CHAPTER XI
OVID
Ovid, 43 B. C.-18 A. D.—His life—Poems of love—Fasti—Metamorphoses—Poems written after his banishment—His qualities and influence.
Publius Ovidius Naso was born at Sulmo, in the country of the Pæligni, in 43 B. C., on the 20th of March. Life of Ovid. He belonged to a wealthy equestrian family and received, along with his elder brother, a good education at Rome, practising rhetoric under Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro. He also studied at Athens, and at some time traveled with the poet Macer in Asia and Sicily. After assuming the toga virilis he held two of the minor offices incidental to the beginning of the senatorial career, and was employed as arbitrator in private cases. But in spite of his father’s remonstrances, he withdrew from public life and devoted himself to poetry. This decision was, according to his own statement, due in part to his delicate physique, but the chief reason was probably his love of poetry and pleasure, and his aversion to serious affairs. His social position was excellent. He was intimate with Messalla and his circle, and had many friends among the literary men of the capital. Virgil, he says, he only saw, but he was intimate with Tibullus, Propertius, Ponticus, and Bassus. He was married three times. His first wife, whom he married in his early youth, was “neither worthy nor useful,”[78] and he was soon separated from the second also, though he charges her with no fault. His third wife, of the Fabian family, remained faithful to him, and he to her. He had one daughter, who in turn had two children. His life of ease and social pleasure at Rome was brought to a sudden close in 8 A. D. by an imperial edict banishing him to Tomi, on the shore of the Pontus (Black Sea). “Two charges,” he writes, “wrought my ruin, a poem and an error, but I must be silent about the fault of one of these acts. I am not important enough to renew thy wounds, Cæsar, since it is more than enough that thou hast suffered once. The other part remains, in which, as author of a vile poem, I am charged with being a teacher of obscene adultery.”[79] The poem referred to can be no other than the Ars Amatoria; but this was published ten years before the poet’s banishment. The real cause of his sentence must be sought in the charge about which he keeps silence through fear of wounding Augustus. Perhaps he was privy to an intrigue between Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus, and Decimus Silanus. Ovid remained in banishment at Tomi until his death in 18 A. D.
Ovid’s poems fall into three divisions: poems of love, in elegiac metre, the works of his earlier years; antiquarian and mythological poems (the Fasti, in elegiacs, and the Metamorphoses, in hexameters), written before his banishment; and the poems written, in elegiac verse, at Tomi. Ovid’s Poems. The exact chronological order of the love poems is hard to fix, as the first series of elegies, the Amores, appeared in two editions, at first in five books, later in three. The later edition is preserved. Most of these elegies were probably written between 22 and 15 B. C. The Heroides, letters from mythical heroines to their absent husbands or lovers, were written soon after the Amores, then followed the poem On the Care of the Face (De Medicamine Faciei), then the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and the Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love). The last two seem to have been published between the beginning of 1 B. C. and the end of 1 A. D., but need not have been entirely written in the space of those two years.
The three books of the Amores contain forty-nine elegies, nearly all of which are love poems. The Amores. Among the comparatively small number on other subjects the best known and most interesting are the elegy on the death of Tibullus (III, ix) and the description of a festival of Juno (III, xiii). The love poems are in great part addressed to Corinna, who seems to be a mere figment of the poet’s imagination, not, like the Lesbia of Catullus, the Delia of Tibullus, and the Cynthia of Propertius, a real person under a fictitious name. Ovid’s love poems are not expressions of his own feelings for any individual, but the means by which he exhibits his astonishing facility in versification and his lively imagination. From beginning to end the poems show an utter lack of serious purpose. All the vicissitudes of a long love affair are treated with equal lightness and grace. Corinna is ill, she goes away, she receives a letter, to which she replies unfavorably, her parrot dies, and her lover laments it in an elegy; but nowhere does any real feeling make itself manifest. The poet seems to wish to give a complete series of pictures of the feelings and conduct of a lover under all possible circumstances, and his lively imagination plays lightly with all the varying phases of passion, but it is all play. Some of the poems are based upon Greek originals, many contain mythological allusions, a few are heavy with Alexandrian learning, some are harmlessly sportive, others extremely indecent, but all alike are masterly in technical execution, and empty of real sentiment. In these, his earliest poems, Ovid is already the most brilliant of Roman elegists. The easy flow of his verse is admirable. The rules that each distich must form a complete sentence, or at least express an independent thought, and that each pentameter must end with a word of two syllables, give great uniformity to the cadence of the verses, but in spite of this the variety of expression and the clever rhetoric employed preserve the poems from monotony. Only the sameness of subject and the lack of real feeling make the Amores tedious to the modern reader.
The subject of the Amores is continued in the Heroides, but in a different form. The Heroides. Here the elegies are supposed to be letters from fifteen famous women of antiquity—Penelope, Briseïs, Phædra, and others—to their absent lovers or husbands. The form of poetic love-letter was known to the Alexandrians and had been employed once (IV, iii) by Propertius, but was first made popular at Rome by Ovid, who was also, apparently, the first to write in the character of mythological persons. Soon after the publication of Ovid’s letters from heroines, replies to some, at least, were written by Sabinus.[80] These replies are lost, but at the end of the Heroides we now have three pairs of letters. Paris, Leander, and Acontius write respectively to Helen, Hero, and Cydippe, and each woman writes a reply. These six letters are so nearly in the style of Ovid that only careful study has led the best critics to the opinion that they are not his work, but clever imitations by some unknown contemporary. In the Heroides, as in the six letters just mentioned, the fact that the writers are well-known mythological persons lends an interest and a dramatic quality to the poems, which is wanting in the Amores, but the general character of the work remains the same.
The book On the Care of the Face is imperfectly preserved, for it breaks off after one hundred lines. The introduction compares the highly developed culture of the Augustan period with the rough simplicity of earlier times. On the Care of the Face. The maids and matrons of old may not have bestowed any care upon their personal beauty, but the Roman girls of the present must act differently, since even the men are no longer careless of their persons. To be sure, the character is more important than personal beauty, for character remains while beauty is fleeting. Up to this point the poem is attractive, but the remainder, consisting of recipes for cosmetics, with accurate directions concerning weights and measures of the various ingredients, is so uninteresting that the loss of the latter part of the poem is hardly to be regretted.
The Art of Love is one of the most immoral poems in existence. The Art of Love. The first book gives instruction to young men to aid them in finding and seducing desirable mistresses, the second tells them how to keep the girls’ affection, and the third instructs girls in the art of gaining lovers. The love of which Ovid writes is mere sensual passion, not the union of souls, and his three books of systematic instruction in the arts of seduction would be utterly tedious were they not enlivened by some striking descriptive passages and myths, as well as by sententious lines of worldly wisdom. A remarkable passage in the first book[81] celebrates the praise of Roman greatness and of Augustus, in order to lead up to the mention of a triumphal procession; and this is mentioned, because in the crowd of spectators the young man may scrape acquaintance with a girl. Of the Roman women at the theatre, Ovid says:
Spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsæ,
They come to see, and to be seen themselves,
and many other lines show keen observation, knowledge of humanity, and no little humor; but, in spite of these beauties of detail, the poem is, as a whole, so uninteresting that its immorality has probably done little harm.
The Cure of Love offers various means for freeing oneself from the bonds of passion. The Cure of Love. Activity and travel are recommended; the lover who longs for freedom is advised to consider the faults of his mistress, and the expense she causes him; he is told to make her show her faults; is urged to fall in love with another, to avoid reminders of the beloved when she is absent, and to shun poetry, music, and the dance. All this is uninteresting enough; but this poem, like the Ars Amatoria, contains many fine details. The Remedia Amoris is the last of Ovid’s poems on the subject of love. From beginning to end his love poems show the greatest ease and fluency of expression, superb mastery of technique, much imagination, wit, and humor, but an almost absolute lack of real feeling and serious purpose.
With the Fasti, or calendar of Roman festivals, Ovid’s poetry becomes more serious. The Fasti. When this work was begun can not be determined, but it probably occupied part of the poet’s time for several years. The description of the festival of Juno in the Amores (III, xiii) shows an interest in religious ritual, and it may be that Ovid conceived the idea of writing the Fasti even before the Ars Amatoria was published. However that may be, the Fasti never reached completion. The poem as planned was to consist of twelve books, one for each month of the year, and was dedicated to Augustus; but, when six books had been written, the work was interrupted by Ovid’s banishment. After the death of Augustus, Ovid began a revision of the poem, and prefixed to it a dedication to Germanicus; but the revision progressed no further than the first book. As this book contains references to events as late as 17 A. D., the entire work as we possess it must have been published after Ovid’s death.
Poetic descriptions of festivals, with accounts of their origin, had been written by the Alexandrians, notably by Callimachus, and four elegies of Propertius (see p. 135) had introduced such subjects into Roman poetry. Ovid undertook to treat systematically all the Roman festivals, arranging them according to the days on which they occurred. This arrangement often causes related myths to be widely separated, and the same myth to be treated in several places, thus destroying the poetic unity of the work. The poet is also obliged by his subject to regard the astronomical as well as the antiquarian aspects of the calendar, and this double interest destroys the harmony of the poem. Ovid was not a careful student of astronomy, and the astronomical parts of his work contain some serious mistakes; but they are interesting on account of their clear descriptions, their variety of expression, and the myths connected with the stars which are introduced. The days that mark important events in Roman history are treated with especial fulness, and the poet takes every opportunity for the expression of patriotic sentiments, and for the praise of Augustus and the Julian family. The descriptions of festivals are lively and beautiful pictures of Roman life. Events of the poet’s own times, or of the early, mythical period, are described with great variety, sometimes in elaborate detail, sometimes more briefly, but always with easy and attractive grace. The causes or origins of festivals and customs are introduced in various ways; sometimes a god appears and reveals them, sometimes they are narrated by a friend or contemporary of the poet, or again the poet tells them without adducing any authority. The Greek myths narrated are derived from some of the many collections of such material familiar to the Romans of Ovid’s day; and even in the matter of Roman legends Ovid probably made no original researches. The grammarian Verrius Flaccus had compiled a prose calendar, with explanations of the established customs pertaining to each day, and it is probably from this that Ovid derived much of his antiquarian lore. The books from which Ovid derived his information are lost, and his work is now one of the chief sources from which we can gain knowledge of Roman ritual, belief, religious antiquities, and even topography, for Ovid frequently mentions the relative positions of temples and other buildings. To the student of Roman life the six books of the Fasti are therefore of great importance. And their importance is not less to the student of Roman poetry, for they teem with beautiful and lively descriptions and interesting stories, and the patriotic sentiments eloquently expressed in several passages show that Ovid was something more than the careless, frivolous writer of corrupt love poems. In beauty of workmanship, vividness of description, and fluent grace of narrative, many portions of the Fasti are equal to any works of Roman literature, not even excepting the Metamorphoses of Ovid himself.
The Metamorphoses.The fifteen books of the Metamorphoses are Ovid’s greatest achievement. When he began the work we do not know, but, according to his own statement,[82] he had finished it at the time of his banishment, though he had not revised and perfected it to his own satisfaction. In his grief he put the manuscript in the fire and burned it, but several copies must have been made, so the work survived. The opening lines of the poem explain its purpose:
Of forms transmuted into bodies new
My spirit moves to tell. Ye gods (for ye
Did change them), lend my task your favoring breath,
And to my times continuous lead the song.
This great collection of myths became almost immediately, and has remained ever since, the chief source of popular knowledge of mythology. Poets and artists alike have drawn their conceptions of the ancient gods and heroes from Ovid even more than from Homer. The myths selected are those in which a metamorphosis, or change of form, takes place. Collections of the same sort had been made by several Alexandrian writers; but Ovid was apparently the first to arrange these stories in continuous order from the beginning of the world to his own time. The astonishing skill with which the transition from one tale to the next is accomplished, the rapidity and fluency of the narrative, the abundance of charming descriptive passages, and the never-failing variety of expression, make this one of the most remarkable of poems. The number of stories told is so great that a list of them would be tedious, but a brief mention and characterization of some of the more important among them will serve to show the scope and variety of the work.
After describing the creation, Ovid gives an account of the four ages (of gold, silver, bronze, and iron) of mankind’s deterioration and of the flood, from which only Deucalion and Pyrrha survived. Contents of the Metamorphoses. The story of Phaëthon’s attempt to drive the chariot of the Sun is told with great animation, though the poet’s display of geographical knowledge is somewhat out of place. The tale of the founding of Thebes by Cadmus is a striking example of narrative skill. More tragical in subject, and more dramatic in composition, are the stories of Pentheus, torn in pieces by the maddened worshipers of Bacchus, led by his own mother and sisters, and of Athamas, who is driven mad by Juno and kills his eldest son, while his wife Ino casts herself, with her son Melicerta, into the sea. Between these two stories are several less dramatic tales, among them the sentimental idyll of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is burlesqued in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The deeds of Perseus, his rescue of Andromeda from the sea-monster, their wedding, with the quarrel that arose, and the turning into stone of Perseus’s enemies by means of the terrible Gorgon’s head, are narrated with vivid detail. The story of Proserpine, carried off by Pluto and sought all over the world by her mother Ceres, is enriched and retarded by the insertion of all manner of geographical, antiquarian, and mythological details. The tale of the pride and grief of Niobe is told with tragic pathos. In telling of Medea’s love for Jason, Ovid imitates to some extent the portrayal of her mental torments given by Apollonius of Rhodes,[83] and at the same time displays his own liking for rhetorical argument. The adventures of Cephalus and Procris, Nisus and Scylla, Dædalus and Icarus, and others, are more simply told. The story of the Calydonian boar-hunt and the death of Meleager, enables Ovid to show his ability in description, narrative, and psychological analysis. The charming idyll of the pious and hospitable rustics, Philemon and Baucis, rests the mind of the reader after the preceding tales of violence. The deeds of Hercules follow, then the story of Orpheus, in which are inserted numerous tales, as if told by Orpheus himself. The account of the terrible death of Orpheus is followed by the story of Midas, who turned all things to gold by his touch, and whose ears were changed into those of an ass because he declared Pan to be a better musician than Apollo. The transformation of Ceyx and Alcyone into sea-gulls gives the poet an opportunity to tell of and praise conjugal fidelity. The combat of the centaurs and Lapithæ is told at some length, with too many names and too little unity. Many tales are told in connection with the Trojan war. Among these, the strife of Ajax and Ulysses for the armor of
Achilles occupies a prominent position, and Ovid shows his rhetorical tendency by introducing set speeches by the two rivals in support of their claims. With the fall of Troy and the escape of Æneas, the poem begins to deal with Roman rather than Greek subjects. The earlier adventures of Æneas and others after the fall of Troy are, to be sure, still derived from Greek sources, but the stories of the combats in Italy and of the founding of Rome are no longer Greek. Near the end of the poem the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls is set forth in considerable detail. Several Roman stories follow, and at last comes the account of Julius Cæsar’s ascent to the gods, and a prophecy of a similar fortune for Augustus. Then the poem ends with the lines:
And now my work is done; which not Jove’s wrath,
Nor fire, nor sword, nor all-consuming age
Can e’er destroy. Let when it will that day,
Which only o’er this body’s frame has power,
Make ending of my life’s uncertain space;
Yet shall the better part of me be borne
Above the lofty stars through countless years,
And ever undestroyed shall be my name.
Where’er the Roman power o’er conquered lands
Extends, shall I be read by many tongues,
And through all ages, if there’s aught of truth
In prophecies of bards, my fame shall live.
Certainly Ovid had written a most remarkable poem. At times the lack of earnestness so noticeable in his earlier works appears also in the Metamorphoses, but frequently he is carried along by his subject to utterances of real power and pathos. His hexameters have not the swelling grandeur of Virgil’s, but they have a fluent rapidity and easy grace that no other Latin writer ever attained. Nor does any other Roman poet equal Ovid in the art of telling a story. He is a master of direct, simple narrative and of clear, vivid description, and he excels also in dramatic presentation and in the analysis of human thoughts and feelings.
In the Metamorphoses Ovid’s power is at its height. His later poems, written after his banishment, show a constant deterioration in every respect, even in technique. The long series of laments over his exile is tedious and wearisome. The five books entitled Tristia consist of elegies addressed for the most part to no one person, while the four books of Letters from the Pontus (Ex Ponto) have the form of real letters to the poet’s friends. The second book of the Tristia is one long letter of appeal to Augustus. The short poem entitled Ibis is an elaborate heaping up of curses and maledictions against an enemy to whom the fictitious name of Ibis is given, and the Halieutica is a fragment (134 lines) of a poem on fishes. Among all these poems those in which Ovid refers to his own circumstances are the most interesting. It is from these[84] that most of our information about his life is derived. In some of these elegies the tone of genuine feeling, which is wanting in the earlier poems, is evident:
When in my mind of that night the sorrowful vision arises,
Which was the end of my life spent in the city of Rome,
When I remember the night when I parted from all that was dearest,
Sadly a piteous tear falls even now from my eyes.[85]
So Ovid sings of his departure from Rome. His letters to his wife[86] and the letter to his daughter Perilla[87] are among the most attractive of these poems of bitter exile and grief. But even upon these the bitterness of the exile’s lot casts its shadow. A greater poet, or a poet of greater character, might have soared above his grief and disappointment; but Ovid wearies us with his continued complaints.
Several works by Ovid have been lost. The most important was probably his tragedy Medea, which was regarded as one of the greatest of Roman tragedies. Only two fragments of this play remain, from one of which we learn that Ovid represented Medea in a state of excitement bordering upon madness. Of a work in hexameters on the constellations, entitled Phœnomena, and a series of epigrams, a few brief fragments remain. Not even fragments are preserved of a bridal song (Epithalamium) for Fabius Maximus, an elegy on the death of Messalla, a poem on the triumph of Tiberius (January 16, 13 A. D.), a poem on the death of Augustus, a medley on bad poets, made up of lines from Macer’s Tetrasticha, and a poem in the Getic language in honor of the imperial family.
Ovid’s one defect as a poet is his lack of character. No other Roman wrote more polished verse, no other employed the Latin language more effectively for his purposes; but the want of moral earnestness and power makes Ovid, with all his genius, the least among the great Roman poets. His weakness is most noticeable in his earlier and later works, and the Metamorphoses and the Fasti are therefore the most admirable of his poems. Ovid was read throughout the Middle Ages, and the mythological allusions in writings of the Renaissance period and modern times are, for the most part, traceable to him. He was one of Milton’s favorite authors, and several passages in Paradise Lost show his influence. Shakespeare, too, was acquainted, directly or indirectly, with the Metamorphoses, and numerous echoes of Ovid’s poems are heard in the strains of other English poets.