Ovid Publius Ovidius Nasd 43 Bc-Ad 17

Shortly after these words were written he died in his sixty-first year in A.D. 17.

Temperament.

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 incorpo rated with herself is fainter in Ovid than in any other great writer. He disclaims the manliness which was regarded as the birthright of the Roman. He is equally devoid of dignity in his brilliant prime, and in his later disgrace. His religion is devoid of reverence, his feeling for nature of depth, his loves of sincerity and, almost, even of passion.

These defects in strength and gravity show a corresponding result in Ovid's writings. Though possessing diligence, per severance and literary ambition, he seems incapable of conceiv ing a great and serious whole. 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 apprecia tion 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 that Lucretius is first named and his sublimity is first acknowledged. 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. To his own contemporaries, known and unknown to fame, he is as liberal in his words of recognition. He enjoyed society too in a thoroughly amiable and unenvious spirit. 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. The age in which he lived was, as he tells us, that in which more than any other he would have wished to live. He is its most gifted representative,

and by not rising above it he reflects it the more perfectly. The sympathy which he felt for the love adventures of his con temporaries, to which he probably owed his fall, quickened his creative power in the composition of the Heroides and the roman tic tales of the Metamorphoses. None of the Roman poets can people a purely imaginary world with such spontaneous fertility of fancy as Ovid. 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 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. Among the poets of all times he 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. Poetry was the chief branch of literature, 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. Ovid was the last of this class of writers.