the foreshadowing is true and the dénouement is foretold; but this is the only play in which the prolog arouses fear unmodified by any hope and at the same time gives the dénouement in words not to be doubted. Yet it is a commonplace of Euripidean criticism to say that the prolog foretells the ending of the tragedy, whereas, in the great majority of cases, nothing is further from the truth.

We believe that we have shown that, as a rule, Euripides arouses suspense in the prolog by a skillful use of true or false foreshadowing, or both, as the case demands. This is done in such a dramatic way that, as soon as the prolog is spoken, no normal spectator could be induced to leave the theatre. A modern dramatist considers himself fortunate if he can place his audience in this frame of mind by the end of the first act. Miss Evelyn Spring, the latest writer to deal with the subject of the Euripidean prolog, points out that" in only two of Euripides' plays (the Ion and the Bacchae) are the explanations supplied in the prolog indispensable in order that the dramatic action which follows may be intelligible." " She calls the prolog "undramatic," and believes that "to consider the Euripidean prolog, in general, an essential part of the play, is an injustice to the poet."" Lessing pointed out long ago that the artistic value of the Euripidean prolog is not to be tested by the question as to whether it is indispensable to the understanding of the plot. Euripides plainly aimed at something far more important than mere exposition in his formal prolog, as both Lessing 10 and Commer 11 partially saw. The point is that, if the prolog is done away with the plot may still be understood and followed; but if the prolog is left out, suspense, the very foundation of the structure of the drama, is immeasurably and perhaps irreparably weakened. Thus we cannot admit that the Euripidean prolog is undramatic and, in general, not an essential part of the drama.

There is certainly no greater admirer of Euripides than Professor Gilbert Murray, who, although he finally justifies the existence of the prolog on different grounds, writes of the prolog as follows:

"It is a long speech with no action to speak of; and it tells us not only the present situation of the characters-which is rather dull-but also

8

Evelyn Spring, A Study of Exposition in Greek Tragedy, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1917, p. 182.

what is going to happen to them-which seems to us to spoil the rest of the play.... But why does it let out the secret of what is coming? Why does it spoil the excitement beforehand? Because, we must answer, there is no secret; and the poet does not aim at that sort of excitement. A certain amount of plot-interest there certainly is: we are never told exactly what will happen, but only what sort of thing; or we are told what will happen but not how it will happen.” 12

In the light of what we have shown we would amend these statements to read as follows:

The prolog. is a speech of varying length, and near the end it indicates either a part or the whole of the problem of the plot. This is a very important element in dramatic technique. It tells the present situation of the characters, which is extremely interesting because the situation is remarkable or tragic or both. It also tells what may happen to the characters and certain things which do or do not happen to them, according to the demands of artistic technique in each case. This arouses interest in the rest of the play immediately because we wish to see how the problem is solved and how the situation developes. It does not let out the secret of what is coming in such a way as to forestall the excitement; but, in connection with the next scene or by itself, it creates suspense by true or false foreshadowing, or both. A great deal of plot-interest there certainly is. There is a secret and the playwright aims at this sort of excitement. We are told once in unequivocal words, with nothing to cast doubt on them, exactly what will happen (Hippolytus). But generally we are told what thing we may hope or fear will happen. Or we are told what will happen and we find that it does not happen with the expected result (Orestes and Electra condemned to death). Or we are told how it will happen and find that it does not happen in this way (Ion).

Princeton University.

"Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age, New York, pp. 205-6.

THE POET OVID

BY KIRBY FLOWER SMITH

The forty-one years during which the destiny of the civilized world was swayed by Cæsar Augustus have always been a proverb of splendor, cultivation, and brilliant achievement. An age of peace and stable government, an age of material prosperity such as the world had never seen before, it was also an age of men whose names are almost as familiar now as they were nineteen centuries ago. But among all those great Augustans who have won and deserved a permanent place in the Temple of Fame there is probably none who, whether we consider his work, his personality, or his romantic career, has as many claims upon our interest and attention as Publius Ovidius Naso.

The last, the youngest, and the most modern of those famous poets who saw the first edition of Virgil's Aeneid and of Horace's Odes was born on the 20th of March in the year 43 B. C. His birthplace was Sulmo, a small mountain town ninety miles due east from Rome, in the Abruzzi. It then belonged to the territory of the Paeligni. In the Social Wars of fifty years before, this hardy stock of Sabellian mountaineers had fought for their rights against the Senatorial party but had been defeated. For that reason they were all the more disposed now to side with Octavianus in that great final struggle which, when Ovid was in the cradle, had already begun.

Sulmo still survives in the modern Solmona. It is perched on an isolated plateau some 1600 feet above the level of the sea. In the background are the snow-capped peaks of the Apennines. The picturesque beauty of the place is accompanied by a cool, bracing climate, and enhanced by a number of cold and sparkling mountain streams to which the poet recurred again and again in after years with a delight in this particular aspect of nature which is eminently characteristic of the Roman temperament.

In these charming surroundings the two children, Ovid and a brother who was his elder by just a year, passed what must have been an exceptionally healthy and happy boyhood. The family was evidently one in which vitality had been stored up for an indefinite period. Ovid says that his father lived to be ninety, and

that his mother survived her venerable husband. To this invaluable inheritance of health and ability were added the advantages of wealth and social position. The family had belonged to the equestrian order for generations, and at the same time, it was fortunate enough to escape financial losses in that turmoil of proscription and confiscation which between the battles of Philippi and Actium brought to ruin so many of the country gentlemen of Italy.

The elder Ovid decided to fit both his sons for the law, and in due time the two boys were sent down to Rome, where they acquired the usual rhetorical and legal education of that period. As it turned out the elder son was the real lawyer of the family. Though he died at the early age of twenty, he had already gained distinction as an advocate. As for the younger son, every line of his works tells us that from the first he must have been deeply interested in the rhetorical side of the profession. The taste for poetry, however, was pronounced even in early childhood. As he himself tells us in one amusing passage: "My father often said to me, 'why do you take up this pursuit? There's nothing in it. Why, Homer himself, the bard of bards, died without a penny!' I felt the force of his words, and I even tried again and again to write in prose, but always,

Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos

Et quod temptabam scribere versus erat."

A famous couplet and the original of those well known lines of Pope,

While yet a child and all unknown to fame

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,

At the same time Ovid was quite enough of a Roman to be the possessor of a good legal mind. He was admited to the bar, and without doubt could have become a distinguished lawyer if he had cared to exert himself in that direction. Moreover, the door to the highest honors in the Imperial administration stood open, and Augustus himself was most anxious to see young men of Ovid's position and training ambitious to take part in public affairs. As a matter of fact, the poet actually did fill, and with credit, a number of the regular civil and judicial offices under the new regime, and thus became eligible to the Senate. This honor, however, he declined. He had no taste for the life-long round of official boredom which such a career would undoubtedly have forced upon him.

Then, too, he must have seen clearly as others did that since the fall of the old government the advantages of public life for any man whether honest or dishonest, were more apparent than real. Finally, his naturally easy-going temperament was encouraged by good birth, a comfortable income, and a host of friends among the leaders of his time, especially among those who formed the famous literary circle of Messalla and afterwards of Fabius Maximus. It is for this reason that the works of Ovid are now our principal source of information regarding the literature of the late Augustan Age.

It was in company with Aemilius Macer, a famous poet in his day, that the young Ovid, following a fashion of the time which had been set by Catullus, Cicero, and others, paid a visit to Greece and Asia Minor. In a letter written to Macer from Pontus many years afterwards (2, 10) Ovid recalls the impressions of that journey, more especially of the year spent in Sicily, a country which seems to have had the same fascination for him that it had for Lucretius and Vergil. It is eminently characteristic of Ovid that he should have retained a more vivid and lasting impression of the flowers on Hymettus than of the lectures on philosophy in the Universities of Athens, and of the long hours of conversation with his friend than of the archæological remains at Syracuse.

But to a man of Ovid's temperament there was no place like Rome. Every impression found him alert and sympathetic, but after all he cared more for people than for things, more for humanity than for nature. Here in Rome, his sunny disposition and his intense vitality, his inexhaustible memory and his cultivated taste, his brilliant wit and later his universal fame as a poet, made him a welcome and a prominent member of that brilliant society which had sprung up at the capital under the new regime. In that circle the mere pursuit of pleasure for its own sake which in the days of Sulla and Catullus, two generations before, still showed a certain amount of crudity, was now refined and directed to no small degree by the fact that at no other period in Roman history was the average man so well-read, the average woman so accomplished and polite society as a whole so cultivated in its tastes.

Unfortunately, however, it tolerated every vice but dulness. We inevitably think of periods like the French Regency, or the later days of Louis XV, above all, when we learn that one of the most characteristic peculiarities of the situation was the almost total emancipation of woman from the conventionalities, her disregard