The elegists—such as the graceful melancholy Tibullus, or Propertius, the pedant who often stumbled into poetry, and a host of others who are mere names to us—would hardly, but for their prominence in the schoolroom, deserve serious attention. Callimachus the Alexandrian was their model, himself scarcely a first-rate poet. The whole idea of writing love poetry in an absolutely regular distich of hexameter and pentameter was inartistic and unreal. Their fluent prolixity makes them insufferably tedious out of school. It is difficult to sustain interest in the relations between the bards and the married ladies with Greek pseudonyms to whom their verses are addressed. From our point of view the chief interest in these writers lies in the fact that nearly all of them were at one time or another invited to praise the new regime. Tibullus, indeed, who enjoyed a modest competence of his own, limits his praises to his immediate patron Messalla, and frankly admits that war and battles disgust him. But Propertius makes an attempt to carry out his commission, and describes the battle of Actium fifteen years after its occurrence. But though he invites Bacchus to assist his Muse, it is wretched stuff and the poet himself turns from it with disgust. The famous elegy upon Cornelia, daughter of the injured Scribonia, beginning desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum, is however sufficient proof that it was only the want of a really inspiring theme and a suitable medium which prevented Propertius from being in the front rank of the world’s poets.
Ovid, “this incorrigibly immoral but inexpressibly graceful poet,” as Mr. Cruttwell called him, is a far more interesting personality. I think he may fairly be called the wickedest writer on the world’s bookshelves. Others may be wicked through ignorance, or by accident, or out of high animal spirits, but Ovid is immoral on principle, a conscientious and industrious perverter. His greatest work, “The Art of Loving,” is quite frankly a guide to adultery, the precepts it contains being perfectly practical and evidently based on expert knowledge. In his Amores, Metamorphoses, and Fasti he took for his field the domain of religion and exhibited celestial sin in the most captivating light. We have already seen how the loves of the gods came to take their place in the Olympian mythology, and how thinking pagans like Plato regarded them. To such men they were already relics of barbarism, but Ovid draws them out into the light again, gilds them with his wit and makes them altogether charming for the Roman drawing-room. The strange and uncouth old ritual of Italian nature-worship is piquantly dressed out for the up-to-date blasphemer. Nobody who had read Ovid could possibly worship Jupiter any
| FIG 1 THE CAPITOL | FIG 2 THE DECUMANUS MAXIMUS AND TRAJAN’S ARCH |
| Plate LXIV TIMGAD | |
more. It was all done with consummate art and unblushing impudence. When the sad Niobe is bereft of her seven fair children by the arrows of the jealous gods, our poet, ingeniously parodying Vergil, observes:
heu quantum hæc Niobe, Niobe distabat ab illa.
In telling the dreadful tragedy whereby the Greeks had explained the sorrow of Philomela, the nightingale, our poet cheerfully describes the slaughter of the children, adding:
pars inde cauis exultat aënis,
pars ueribus stridunt.