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.