Ovid's second birthday in exile had passed. The hope of an early
release, harboured at first by his family and friends, had died away.
None of them knew what the "blunder" or "crime" was which had aroused
the anger of Augustus, and every effort to bring into high relief
the innocence of Ovid's personal life and his loyalty to the imperial
family simply made them more cognisant of a mystery they could not
fathom. Access to Caesar was easy to some of them, and through Marcia,
Maximus's wife, they had hoped to reach Livia. But these high
personages remained inscrutable and relentless. At times it seemed
as if even Tiberius, although long absent from the city, might be
playing a sinister role in the drama. All that was clear was that
some storm-wind from the fastnesses of the imperial will had swept
through the gaiety of Rome and quenched, like a candle, the bright
life of her favourite poet. It was easy to say that an astonishing
amount of freedom was still Ovid's. His books had been removed from
the public libraries, but the individual's liberty to own or read
them was in no way diminished. Nor was the publication of new work
frowned upon. In the autumn before his banishment Ovid had given out
one or two preliminary copies of his _Metamorphoses_, and his friends
now insisted that a work so full of charm, so characteristic of his
best powers, so innocent of questionable material should be
published, even if it had not undergone a final revision. The author
sent back from Tomi some lines of apology and explanation which he
wished prefixed. He also arranged with the Sosii for the bringing
out of his work on the Roman Calendar when he should have completed
it. And he was at liberty not only to keep up whatever private
correspondence he chose, but to have published a new set of elegiac
poems in the form of frank letters about his present life to his wife
and friends. A third volume of these poems, which he called _Tristia_,
had just appeared and more were likely to follow. He had an
extraordinary instinct for self-revelation.
But in spite of this freedom to raise his voice in Rome, it was obvious
that all that made life dear to Ovid had been taken away. The lover
of sovereign Rome, of her streets and porticoes and theatres, her
temples and forums and gardens, must live at the farthest limit of
the Empire, in a little walled town from whose highest towers a
constant watch was kept against the incursions of untamed barbarians.
The poet to whom war had meant the brilliance of triumphal pageants
in the Sacred Way must now see the rude farmers of a Roman colony
borne off as captives or sacrificing to the enemy their oxen and carts
and little rustic treasures. The man of fifty who had spent his youth
in writing love poetry and who through all his life had had an eye
for Venus in the temple of Mars must wear a sword and helmet, and
dream at night of poisoned arrows and of fetters upon his wrists.
The son of the Italian soil, bred in warmth, his eye accustomed to
flowers and brooks and fertile meadows, must shiver most of the year
under bitter north winds sweeping over the fields of snow which
melted under neither sun nor rain; and in spring could only watch
for the breaking up of the ice in the Danube, the restoration of the
gloomy plains to their crop of wormwood, and the rare arrival of some
brave ship from Italy or Greece. The acknowledged master of the Latin
tongue, the courted talker in brilliant circles in Rome must learn
to write and speak a barbarous jargon if he wished to have any
intercourse with his neighbours. The husband with the heart of a
child, whose little caprices and moods, whose appetite and health
had been the concern of tender eyes, must learn to be sick without
proper food or medicine or nursing, must before his time grow old
and grey and thin and weak, dragged from the covert of a woman's love.
* * * * *
It was spring again and the late afternoon air, which came through
the open window by which Fabia was sitting, was sweet with the year's
new hope, even though borne over city roofs. Fabia had dwelt with
sorrow day and night until there was no one of its Protean shapes
which she did not intimately know. She had even attained to a certain
tolerance of her own hysteria that first night when her uncle and
her servants had had to care for her till morning. It was the last
service she had required of others. Her daughter had hurried to her
and spent weeks with her in watchful companionship. Perilla had come
back in the summer and gone with her to Sulmo. But neither the love
of the one child nor the grief of the other passed into the citadel
where her will stood at bay before the beleaguering troops of pain.
They were newer to her than they usually are to a woman of her age.
The death of her child's father had brought regret rather than sorrow.
Her will had been disciplined only by the habitual performance of
simple duties which had given her happiness. But untaught, unaided,
it slew her enemies and left her victor. Her daughters had long since
given over worrying about her, had, indeed, begun to draw again upon
her generous stores. Only her uncle, who knew the cost of warfare
better, still silently watched her eyes. He knew that her victory
had to be won afresh every night as soon as the aegis of the day was
lifted. For a long time this had meant nights of dry-eyed anguish,
which threatened her sanity, or nights of weakening tears. Through
these months her uncle had come to see her every day. He had not
doubted the strength of her will, but he had feared that the strength
of her body might be sacrificed to its triumph. Her long days of
self-control, however, repaired the ravages of the night hours, and
little by little her strong mind, from which she had resolutely
withheld all narcotics, reasserted its sway over her nerves. She
recovered her power to think. To her a clear understanding of
principles by which she was to decide the details of conduct had
always been essential.
To-day, in this favourite hour of hers, when the mask laid by a busy
day over the realities of life began to be gently withdrawn, she had
set herself the task of analysing certain thoughts which had been
with her hazily for over a week. On Ovid's birthday she had sent
little presents to the grandchildren and written to her stepdaughter
a letter which she hoped would make her feel that she was still the
daughter of her father's house. In doing this she had been poignantly
reminded of the birthday fete two years ago, of Perilla's sweetness
to her, and of their conversation, so light-hearted at the time,
about woman's place in the state. Since then she had been wondering
whether she could still say that it was enough for her to be a wife.
She was perfectly sure that she did not miss the outer satisfactions
of being Ovid's wife. Except as they indicated his downfall, she did
not regret the loss of her former place in society or the desertion
of many of their so-called friends. Indeed, she had welcomed as her
only comfort whatever share she could have in his losses. But was
it true that her life as a whole had no meaning or value apart from
his? Had the hard, solitary fight to be brave meant nothing except
that she could write her husband stimulating letters and help his
child to take up again the joys of youth? She had found and tested
powers in herself that were not Ovid's. What meaning was there in
her phrase--"The wife of a Roman citizen?" She began to think over
Ovid's idea of citizenship. Suddenly she realised, in one of those
flashes that illuminate a series of facts long taken for granted,
that the time he had shown most emotion over being a citizen was on
the night he had left home, when he had insisted that he still
retained his property and his rights. Before that indeed, on the
annual occasions when the Emperor reviewed the equestrian order and
he rode on his beautiful horse in the procession, he had always come
home in a glow of enthusiasm. But she had often felt vaguely, even
then, that the citizen's pride was largely made up of the courtier's
devotion to a ruler, the artist's delight in a pageant and the
favourite's pleasure in applause in which he had a personal share.
That he loved Rome she had never doubted. He loved the external city
because it was fair to the eye. He loved Roman life because it was
free from all that was rustic, because it gave the prizes to wit and
imagination and refinement. The culture of Athens had at last become
domiciled in the capital of a world-empire. Ovid's idea of
citizenship, Fabia said to herself, was to live, amid the beauties
of this capital and in the warmth of imperial and popular favour,
freely, easily, joyfully.
And what was her own idea? Fabia's mind fled back to the days when
she was a little girl in Falerii and her uncle used to come to the
nursery after his dinner and take her on his lap and tell her stories
until she was borne off to bed. The stories had always been about
brave people, and her nurse used to scold, while she undressed her,
about her flushed cheeks and shining eyes. The procession of these
brave ones walked before her now, as a child's eyes had seen
them--Horatius, Virginia, Lucretia, Decius, Regulus, Cato--men and
women who had loved the honour and virtue demanded by Rome, or Rome's
safety better than their lives. The best story of all had been the
one about her own ancestors, the three hundred and six Fabii who,
to establish their country's power, fought by the River Cremera until
every man was dead.
She had grown old enough to read her own stories, to marry, and to
tell stories to a child and to grandchildren, but the time had never
come when her heart had not beat quicker at the thought of men
sacrificing their life or their children, their will or their
well-being to their country's need. She had become a widely read
woman in both Latin and Greek. Her reason told her that appreciation
of beauty in nature and art, grace and elegance in manners,
intellectual freedom and a zest for individual development were
essential factors in the progress of civilisation. She knew that if
her husband had not believed in these things he could not have been
the poet he was, and she knew his poetry had done something for Roman
letters that Virgil's had not done. She had not only loved, with all
the pure passion of her maturity, his charm and his blitheness and
his gifted sensitiveness, but she had been proud of his achievements.
His citizenship had satisfied her. But always, within the barriers
of her own individuality, that faith which is deeper, warmer, more
masterly than reason, had kept her the reverent lover of duty, the
passionate guardian of character, for whose sake she would deny not
only ease and joy, but, even, if the dire need came, beauty itself.
Art the Romans had had to borrow. Their character they had hewn for
themselves, with a chisel unknown to the Greeks, out of the brute
mass of their instincts. Its constancy, its dignity, its magnanimity,
probity and fidelity Cicero had described in words befitting their
massive splendour. To possess this character was to be a Roman
citizen, in the Forum and on the battlefield, in the study and the
studio, in exile and in prison, in life and in death. Ovid's
citizenship, save for the empty title, had been ended by an imperial
decree. In losing Rome he had ceased to be a Roman. His voice came
back only in cries in which there was no dignity and no fortitude.
He was tiring out his friends. Perilla no longer let Fidus see his
letters. Even in her own heart the sharpest sorrow was not his exile
but his defeat. Her love had outlived her pride.
The dreaded night was coming on. Would he moan in his sleep again,
without her quieting hand upon his face, or wake from dreams of her
to loneliness? She rose impetuously and looked up through the narrow
window. The sky was filled with the brightness of the April sunset.
Of pain she was no longer afraid. But she was afraid to go on fighting
with nothing to justify the cost of her successive battles or to
glorify their result. Against the sunset sky rose the Capitol.
Burnished gold had been laid upon its austere contours. Strength was
aflame with glory. She never knew how or why, but suddenly an
answering flame leaped within her. In that majestic temple dwelt the
omnipotent gods of her country. Why should all her prayers be said
to the Penates on her hearth? What did her country need, save, in
manifold forms, which obliterated the barriers of sex, the sacrifice
of self, the performance of duty, the choice of courage? The feverish
talk of women about their independence had failed to hold her
attention. Now a mightier voice, borne from the graves of the dead,
trumpeted from the lives of the living, called to her, above the
warring of her will with sorrow, to be a Roman citizen. She had
neither arms nor counsels to give to her country. She could not even
give sons born of her body, taught of her spirit. She was a woman
alone, she was growing old, she was ungifted. She would be nothing
but a private in the ranks, an obscure workman among master builders.
But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country
to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with
its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable.
She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to
know the outcome, lay them both together upon the altar of Rome's
immortal Spirit.
The new moon hung in the still radiant west. On a moonlit night she
had fallen by the ashes of her hearth and prayed in futile agony to
the gods of her home. Now she stood erect and looked out upon the
city and with a solemn faith prayed to the greater gods. Later she
slept peacefully, for the first time in fifteen months, as one whose
taskmaster has turned comrade.
In the morning her uncle, who had been in Falerii for a few weeks,
came to see her. He looked keenly into her eyes as she hastened across
the wide room to greet him. Then his own eyes flashed and with a sudden
glad movement he bent and kissed her hands. "Heart of my heart," he
said, "in an exile's house I salute a Roman."