daughter; but this is impossible, since she is described as young and still living under her mother's roof, whereas at the time of Ovid's exile his daughter was already married to her second husband.
- ↑ There are found in him some exceptionally fine expressions, such as Her. iii. 106 “qui bene pro patria cum patriaque iacent”; and Met. vii. 20 “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.”
- ↑ Am. i. 15, 19 ff.
- ↑ Am. iii. 9. 61.
- ↑ Ex Ponto, iv. 16
- ↑ Ars amatoria, iii. 121 ff.
