there is also contained a group of short pieces by another lady of high
birth and social standing, a niece of Messalla and a daughter of Servius
Sulpicius, and so belonging by both parents to the inner circle of the
aristocracy. Nothing is known of her life beyond what can be gathered
from the poems. But that they should have been published at all, still
more that they should have been published, as they almost certainly were,
with the sanction of Messalla, is a striking instance of the unique
freedom enjoyed by Roman women of the upper classes, and of their
disregard of the ordinary moral conventions. The only ancient parallel is
in the period of the Aeolic Greek civilisation which produced Sappho. The
poems are addressed to her lover, who (according to the fashion of the
time--like Catullus' Lesbia or Propertius' Cynthia) is spoken of by a
Greek name, but was most probably a young Roman of her own circle. The
writer, a young, and apparently an unmarried woman, addresses him with a
frankness of passion that has no idea of concealment. She does not even
take the pains to seal her letters to him, though they contain what most
women would hesitate to put on paper. They have all the same directness,
which sometimes becomes a splendid simplicity. One note, reproaching him
for a supposed infidelity--
_Si tibi cura togae potior pressumque quasillo
Scortum quam Servi filia Sulpicia--_
has all the noble pride of Shakespeare's Imogen. Of the world and its
ways she has no girlish ignorance; but the talk of the world, as a motive
for reticence, simply does not exist for her.
Where young ladies of the upper classes had such freedom as is shown in
these poems, and used it, the ordinary lines of demarcation between
respectable women and women who are not respectable must have largely
disappeared. It has been much and inconclusively debated whether the
Hostia and Plania, to whom, under assumed names, the amatory poems of
Propertius and Tibullus were addressed, were more or less married women
(for at Rome there were degrees of marriage), or women for whom marriage
was a remote and immaterial event. The same controversy has raged over
Ovid's Corinna, who is variously identified as Julia the daughter of the
Emperor herself, as a figment of the imagination, or as an ordinary
courtesan. The truth is, that in the society so brilliantly drawn in the
_Art of Love_, such distinctions were for the time suspended, and we are
in a world which, though for the time it was living and actual, is as
unreal to us as that of the Restoration dramatists.
The young lawyer and man of fashion, Publius Ovidius Naso, who was the
laureate of this gay society, was a few years younger than Propertius,
with whom he was in close and friendly intimacy. The early death of both
Propertius and Tibullus occurred before Ovid published his first volume;
and Horace, the last survivor of the older Augustans, had died some years
before that volume was followed by any important work. The period of
Ovid's greatest fertility was the decade immediately following the
opening of the Christian era; he outlived Augustus by three years, and so
laps over into the sombre period of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which
culminated in the reign of Nero.
As the eldest surviving son of an opulent equestrian family of Upper
Italy, Ovid was trained for the usual career of civil and judicial
office. He studied for the bar at Rome, and, though he never worked hard
at law, filled several judicial offices of importance. But his interest
was almost wholly in the rhetorical side of his profession; he "hated
argument;" and from the rhetoric of the schools to the highly rhetorical
poetry which was coming into fashion there was no violent transition. An
easy fortune, a brilliant wit, an inexhaustible memory, and an unfailing
social tact, soon made him a prominent figure in society; and his genuine
love of literature and admiration for genius--unmingled in his case with
the slightest trace of literary jealousy or self-consciousness--made him
the friend of the whole contemporary world of letters. He did not begin
to publish poetry very early; not because he had any delicacy about doing
so, nor because his genius took long to ripen, but from the good-humoured
laziness which never allowed him to take his own poetry too seriously.
When he was about thirty he published, to be in the fashion, a volume of
amatory elegiacs, which was afterwards re-edited and enlarged into the
existing three books of _Amores_. Probably about the same time he
formally graduated in serious poetry with his tragedy of _Medea_. For ten
or twelve years afterwards he continued to throw off elegiac poems, some
light, others serious, but all alike in their easy polish, and written
from the very first with complete and effortless mastery of the metre. To
this period belong the _Heroides,_ the later pieces in the _Amores,_ the
elaborate poem on the feminine toilet called _De Medicamine Faciei,_ and
other poems now lost. Finally, in 2 or 1 B.C., he published what is
perhaps on the whole his most remarkable work, the three books _De Arte
Amatoria_.
Just about the time of the publication of the _Art of Love,_ the exile of
the elder Julia fell like a thunderbolt on Roman society. Staggered for a
little under the sudden blow, it soon gathered itself together again, and
a perpetual influx of younger men and women gathered round her daughter
and namesake, the wife of Lucius Aemilius Paulus, into a circle as
corrupt, if not so accomplished, as that of which Ovid had been a chief
ornament. He was himself now forty; though singularly free from literary
ambition, he could not but be conscious of his extraordinary powers, and
willing to employ them on larger work. He had already incidentally proved
that he possessed an instinct for narrative such as no Roman poet had
hitherto had--such, indeed, as it would be difficult to match even in
Greek poetry outside Homer. A born story-teller, and an accomplished
master of easy and melodious verse, he naturally turned for subjects to
the inexhaustible stores of the Graeco-Roman mythology, and formed the
scheme of his _Metamorphoses_ and _Fasti_. Both poems were all but
complete, but only the first half of the latter had been published, when,
at the end of the year 8, his life and work were suddenly shattered by a
mysterious catastrophe. An imperial edict ordered him to leave Rome on a
named day, and take up his residence at the small barbarous town of Tomi,
on the Black Sea, at the extreme outposts of civilisation. No reason was
assigned, and no appeal allowed. The cause of this sudden action on the
part of the Emperor remains insoluble. The only reason ever officially
given, that the publication of the _Art of Love_ (which was already ten
years old) was an offence against public morals, is too flimsy to have
been ever meant seriously. The allusions Ovid himself makes to his own
"error" or "crime" are not meant to be intelligible, and none of the many
theories which have been advanced fully satisfies the facts. But,
whatever may have been the cause--whether Ovid had become implicated in
one of those aristocratic conspiracies against which Augustus had to
exercise constant vigilance, or in the intrigues of the younger Julia, or
in some domestic scandal that touched the Emperor even more personally--
it brought his literary career irretrievably to the ground. The elegies
which he continued to pour forth from his place of exile, though not
without their grace and pathos, struggle almost from the first under the
crowning unhappiness of unhappiness, that it ceases to be interesting.
The five books of the _Tristia,_ written during the earlier years of his
banishment, still retain, through the monotony of their subject, and the
abject humility of their attitude to Augustus, much of the old dexterity.
In the four books of _Epistles from Pontus,_ which continue the
lamentation over his calamities, the failure of power is evident. He went
on writing profusely, because there was nothing else to do; panegyrics on
Augustus and Tiberius alternated with a natural history of fish--the
_Halieutica_--and with abusive poems on his real or fancied enemies at
Rome. While Augustus lived he did not give up hopes of a remission, or at
least an alleviation, of his sentence; but the accession of Tiberius, who
never forgot or forgave anything, must have extinguished them finally;
and he died some three years later, still a heart-broken exile.
Apart from his single tragedy, from a few didactic or mock-didactic
pieces, imitated from Alexandrian originals, and from his great poem of
the _Metamorphoses,_ the whole of Ovid's work was executed in the elegiac
couplet. His earliest poems closely approximate in their management of
this metre to the later work of Propertius. The narrower range of cadence
allowed by the rule which makes every couplet regularly end in a
disyllable, involves a monotony which only Ovid's immense dexterity
enabled him to overcome. In the _Fasti_ this dexterity becomes almost
portentous: when his genius began to fail him, the essential vice of the
metre is soon evident. But the usage was stereotyped by his example; all
through the Empire and through the Middle Ages, and even down to the
present day, the Ovidian metre has been the single dominant type: and
though no one ever managed it with such ingenuity again, he taught enough
of the secret to make its use possible for almost every kind of subject.
His own elegiac poetry covers an ample range. In the impassioned rhetoric
of the _Heroides,_ the brilliant pictures of life and manners in the _De
Arte Amatoria,_ or the sparkling narratives of the _Fasti,_ the same sure
and swift touch is applied to widely diverse forms and moods. Ovid was a
trained rhetorician and an accomplished man of the world before he began
to write poetry; that, in spite of his worldliness and his glittering
rhetoric, he has so much of feeling and charm, is the highest proof of
his real greatness as a poet.
But this feeling and charm are the growth of more mature years. In his
early poetry there is no passion and little sentiment. He writes of love,
but never as a lover; nor, with all his quickness of insight and
adroitness of impersonation, does he ever catch the lover's tone. From
the amatory poems written in his own person one might judge him to be
quite heartless, the mere hard and polished mirror of a corrupt society;
and in the _Art of Love_ he is the keen observer of men and women whose
wit and lucid common sense are the more insolently triumphant because
untouched by any sentiment or sympathy. We know him from other sources to
have been a man of really warm and tender feeling; in the poetry which he
wrote as laureate of the world of fashion he keeps this out of sight, and
outdoes them all in cynical worldliness. It is only when writing in the
person of a woman--as in the Phyllis or Laodamia of the _Heroides_--that
he allows himself any approach to tenderness. The _Ars Amatoria,_ full as
it is of a not unkindly humour, of worldly wisdom and fine insight, is
perhaps the most immoral poem ever written. The most immoral, not the
most demoralizing: he wrote for an audience for whom morality, apart from
the code of good manners which society required, did not exist; and
wholly free as it is from morbid sentiment, the one great demoralizing
influence over men and women, it may be doubted whether the poem is one
which ever did any reader serious harm, while few works are more
intellectually stimulating within a certain limited range. To readers for
whom its qualities have exhausted or have not acquired their stimulating
force, it merely is tiresome; and this, indeed, is the fate which in the
present age, when wit is not in vogue, has very largely overtaken it.
Interspersed in the _Art of Love_ are a number of stories from the old
mythology, introduced to illustrate the argument, but set out at greater
length than was necessary for that purpose, from the active pleasure it
always gives Ovid to tell a story. When he conceived the plan of his
_Metamorphoses,_ he had recognised this narrative instinct as his special
gift. His tragedy of _Medea_ had remained a single effort in dramatic
form, unless the _Heroides_ can be classed as dramatic monologues. The
_Medea,_ but for two fine single lines, is lost; but all the evidence is
clear that Ovid had no natural turn for dramatic writing, and that it was
merely a clever _tour de force_. In the idea of the _Metamorphoses_ he
found a subject, already treated in more than one Alexandrian poem, that
gave full scope for his narrative gift and his fertile ingenuity. The
result was a poem as long, and almost as unflagging, as the _Odyssey_. A
vast mass of multifarious stories, whose only connection is the casual
fact of their involving or alluding to some transformation of human
beings into stones, trees, plants, beasts, birds, and the like, is cast
into a continuous narrative. The adroitness with which this is done makes
the poem rank as a masterpiece of construction. The atmosphere of
romantic fable in which it is enveloped even gives it a certain
plausibility of effect almost amounting to epic unity. In the fabulous
superhuman element that appears in all the stories, and in their natural
surroundings of wood, or mountain, or sea--always realised with fresh
enjoyment and vivid form and colour--there is something which gives the
same sort of unity of effect as we feel in reading the _Arabian Nights_.
It is not a real world; it is hardly even a world conceived as real; but
it is a world so plausible, so directly appealing to simple instincts and
unclouded senses, above all so completely taken for granted, that the
illusion is, for the time, all but complete. For later ages, the
_Metamorphoses_ became the great textbook of classical mythology; the
legends were understood as Ovid had told them, and were reproduced (as,
for instance, throughout the whole of the painting of the Renaissance) in
the spirit and colour of this Italian story-teller.
For the metre of the _Metamorphoses_ Ovid chose the heroic hexameter, but
used it in a strikingly new and original way. He makes no attempt, as
later poets unsuccessfully did, at reproducing the richness of tone and
intricacy of modulation which it had in the hands of Virgil. Ovid's
hexameter is a thing of his own. It becomes with him almost a new metre--
light, brilliant, and rapid, but with some monotony of cadence, and
without the deep swell that it had, not in Virgil only, but in his
predecessors. The swift, equable movement is admirably adapted to the
matter of the poem, smoothing over the transitions from story to story,
and never allowing a story to pause or flag halfway. Within its limits,
the workmanship is faultless. The style neither rises nor sinks with the
variation of subject. One might almost say that it was without moral
quality. Ovid narrates the treachery of Scylla or the incestuous passion
of Myrrha with the same light and secure touch as he applies to the
charming idyl of Baucis and Philemon or the love-tale of Pyramus and
Thisbe; his interest is in what happened, in the story for the story's
sake. So, likewise, in the rhetorical evolution of his thought, and the
management of his metre, he writes simply as the artist, with the
artistic conscience as his only rule. The rhetorician is as strong in him
as it had been in the _Amores;_ but it is under better control, and
seldom leads him into excesses of bad taste, nor is it so overmastering
as not to allow free play to his better qualities, his kindliness, his
good-humour, his ungrudging appreciation of excellence, in his evolution
of thought--or his play of fancy, if the expression be preferred--he has
an alertness and precision akin to great intellectual qualities; and it
is this, perhaps, which has made him a favourite with so many great men
of letters. Shakespeare himself, in his earlier work, alike the plays and
the poems, writes in the Ovidian manner, and often in what might be
direct imitation of Ovid; the motto from the _Amores_ prefixed to the
_Venus and Adonis_ is not idly chosen. Still more remarkable, because
less superficially evident, is the affinity between Ovid and Milton. At
first sight no two poets, perhaps, could seem less alike. But it is known
that Ovid was one of Milton's favourite poets; and if one reads the
_Metamorphoses_ with an eye kept on _Paradise Lost_, the intellectual
resemblance, in the manner of treatment of thought and language, is
abundantly evident, as well in the general structure of their rhetoric as
in the lapses of taste and obstinate puerilities (_non ignoravit vitia
sua sed amavit_ might be said of Milton also), which come from time to
time in their maturest work.
The _Metamorphoses_ was regarded by Ovid himself as his masterpiece. In
the first impulse of his despair at leaving Rome, he burned his own copy
of the still incomplete poem. But other copies were in existence; and
though he writes afterwards as though it had been published without his
correction and without his consent, we may suspect that it was neither
without his knowledge nor against his will; when he speaks of the _manus
ultima_ as wanting, it is probably a mere piece of harmless affectation
to make himself seem liker the author of the _Aeneid_. The case was
different with the _Fasti_, the other long poem which he worked at side
by side with the _Metamorphoses_. The twelve books of this work, dealing
with the calendar of the twelve months, were also all but complete when
he was banished, and the first six, if not actually published, had, at
all events, got into private circulation. At Tomi he began a revision of
the poem which, apparently, he never completed. The first half of the
poem, prefaced by a fresh dedication to Germanicus, was published, or
republished, after the death of Augustus, to whom, in its earlier form,
it had been inscribed; the second half never reached the public. It
cannot be said that Latin poetry would be much poorer had the first six
books been suppressed also. The student of metrical forms would, indeed,
have lost what is metrically the most dexterous of all Latin poems, and
the archaeologist some curious information as to Roman customs; but, for
other readers, little would be missed but a few of the exquisitely told
stories, like that of Tarquin and Lucretia, or of the Rape of Proserpine,
which vary the somewhat tedious chronicle of astronomical changes and
national festivals.
The poems of the years of Ovid's exile, the _Tristia_ and the _Letters
from Pontus_, are a melancholy record of flagging vitality and failing
powers. His adulation of the Emperor and the imperial family passes all
bounds; it exhausts what would otherwise seem the inexhaustible
copiousness of his vocabulary. The long supplication to Augustus, which
stands by itself as book ii. of the _Tristia_, is the most elaborate and
skilful of these pieces; but those which may be read with the most
pleasure are the letters to his wife, for whom he had a deep affection,
and whom he addresses with a pathos that is quite sincere. As hope of
recall grew fainter, his work failed more and more; the incorrect
language and slovenly versification of some of the _Letters from Pontus_
are in sad contrast to the Ovid of ten years before, and if he went on
writing till the end, it was only because writing had long been a second
nature to him.
Of the extraordinary force and fineness of Ovid's natural genius, there
never have been two opinions; had he but been capable of controlling it,
instead of indulging it, he might have, in Quintilian's opinion, been
second to no Roman poet. In his _Medea_, the critic adds, he did show
some of this self-control; its loss is the more to be lamented. But the
easy good-nature of his own disposition, no less than the whole impulse
of the literary fashion then prevalent, was fatal to the continuous
exercise of such severe self-education: and the man who was so keen and
shrewd in his appreciation of the follies of lovers had all the weakness
of a lover for the faults of his own poetry. The delightful story of the
three lines which his critical friends urged him to erase proves, if
proof were needed, that this weakness was not blindness, and that he was
perfectly aware of the vices of his own work. The child of his time, he
threw all his brilliant gifts unhesitatingly into the scale of new ideas
and new fashions; his "modernity," to use a current term of the present
day, is greater than that of any other ancient author of anything like
his eminence.
_Prisca iuvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis--_
this is his deliberate attitude throughout his life.
Such a spirit has more than once in the history of the arts marked the
point from which their downward course began. _I do not sing the old
things, for the new are far better_, the famous Greek musician Timotheus
had said four centuries earlier, and the decay of Greek music was dated
from that period. But to make any artist, however eminent, responsible
for the decadence of art, is to confuse cause with effect; and the note
of ignominy affixed by Augustus to the _Art of Love_ was as futile as the
action of the Spartan ephor when he cut the strings away from the cithara
of Timotheus. The actual achievement of Ovid was to perfect and
popularise a poetical form of unusual scope and flexibility; to throw a
vivid and lasting life into the world of Graeco-Roman mythology; and,
above all, to complete the work of Cicero and Horace in fixing a certain
ideal of civilised manners for the Latin Empire and for modern Europe. He
was not a poet of the first order; yet few poets of the first order have
done a work of such wide importance.
V.
LIVY.
The Ciceronian age represents on the whole the culmination of Latin
prose, as the Augustan does the culmination of Latin poetry. In the
former field, the purity of the language as it had been used by Caesar
and Cicero could hardly be retained in a period of more diffused culture;
and the influence of the schools of rhetoric, themselves based on
inferior Greek models, became more and more marked. Poetry, too, was for
the time more important than prose, and one result was that prose became
infected with certain qualities of poetical style. The reign of Augustus
includes only one prose writer of the first rank, the historian Titus
Livius.