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!