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 scattered through his works, he gives evidence of true dramatic creativeness. Unlike his great predecessor Catullus, he has little of the idyllic in his art, or whatever of idyllic there is 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 the most vivid inventiveness and tell it with the most unflagging animation. 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 Alexandrine age than any other era of antiquity. The Alexandrine age was like the Augustan, one of refinement and luxury, of outward magnificence and literary dilettantism flourishing under the fostering influence of an absolute monarchy. Poetry was the most 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 two were the chief subjects of the later Augustan poetry. The higher feelings and ideas which found expression in the poetry of Virgil, Horace 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 and their school, and in that of Gallus, Tibullus and Propertius. Ovid was the last of this class of writers.
His extant works fall naturally into three divisions, those of his youth, of middle life and of his later years. To the first of these divisions belong the amatory poems: (1) the three books of Amores (originally five, but reduced in a later recension to three) relating to his amours with his mistress Corinna; (2) the Medicamina formae, or, as it is sometimes called Medicamina faciei, a fragment of a hundred lines on the use of cosmetics; (3) the three books of the Ars amatoria, rules for men and women by which they may gain the affections of the other sex; (4) the Remedia amoris (one book), a kind of recantation of the Ars amatoria. To the second division belong (5) the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses, and (6) the six books of the Fasti, which was originally intended to be in twelve books, but which breaks off the account of the Roman calendar with the month of June. To the third division belong (7) the five books of the Tristia, (8) the Ibis, an invective against an enemy who had assisted to procure his fall, written in elegiac couplets probably soon after his exile; (9) the four books of Epislulae ex Panto. Of these the first three were published soon after the Tristia, while the fourth book is a collection of scattered poems published by some friend soon after the author’s death. The Halieutica is a didactic fragment in hexameters on the natural history of fishes, of doubtful genuineness, though it is certain that Ovid did begin such a work at the close of his life.
In his extant works Ovid confined himself to two metres—the elegiac couplet and the hexameter. The great mass of his poetry is written in the first; while the Metamorphoses and the Halieutica are composed in the second. Of the elegiac couplet he is the acknowledged master. By fixing it into a uniform, mould he brought it to its highest perfection; and the fact that the great mass of elegiac verse written subsequently has endeavoured merely to reproduce the echo of his rhythm is evidence of his pre-eminence. In the direct expression and illustration of feeling his elegiac metre has 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 make it an admirable vehicle for pathetic and picturesque narrative. It was impossible for him to give to the hexameter greater perfection, but he imparted to it also a new character, wanting indeed the weight and majesty and intricate harmonies of Virgil, but rapid, varied, animated in complete accord with the swift, versatile and fervid movement of his imagination. One other proof he gave of his irrepressible energy by composing during his exile a poem in the Getic (Gothic) language in praise of Augustus, Tiberius and the imperial family, the loss of which, whatever it may have been to literature, is much to be regretted in the interests of philology.
It was in Ovid’s writings that the world of romance and wonder created by Greek imagination was first revealed to modern times. The vivid fancy, the transparent lucidity, the liveliness, ease and directness through which he reproduced his models 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 read more than any other ancient poet, not even excepting Virgil, and it was on minds such as those of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare[1], Milton and Dryden that he acted most powerfully. His influence is equally unmistakable during the classical era of Addison and Pope. The most successful Latin verse of modern times has been written in imitation of him; the faculty of literary composition and feeling for ancient Roman culture has been largely developed in the great schools of England and France by the writing of Ovidian elegiacs. His works afforded also abundant stimulus and materials to the great painters who flourished during and immediately after the Renaissance. Thus his first claim on the attention of modern readers is the influence which he has exercised on the development of literature and art; for this, if for no other reason, his works must always retain an importance second only to those of Virgil and Horace.
He is interesting further as the sole contemporary exponent of the last half of the Augustan age, the external aspects and inner spirit of which is known from the works, not of contemporary historians or prose-writers, but from its poets. The successive phases of Roman feeling and experience during this critical period are revealed in the poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Virgil throws an idealizing and religious halo around the hopes and aspirations of the nascent empire. Horace presents the most complete image of its manifold aspects, realistic and ideal. Ovid reflects the life of the world of wealth and fashion under the influence of the new court, its material prosperity, its refinement, its frivolity and its adulation. For the continuous study of the Roman world in its social and moral relations his place is important as marking the transition between the representation of Horace, in which the life of pleasure and amusement has its place, but is subordinate to the life of reflection and serious purpose, and that life which reveals itself in the cynicism of Martial and the scornful indignation of Juvenal. He is the last true poet of the great age of Roman literature, which begins with Lucretius and closes with him. No Roman poet writes with such vivacity and fertility of fancy; in respect of these two qualities 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, it is Ariosto who may be said to reproduce the light-hearted gaiety and brilliant fancy of Ovid.
Bibliography.—The life of Ovid was first treated systematically by J. Masson, Ovidii vita ordine chronologico digesta (1780) (often reprinted, e.g. in Burmann’s edition). Modern literature on this subject will be found in Teuffel’s History of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., ed. 2), § 247, and S. G. Owen’s edition of Tristia, bk. i. The very numerous manuscripts of Ovid are chiefly of late date, 13th to 15th century. The earliest and best are: for the Heroides a Paris MS. of the 9th, a Wolfenbüttel MS. of the 12th and an Eton
- ↑ The influence of Ovid on Shakespeare is shown conclusively by T. S. Baynes, Shakespeare Studies (1894), p. 195 ff.
