when almost a boy1; but they were soon divorced, and his wife's character does not seem to have been unimpeachable, His second wife came of the Etrurian tribe, whose chief town was Falerii2; but though he himself attests that she was blameless, she too was dismissed 3. It was during this marriage that his liaison with Corinna took place, the mistress whom he celebrated in the Amores *. In his third wife he was more fortunate. She was a person of some consideration, for she belonged to the gens Fabia, and thus was connected with his powerful patron Paullus Fabius Maximus, with whose wife Marcia she was on intimate terms; and was even a friend of the Empress Livia . Consequently this marriage seemed to promise great material advantages, and more especially the favour of the Imperial house, though we are hardly justified in supposing with Boissier that it was a mere arrangement of convenience, and destitute of affection, for he always speaks of this wife with great warmth of feeling, and praises highly her faithfulness to himself, and the courage and constancy with which she defended him against the frequent attacks of the merciless private enemy', who endeavoured to despoil the absent exile of his property, in which difficult task she received counsel and assistance from her uncle Rufus, to whom P. ii. 11 is addressed 8.

1 He may have been married at fourteen years of age, when a boy might contract legal matrimony; the age for girls was twelve. Macrob. Sat. i. 9.

'illi successit, quamvis sine crimine coniunx,

non tamen in nostro firma futura toro.'

This passion never seems to have been a very genuine one on either side, for, by his own confession, each was false to the other: she to him, Am. iii. 11. 11-14; he to her, ii. 7. 7.

♪ T. i, 6. 25 ; iv. 10. 73.

• L'Opposition sous les Césars, p. 162.

7 Against whom the Ibis is directed.

That he was her uncle is shown by the words, P. ii. 11. 15:

'namque quod Hermiones Castor fuit, Hector Iuli,

hoc ego te laetor coniugis esse meae:

xvii

This wife survived him; her daughter by a former husband was married to P. Suillius Rufus, a man of noble family, whose mother Vistilia was also by other husbands the mother of Domitius Corbulo, and of Caesonia, wife of Gaius. Suillius acted

as quaestor to Germanicus, and the poet, in the only letter addressed to him, P. iv. 8, begs Suillius to procure for him the favour of that prince. In 777/24 he was banished by Tiberius for receiving bribes in the discharge of his duties as a judge1; but under Caligula and Claudius he again entered political life, and was consul, though in what year is uncertain; and in 805/52 or 806/53, towards the close of the reign of Claudius, he administered Asia as proconsul. He was possessed of considerable oratorical powers, which his greed led him to devote to attacking wealthy men. Under Nero he was accused of a number of crimes, and condemned in his old age to banishment in the Balearic Isles, where he lived on for some time 2.

Ovid had one daughter, whose name he never mentions, possibly for metrical reasons, though he makes several references to her 1. We are not directly told which of his three wives

quae, ne dissimilis tibi sit probitate, laborat,

seque tui vita sanguinis esse probat.'

Koch, Prosopogr. Ov. p. 23, has correctly explained that the reason why Rufus is only once addressed in the Pontic Epistles is that, though a man of high character, towards whom the poet felt grateful regard, he was not influential with the Caesars, and thus could not be of use towards procuring the exile's recall.

1 Tac A. iv. 31.

2. Ferebaturque copiosa et molli vita secretum illud toleravisse,' Tac. A. xiii. 43. See Koch, p. 27; Graeber, i. x.

3 This ingenious suggestion

tostys. 1508, cap. 35.

owe to Constantius Fanensis; Heca

* See T. i. 3. 19; iv. 10. 75; P. i. 8. 32; F. vi. 219 ff. That this daughter was not the poetess Perilla, addressed in T. iii. 7, has been conclusively shown by Masson, Vit. Ov., p. 111, ed. Fischer, and Lörs intr. to iii. 7; and it is strange that this misconception should have been revived by some modern writers, e. g., Teuffel, Hist. Rom. Lit. 242. 2, Ramsay, Selections, p. xv, and Hallam, Ovid's Fasți, p. xii.

b

was her mother, but the following considerations show her to have been the daughter of the second. She was no longer very young at the period of his exile, for she had been twice married, and had given birth to two children1. Hence, as his third wife is described as being at that time still iuvenis 2, she can hardly have been the daughter of that wife. Again, speaking of his departure from Rome in T. i. 3. 97, he says of his wife,—

'nec gemuisse minus quam si nataeque virique

vidisset structos corpus habere rogos.'

Now, as his third wife had, by a former husband, a daughter of her own, married to Suillius Rufus, if Ovid's daughter had also been her daughter, he would have written natarum rather than natae. Further, in celebrating his third wife's birthday, he mentions only one daughter of hers, who must have been the daughter by her former husband. Hence it follows that she was not the daughter of his third wife. And as he speaks so slightingly of his first wife—which he would hardly have wounded the feelings of his daughter by doing, had she been her mother and as he lived for some time apparently on happy terms with his second wife, it is probable that she was the daughter of his second wife *. About this daughter we

know little. She was twice married, as we have seen: her second husband was Fidus Cornelius, a senator, whom she accompanied to the senatorial province of Africa, of which he was probably proconsul in 761/85.

The love-poetry of Ovid's life reached its climax in the

1 T. iv. 10. 75:

'filia me mea bis prima fecunda iuventa,

sed non ex uno coniuge, fecit avum.'

2 P. i. 4. 47:

'te quoque, quam iuvenem discedens urbe reliqui,

credibile est nostris insenuisse malis.'

3 T. v. 5. 19:

'illa domo nataque sua patriaque fruatur.'

This is the conclusion of Constantius Fanensis u. s. and Lörs, Tristia, p. 433.

T. i. 3. 19 n.; M. Sen. dial. ii. 17.

Ars Amatoria, a book distinguished equally for its brilliancy and its heartless immorality. The topic of love seemed now to be exhausted, and the poet in his middle age turned to more serious matter, and devoted himself to the composition of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. In these labours he was suddenly interrupted. In the fiftieth year of his age, in the autumn of 761/8, when in attendance upon his powerful friend M. Aurelius Cotta, as one of his suite, in the island of Ilva (Elba), a mandate was suddenly brought to him from the Emperor, informing him that his Ars Amatoria was expelled from the public.libraries, and that he must quit Rome and take up his residence as a 'relegatus,' the mildest form of banishment', at Tomi, in Moesia,—near the modern Kustendsche, on the western coast of the Pontus Euxinus,-which was one of the numerous frontier fortresses (castella) that defended the Empire against the incursions of barbarians. On receiving the news of his banishment he repaired to Rome in order to arrange his affairs3, and left it at some time in November (intr. to El. iv.); sailing to Lechaeum, where he crossed the Isthmus of Corinth, and took ship again from Cenchreae to Samothrace, from this place he sent his effects on to Tomi in the ship in which he had come and after staying for the rest of the winter at Samothrace, proceeded on land through Thrace in the spring of 762/9. He seems in the course of his journey to have lost much of his property, through the dishonesty of those who accompanied him.

1 See note in Appendix on ii. 72.

2 T. iii. 9. 33; iv. 10. 97; Graeber i. iv.-vi. The name Tomi was etymologically connected with téμvw; and it was supposed that it was here that Medea, in her flight from Aeetes, cut up the body of her brother Absyrtus, T. iii. 9. 33; Masson, Vit. Ov., p. 108; Grote, Hist. Gr. i. 221.

* See the touching description of his last night at Rome, T. i. 3.

P. ii. 7. 61-62. In the course of his journey (on which see intr. to El. x) he received several letters from his wife and friends at home; which were most probably delivered to him at Samothrace, as has been shown by Schulz, Q. O. p. 7.. See note on iii. 91. He must have waited till the spring to go through Thrace on land; for considering the

The sentence of banishment was never revoked, either by Augustus or his successor Tiberius. The unfortunate poet spent the rest of his days in composing elegies, in which he lamented the miseries of his lot, and sought by flattery and supplication to conciliate the offended Emperor'.

The latitude of Tomi is really much the same as that of Florence, but so severe was its climate that Ovid persistently regards it as lying far in the Arctic circle (El. v. 61 n.). The town,' he says,' is protected in summer by the Danube stream; but when winter comes all is frost and deep snow, which the sun has scarcely power to thaw. Nay, sometimes it lies throughout the whole year, and one year's snow is piled upon the snow of another. So violent is the north-wind that it often levels towers and carries roofs away. . . . The shaggy hair of severity of the winter in those regions, upon which he so frequently enlarges, such a journey would have been at that season impossible.

...

1 The constant ascription of divinity to the emperor is highly offensive to European taste, but it may be doubted whether it would appear in the same light to a modern Oriental. The abuse which is lavished upon Ovid on this account is hardly deserved. It has been well shown by Professor Nettleship that the cult of the Caesars arose from a genuine popular feeling. 'What seems to modern sentiment a tasteless falsehood appeared to the religious or superstitious temper of the congeries of nations then forming the Roman world, a not unnatural development; the exclusive religion of the Roman Republic was dissolving, and the worship of Divus Iulius once called into life in popular feeling and observance, the flexible servility of Greek paganism, which found it easy and natural to invest any benefactor of mankind with divine or quasi-divine honours, united with Oriental extravagance and Roman devotion in offering homage to the visible centre of Roman greatness, and thus virtually bowing to the spirit of the Roman religion in its new embodiment' (Essays, p. 133). Instances of the same attitude are Prop. iii. 4. I; iv. 11. 60; Hor. C. iii. 3. 11; Epp. ii. 1. 16. See Tac. A. iv. 37; Suet. Aug. 59; Sellar's Vergil, p. 14, ff. Ovid and his contemporaries were probably not more serious when they spoke of 'deus Caesar,' than were the ancient cavaliers in the language they employed towards their mistresses. 'God and the ladies were familiarly appealed to in the same breath; and devotion to the fair sex was as peremptorily enjoined upon the aspirant to the honour of chivalry as that which was due to heaven.'-Scott, Fair Maid of Perth, ch. ii.