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The sea freezes,

The ships are

the inhabitants rattles as they move with the hanging icicle ; the beard is white and glistening. The very wine freezes, and the Danube itself becomes a firm mass of ice, over which men and horses and wains of oxen can safely pass. and I myself have trod its slippery surface. stuck fast, and fishes are closed up alive in ice. The barbarian enemy avails himself of the opportunity to cross the frozen river, and with his mounted archers overruns the whole country side. Cattle and waggons and all the farmer's poor possessions fall a prey to him; many are led into captivity; many die in torments, wounded by the poisoned arrows. What they cannot carry off they burn. Even in time of peace the constant fear of war blanches every cheek. All industry is at a standstill. Here is no corn crop, no vineyard, no orchard, nothing but the desolate expanse of bare and treeless fields'.'

The dangerous and disturbed condition of those districts is not at all overstated. It is hardly necessary to say that there was no one at Tomi to offer the poet literary sympathy. The place was so remote that it took a whole year to communicate with Rome, six months each way. We are thus enabled to realise the force of the persistent, though unavailing, prayer of the unfortunate exile, that the place of his banishment may at least be less dangerously situated and less remote *.

1 T. iii. 10. 7 ff. See similar descriptions in v. 10. 15 ff.; v. 12. 53; P. ii. 7. 65 ff.; P. iii. 8.

2 The constant incursions of the Dacae were one of the frontier difficulties of the empire: Suet. Aug. 21; Hor. C. iii. 6. 14; Sat, ii. 6. 53; Mommsen on Mon. Ancyr. pp. 128-132.

8 P. iii. 4. 59; iv. 11. 15.

4 T. ii. 577:

'tutius exilium pauloque quietius oro,

ut par delicto sit mea poena suo.'

Cp. ibid. 185 ff.; iii. 6. 37; 8. 42; v. 2. 77:

v. 10. 49:

'quod petimus, poena est. neque enim miser esse recuso,

sed precor, ut possim tutius esse miser.'

'merui tamen urbe carere,

non merui tali forsitan esse loco.'

See Boissier, p. 158.

Yet he had one consolation, for he won the appreciation of the inhabitants, and became so far acclimatised as to learn the Getic language1, and to compose in it a poem in praise of Augustus, the contents of which he briefly summarizes in P. iv. 13. 19 ff., and which, had it been preserved, would have been of incalculable philological interest. It was no doubt in recognition of this effort that he received a crown of honour from the .inhabitants".

He died at Tomi in the same year as the historian Livy, 770/17, and was buried near the town. In person Ovid was slender and not naturally strong; P. i. 5. 51,—

'hoc quoque me studium prohibent adsumere vires,
mensque magis gracili corpore nostra valet.'

ibid. 10. 21,—

'is quoque, qui gracili cibus est in corpore, somnus,
non alit officio corpus inane suo:'

he tells us that his complexion was naturally good; P. i. 10. 25,

‘vix igitur possis visos adgnoscere vultus,

quoque ierit, quaeras, qui fuit ante color.' his habits of life were temperate; P. i. 10. 29,— 'non haec inmodico contraxi damna Lyaeo; scis, mihi quam solae paene bibantur aquae : non epulis oneror: quarum si tangar amore, est tamen in Geticis copia nulla locis: nec vires adimit Veneris damnosa voluptas.'

His disposition, according to M. Seneca, was refined, elegant, and loveable*; and the impression gathered from his writings is that of a gay, careless, kindly, open-hearted man, in whom there was little of evil, if little depth of moral character.

1 P. iii. 2. 40.

2 P. iv. 9. 97 ff. ; 14. 55 ff.

3 Hieronym. chron. a. Abr. 2033, 'Ovidius poeta in exilio diem obiit et iuxta oppidum Tomos sepelitur.'

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Habebat ille comptum et decens et amabile ingenium.'—Senec. Controv., ii. 10. 8.

II.

THE WORKS OF OVID.

THE writings of Ovid fall naturally into three divisions: (1) those of his youth; (2) those of middle life; (3) those of his latter years; and the style and subject-matter of the poems of the three periods are totally distinct.

:

1. This division comprises the amatory poems, in which style of composition Ovid was unrivalled among his countrymen. i. Amorum Libri III.-Forty-nine pieces, celebrating the amours of the poet and his mistress Corinna. There were originally five books, which were published about A.V.C. 740 (B.C. 14); they were afterwards reduced to the recension of three, which we possess, and which was published before A.V.C. 752-3 (B.C. 2-1), the date of the publication of the Ars Amatoria.

ii. Heroides.-A collection of twenty-one letters in elegiac verse, purporting to have been written by ladies of heroic renown to their absent lovers. Of these the first fourteen alone are of undoubted authenticity, though it is probable that some at least of the rest were written by Ovid at a later period of his life than the original collection'.

iii. Medicamina formae: an extant fragment of 100 lines on the use of cosmetics. It was written apparently before the appearance of the Ars Amatoria. (See A. A. iii. 205 ff.)

iv. Artis Amatoriae Libri III.-This, the most profligate of Ovid's, works, contains two books of rules for men as to how to gain the affections of girls, and one book for girls as to how to gain those of men. It was probably published A.V.C. 752 or 751 (B.C. 2 or 3).

1 See W. Zingerle, Untersuchungen zur Echtheitsfrage der Heroiden Ovid's, Innsbruck, 1878. The genuineness of the Epistula Sapphus has been vindicated by Professor Comparetti; and has been maintained recently by Baehrens in the Rivista di Filologia e d' Instruzione Classica for 1884.

v. Remedia Amoris.-One book: this was intended as a kind of recantation of his Ars Amatoria, and treats of the means of escaping from love. It was written in A.V.C. 754 or 755 (A.D. I or 2).

2. The works of the poet's maturity are characterised by greater seriousness of subject-matter. They are :—

vi. Metamorphoseon Libri XV. A collection, rather loosely strung together, in heroic hexameter verse, of the chief fables of antiquity, which involved a transformation of shape, from the creation of the world out of chaos to the transmutation of Julius Caesar into a star. The poem had not received its writer's last polish when he was exiled; and in his disgust he burnt it. But copies had fortunately been preserved by some friends, one of whom published it for him shortly after his banishment.

vii. Fastorum Libri VI.-A poem in elegiac verse, describing the ceremonies and legends connected with the Roman Calendar. The work, which was originally intended to be in twelve books breaks off at book VI. ending with June. Its composition was interrupted by the writer's banishment in A.V.C. 761 (A.D. 8). A first issue of book I, dedicated to Augustus, seems to have appeared (T. ii. 549 ff.); and after the death of Augustus A.V.C. 767 (A.D. 14), a revised version of book I, and books II-VI. were published, inscribed to the accomplished young prince Germanicus Caesar.

3. Poems of the period of exile.

viii. Tristium Libri V.-A collection of elegies, couched in the form of letters, chiefly consisting of lamentations upon his exile. The poems appear to stand in the order in which they were written, excepting the first and last elegies of each book, which were written last, as the prologue and epilogue of the book. (This does not apply to Book II, which is a continuous essay.) Each book, as completed, seems to have been sent. collectively to Rome'. Of these, Book I. was written in the course of the journey, before Ovid arrived at Tomi; and elegy i, was written last, probably at Tempyra 2. Te book was sent to

1 Schulz, Q. O., pp. 1-7.

2 Schulz, p. 14.

Rome, and published in the spring of A.V.C. 762 (A.D. 9), under the editorship of some friend unknown to us'.

Book II. A long vindication of himself and his Ars Amatoria, addressed to Augustus, was written and sent to Rome in the summer (probably August) of the same year, A.V.C. 762 (A.D. 9).

Book III. followed immediately, and was published in the spring of A.V.C. 763 (A.D. 10).

Book IV. appeared in the beginning of A.V.C. 764 (A.D. 11). Book V. in the spring of A.V.C. 765 (A.D. 12) 2.

ix. Ibis.—Published not before A.V.C. 762 (A.D. 9), for in that year, March 20th (T. iv. 10. 13-14), was the poet's fiftieth birthday; and in Ibis 1. he says that he was already fifty years old when he wrote it. This poem is an invective in 644 elegiac lines, written in imitation of a poem of similar name by the Alexandrine Callimachus, in which he assailed his rival Apollonius Rhodius. It is directed against the unknown enemy, called by the poet Ibis-attacked also in T. iii. 11, iv. 9, v. 8, P. iv. 3—whom Ovid accuses of having procured his disfavour with the Emperor by introducing the Ars Amatoria to his notice (T. ii. 77), of having openly defamed him in his absence (T. iii. 11. 20; Ibis 14), of having attempted to prevent his receiving supplies in his exile (Ibis 21), and of having tried to rob him of his property (T. i. 6

'The ingenious hypothesis that this friend was C. Iulius Hyginus, the celebrated librarian of the Palatine Library, and author of the four books of astronomy, and the 277 fables which have come down to us in an abridged form under his name, and that. T. i. 7; iii. 14; iv. 7; and v. 6, are addressed to him, has been shown by Graeber, ii. pp. 13-14, to rest on too weak a foundation for us to accept it as proved.

2 In these dates I follow Graeber, i. pp. vi-ix, excepting in the last, which he puts at the end of 764/11. We know that a very brief interval elapsed between the publication of T. v. and P. i.-iii. And in T. v. there is no mention of the triumph of Tiberius over Pannonia, celebrated 16 Jan. 766/13 (as Schulz has shown, Q. O., pp. 16 ff., not 765/12 as Graeber (i. viii) supposed); whereas this triumph is frequently alluded to in the Pontic Epistles (see P. ii. 1. 1; 2. 91; 5. 27; iii. 3. 83 ff.; 4. 3). Hence T. v. must have been published before the news of the fixing of the date of that triumph, viz. at some time in 765/12.

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