Ovid Publius Ovidius Nasd 43 Bc-Ad 17

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 dis inherited; 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 ama toria, 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. Ovid appears to have had no idea of the storm that was gathering over him.

But he was aware that public opinion had been shocked, or pro fessed 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, and a tragedy, the Medea, which must have afforded greater scope for the dramatic and psychological treat ment 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 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 Meta morphoses 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 meta morphosis of Julius Caesar into a star and a promise of im mortality to Augustus. The Metamorphoses 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, treat ing of the first six months of the year.

Banishment.

In A.D. 8 Ovid was ordered by Augustus into banishment ; for this he assigns two causes, his Ars amatoria and an actual offence (Trist. ii. 207). It is natural that Augustus should have felt resentment against the Ars, because its doctrine was a direct challenge to his policy of moral reform. What the actual offence was is a secret which the poet leaves unrevealed; since his disgrace coincided with the banishment of Augustus' granddaughter, the younger Julia, on account of an intrigue with Silanus, it has been supposed that Ovid was concerned in abetting that intrigue, and that this constituted his unforgivable sin. But if Ovid had really assisted to bring about the moral scandal which befell the emperor's family, it is incredible that he could have dared to allude to it, as he does constantly, in his poems.

This, and the fact that, even after Augustus' death, his successor Tiberius left Ovid unpardoned, makes it probable that the offence was political and specially displeasing to Tiberius and Livia be cause it somehow interfered with their dynastic policy. Ovid may have been implicated with those who were over-zealous in the interests of rival possible successors to the throne, either Agrippa Postumus, the grandson of Augustus, or Germanicus, the brilliant and popular nephew of Tiberius, with many of whose friends Ovid was associated. Ovid's banishment was the mild est possible (relegatio) ; 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. 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.

The Epistle.

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 Epistulae 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 all con fessions; 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 intel lectual position, and cast upon his own resources in a place and among people affording the dreariest contrast to the brightness of his previous life. The letters, which compose the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, are addressed either to his wife, the em peror, 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 (Trist. z 1, iv. 9; v. 8) 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 affec tion 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 (Trist. 7). 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.