OVID’S BANISHMENT
Letter from Diogenes, a Sculptor, to a friend in Athens
My work, or rather the business which called me to Rome, is now accomplished, and the Caryatids which I was commissioned to make for the Pantheon of Agrippa are now in their place. But in what a place! Alas, they have been set up so high that their whole effect is lost, and the work might just as well be that of any Roman bungler. The Romans are indeed barbarians. They consider that as long as a thing is big and expensive it is beautiful; they take luxury for comfort, notoriety for fame, eccentricity for genius, and riches for wisdom; or rather they deem that wealth is the only thing which counts in the modern world, and here at Rome this is true. Their attempts at art are in the highest degree ludicrous. Yesterday I visited the studio of Ludius, who is renowned in this city for his decorative work. He paints walls and ceilings, and the Emperor has employed him to decorate his villa at Naples.
His work, which is not devoid of a certain talent, is disciplined by no sense of proportion. It would not be tolerated in Greece for a moment owing to an extravagance and an exaggeration which, so far from displaying any originality, merely form the futile mask of a fundamental banality. The man himself wears his hair yards long like a Persian, and favours a pea-green toga. I could not help saying to him that in Greece artists took pains to dress like everybody but to paint like no one.
Last night I supped with Maecenas at his house on the Esquiline. Let me do justice to my host and give praise where praise is due; here are no jarring notes and no foolish display. Maecenas has exquisite taste; his house is not overcrowded with ornaments nor overwhelmed by useless decoration. By a cunning instinct he has realized that art should be the servant of necessity. Everything in his house has a use and a purpose; but where a vase, a bowl, a cup, a chair, or seat is needed, there you will find a beautiful vase, a beautiful bowl, and so forth.
Maecenas himself is bald, genial, and cultivated; he looks older than he is, and dresses with a very slight affectation of coxcombry; his manner is a triumph of the art which conceals art. He talks to you as though you were the one person in the world he had been anxious to see, and as if the topic you were discussing were the preponderating interest of his life. As I entered his hall I found him pacing up and down in eager conversation with Agrippa, the famous admiral; my ears are sharp, and I just caught a fragment of their conversation, which happened to concern the new drains of Rome. Yet as Maecenas approached me he greeted me with effusion, and turning to Agrippa he said: “Ah, here he is,” as if their whole talk had been of me.
We reclined almost immediately. The fare was delicious, and distinguished by the same supreme simplicity and excellence as the architecture and the ornamentation of his dwelling. There were many celebrities present besides Agrippa—Ludius the painter, most grotesquely clothed, several officials and politicians, Cinna, Grosphus, three minor poets, Horatius Flaccus, Propertius and Crassus; Ovidius Naso, the fashionable writer; Vergilius, the poet, and many young men whose names escape me. Naso is by far the most prominent figure in the Roman literary world at present. He is the arbiter of taste, and sets the criterion of what is to be admired or not. Heaven forbid that I should read his verse, but there is no doubt about the flavour of his conversation, which is more interesting than his work.
The literary world despises Vergilius (the only Roman poet at present living worthy of the name!); on the other hand they admire this Crassus, who writes perfectly unintelligible odes about topics barren of interest. He has invented a novel style of writing, which is called symbolism. It consists of doing this: If you are writing about a tree and the tree seems to you to have the shape of an elephant you call it an elephant. Hence a certain chaos is produced in the mind of the reader, which these young men seem to find delectable. If you mention Vergilius to them they say: “If he only knew how to write. His ideas are good, but he has no sense of form, no ear for melody, and no power of expression.”
This, of course, is ridiculous; for although Vergilius is a writer who has no originality, his style is felicitous, delicate, and lofty, and often musical. In fact he writes really well. With regard to the other poets, they are of little or no account. Horatius Flaccus has a happy knack of translation; Propertius writes amiable, sentimental stuff, and Tibullus babbles of pastures; but they are all of them decadent in that they, none of them, have anything to say. And they either display a false simplicity and a false archaism, or else they are slavishly imitative or hopelessly obscure.
At first the conversation turned on naval matters. It was debated at some length whether the Romans needed a fleet at all, and, if they did, whether it should be a small fleet composed of huge triremes or a large fleet of smaller and swifter vessels. Agrippa, who has the great advantage of practical experience in naval warfare, was in favour of the latter type of vessel. But another sailor, a friend of Cinna’s, who was present, and who was also experienced, said that the day of small vessels was over. The conversation then veered to literary matters.
Ovidius—a little man with twinkling eyes, carefully curled hair, and elaborately elegant clothes—he has his linen washed at Athens—excelled himself in affable courtesy and compliment to Crassus, whom he had never met hitherto. He had always been so anxious, he said, to meet the author of odes that were so interesting, although they were to him a little difficult.
“I’m afraid you must be deeply disappointed,” said Crassus, blushing—he is a shy, overgrown youth with an immense tuft of tangled hair and a desperately earnest face.
“No,” said Ovidius, “I am never disappointed in men of letters. I always think they are the most charming people in the world. It is their works which I find so disappointing. Everybody writes too much,” he continued, “and, what is worse still, everybody writes. Even the dear Emperor writes hexameters; they do not always scan, but they are hexameters for all that. It has even been hinted that he has written a tragedy. Of course it doesn’t matter how much verse a young man writes as long as he burns it all, but our dear Master’s hexameters are preserved by the Empress. She told me herself with pride that she often ‘mends’ his verses for him. And they need mending sadly, because so many stitches in them are dropped. But how delightful it is to have a literary Emperor. He was good enough to ask me to read him a little poetry the other day. I did so. I chose the passage from the ‘Iliad’ where Hector says farewell to Andromache. He said it was very fine but a little old-fashioned. I then recited an ode of Sappho’s, perhaps the loveliest of all of them. He seemed to enjoy it, but said that it was not nearly as good as the original, and that he preferred that kind of song when it was set to music. What the ‘original’ might be to which he alluded I did not ask, as I have always held that a monarch’s business is to have a superficial knowledge of everything but a thorough knowledge of nothing. And therefore I say it is an excellent thing, Vergilius, that our dear Emperor is aware that you and Crassus and myself all write verse. But it would be in the highest degree undesirable that he should know so much about the business as to command you to write verses of society, and myself to write a Georgic.
“But, you will say, he is a poet himself, and the Empress mends his verses. It is true she mends his verses, but she also mends his socks, and a sensible monarch no more bothers to write his own verse than he bothers to make his own socks, or else what would be the use of being a monarch? But, again, you will object: if they are written for him, why don’t they scan? The answer is simple. The man who makes them knows his business, and he knows that if they did scan nobody would believe that our dear Master had written them.
“And in having his verse written for him by a professional, and a bad professional—I hope, Horatius, it is not you, by the way—the Emperor displays not only sense but a rare wisdom. For a gentleman should never bother to acquire technical skill. If he loves music let him hire professional flute-players, but do not let him waste his time in practising ineffectual scales; and if he wants poetry let him order of Vergilius an epic, and if he wishes to pose as a literary monarch let him employ our friend Horatius to write him a few verses without sense or scansion—although I am afraid Horatius would find this difficult. You are too correct, Horatius. That is your fault and mine. We write verse so correctly that I sometimes think that in the far distant future, when the barbarians shall have conquered us, we shall be held up as models somewhere in Scythia or Thule by pedagogues to the barbarian children of future generations! Horrible thought! When Rome falls may our language and our literature perish with us. May we be utterly forgotten. My verse at least shall escape the pedagogues, for it is licentious; and yours, Crassus, I fear they will scarcely understand across the centuries. But, O Vergilius, the spirit of your poetry, so noble and so pure, is the very thing to be turned into a bed of Procrustes for little Dacians!”
“You are unfair on the Emperor,” said Vergilius, “he has excellent taste.”
“In poets certainly,” said Ovidius, “but not in poetry.”
The conversation then turned to other topics: the games, the new drains, the theatre of Balbus, the Naumachia, and the debated question whether the Emperor was right in having caused Vedius Pollio’s crystal beakers to be broken because the latter had condemned a slave, who had accidentally dropped one of them, to be thrown into his pond of lampreys and eaten. The sentence would have been carried out had not the Emperor interfered and caused the slave to be released. Horatius said that Vedius Pollio deserved to be eaten by lampreys himself, but Ovidius and Ludius considered the punishment to be out of all proportion to the crime. Agrippa could not understand his minding the goblet being broken, as there were plenty of goblets in the world. Vergilius thought that Pollio’s act was monstrous. Cinna said that the slave was his own. Maecenas considered that although it was a reprehensible act (and such deeds created dangerous precedents) nobody but a collector knew how terribly severe the punishment was.
We sat talking till late in the night. I cannot write any more, but I have just heard a piece of startling news. Ovidius Naso has been banished for life to some barbarous spot near Tauris. The reason of his disgrace is unknown. Hail!