abandoned the regular practice of the law, and gave the reins to his poetic fancy. After his brother's death at the age of twenty, he travelled with Travels his friend and fellow poet Macer, visiting Asia and Sicily, and Athens, then much frequented by the wealthy Roman youth, as the fountain of art and culture. 3 4 After returning to Rome he held some minor judicial offices, becoming, as he tells us, one of the Triumviri Capitales, and again a Decemvir litibus iudicandis,5 sitting in the CentumRome viral Court, and sometimes acting as arbitrator in private suits. He was, Life at however, too indolent to be a candidate for any of the high offices of state, and never cared to rise from the Equestrian order to the Senate. As a very young man he formed two successive marriages, which were unhappy and did not last long. To his third wife, Marcia, who was related Marriage by marriage to Fabius Maximus, and a personal friend of Livia, he was fondly attached, and remained so to his death. By her he had one daughter, Perilla, to whose wedding he alludes in the Fasti," and who appears to have written poetry. His father and mother, of whom he speaks with affection, lived to a good old age, dying not long before his banishment. His literary tastes showed themselves again in his choice of friends. He did not belong to the literary clique who clustered round Maecenas, but was intimate with Ponticus and Bassus, the Friends former famous for his heroic verse, the latter for his iambics; the two Macri, one of whom, 3 Fasti VI. 355, and Pont. II. 10, 21. 4 Tr. I. 2, 77. 6 Fasti VI. 199. 5 Fasti IV. 317. 7 Tr. III. 7, 11. his travelling companion, was the composer of an epic on the story of Troy; Sabinus, the author of a work resembling the Fasti; Tuticanus, a translator of the Odyssey; Cornelius Severus, who described in elegant verse the Bellum Siculum of Sex. Pompeius; Pedo Albinovanus, the author of a Theseid and another epic on contemporary events, as well as a brilliant wit and conversationalist. Virgil, he tells us, he had only seen; his ears had been enchained by the tuneful Horace; Propertius was his boon companion, to the recitation of whose love-poems he was often a listener. He lived in the heart of Rome, near the Capitol.8 But this pleasant life was not to last. In A.D. 9 he was banished from Rome to Tomi, among the Getae, on the western shore of the Black Sea. The reasons for his banishment are Exile mysterious: the poet only hints at them.9 66 In the poem about his life (Tristia IV. 10) quoted above, he says that the cause was errorem non scelus." This much is clear from his words, that he had given some personal offence to Augustus, and in Tristia II. 103, he speaks of his " eyes as having been in fault. The most probable theory is that he had been a consenting witness of some disgraceful act of the emperor's profligate grand-daughter, the younger Julia.io Augustus was the more inclined to deal severely with him on account of the corrupt nature of the poems which he had published some years before. The sentence was one of relegatio, not exilium, and Ovid accordingly did not lose his property; but the punishment was nevertheless crushing. At the age of fifty, or rather more, this town-bred man of 10 Cf. Introd. § 8. 8 Fasti VI. 327. 9 Tr. II. 207. pleasure, with his cultivated tastes and luxurious habits, is driven from wife and home, and from the literary friends whose society and approbation were the very breath of his nostrils, to the cold and distant Euxine, and the companionship of outer barbarians. He felt the change as Dr. Johnson might have felt a sentence of perpetual banishment from Fleet Street to the farthest Hebrides. Little wonder if the poet, here as elsewhere incapable of self-control, pours out his heart in ceaseless wailings and petitions, grovelling in the very dust before Augustus and Tiberius and their imperial house, in the vain hope of pardon. It was with this motive that he dedicated to Tiberius's heir Germanicus the revised edition of his Fasti.1 11 Yet even in exile his amiable disposition won him friends among his rough neighbours, and the poet's thoughts still found their utterance in verse, so that he even wrote a poem in the Getic language, 12 His laments Death Poems He died at Tomi A.D. 18. His poems may be placed in three classes: (1) those of early life; (2) those of middle age, written before his banishment; and (3) those written at Tomi. (1) Love poems (written partly in imitation of the Alexandrine poets, and of his predecessors at Rome, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius), the Heroides, and a tragedy, the Medea. (2) The Fasti (suggested perhaps by the last book of Propertius), and the Metamorphoses. (3) Five books of Tristia, and four of Epistles from Pontus, Ibis (a lampoon), Halieutica (on the fish of the Black Sea). 11 Cf. Introd. § 2. 12 Pont. IV. 13, 19, and III. 2, 40. We have seen that Ovid possessed a great natural taste and aptitude for poetry; he wrote with perfect ease and fluency, and was a master of the technicalities of his art, though he shrank Poetical from the "limae labor;" indeed Seneca powers says of him, "that he lacked not critical acumen, but the inclination to prune; he sometimes used to say that a mole or two made a comely face more comely." In disposition he was joyous and light-hearted, incapable of seriousness or self-discipline. Even in his graver work, such as the Fasti, he plays lightly with his task, and finds food for merriment in the exploits of gods and goddesses. We may suppose that his choice of the elegiac as his favourite metre was determined by its fitness for neat and witty turns, without the necessity for sustained effort, and by his fondness for rhetorical expression, which must have been fostered by his early training. The poetical rhetoric of his schoolboy-days finds its counterpart in the somewhat rhetorical poetry of his later years. Both Seneca and Quintilian show their high appreciation of him by the frequency with which they quote his works, and the latter says that the Medea shows what he could have done if he had chosen to exercise self-restraint in using his poetic ability. Tacitus bears testimony to the same effect, but the poem, except a few lines quoted by Quintilian, is lost to us. 13 § 2. COMPOSITION AND REVISION OF THE FASTI. The Fasti, as we possess it, is only a fragment of the work which Ovid certainly sketched out, 13 Quint. x. 1, 98. and of which he probably wrote at least his rough copy. The latter part, even of The complete poem Book VI., is little more than this, showing many signs of haste and incompleteness. It ends with June, but there are several references to later parts of the poem which have not come down to us, e.g. III. 49 [57]' cum Larentalia dicam': the Larentalia was in December. III. 192 [200] Consus tibi cetera dicet .. cum sua sacra canes.' the festival of Consus was in August. V. 147, Quo feror? Augustus mensis mihi carminis huius Ius habet.' Furthermore, Ovid himself says (Tristia II. 549)— Sex ego fastorum scripsi totidemque libellos, Gronovius, quoted by Merkel in his critical notes p. 303, repeats the statement made in an ancient edition, that the last six books were in existence: 'servantur apud presbyterum in pago prope Ulmam': and a first couplet is quoted, which differs however from another version of the couplet preserved in two or three of the MSS. Leaving the doubtful question of the last six books, and confining our attention to the six Dedication which are now extant, we find indicavision tions of a first copy, and of a subsequent revision. and Re The book was dedicated in the first instance to Augustus, and Merkel thinks the first lines were written about 1 or 2 B.C. When Ovid was banished, A.D. 9, the work seems to have been laid on the shelf and to have remained there until Augustus's death, in A.D. 14. Then it was revised as far as the end of |