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,