He himself confesses his natural susceptibility and amorous temperament; but claims the credit of never having given occasion to any scandal. He was three times married. His first wife was unsuitable, and proved unworthy of him, and accordingly he divorced her. His second he divorced also, although no imputation rested on her virtue. From his third, whom, notwithstanding his fickleness and infidelity, he sincerely loved, he was only separated by exile. She was one of the Fabian family, and bore him one daughter.
Epicurean in his tastes, and a skeptic, if not a disbeliever in a future state, he lived a life of continual self-indulgence and intrigue. He was a universal admirer and as universal a favourite among the female sex in the voluptuous capital; for the tone of female morals was in that age low and depraved, and the women encouraged the licentiousness of the men. Although his favourite mistress, whom he celebrated under the fictitious name of Corinna, is unknown, and all the conjectures concerning her identity are groundless, there is no doubt that she was a lady of rank and fortune.
Ovid was popular as a poet, successful in society, and possessed all the enjoyments which wealth can bestow. He had a villa and estate in his native Sulmo, a house on the Capitoline hill, and suburban gardens, celebrated for their beauty. At some period of his life he travelled with Macer into Asia and Sicily; and, in his exile, recalls to mind with sorrowful pleasure the magnificent cities of the former, and the sublime scenery and classic haunts of the latter.[[738]] This sunny life at length came to an end. The last ray of happiness, which he speaks of as beaming on him, was the intelligence that his beloved daughter Perilla, who was twice married, made him a grandfather a second time. When his hair became tinged with white, and he had reached his fiftieth year, he incurred, by some fault or indiscretion, the anger of Augustus, and was banished to Tomi (Tomoswar or Baba.)
The cause of his banishment is involved in obscurity. It was not unknown at Rome; but in his exile he refrains from alluding to it, except in dark allusions, out of fear of giving additional offence to the emperor.[[739]] He speaks of it as an indiscretion (error,) not a crime (scelus, facinus;[[740]]) as something which he had accidentally witnessed,[[741]] perhaps had indiscreetly told—a circumstance which deeply and personally affected Augustus, and inflicted a wound which he was unwilling to tear open afresh. He hints also that he fell a victim to the treachery of friends and domestics,[[742]] who enriched themselves by his ruin.
There have been many conjectures[[743]] on this difficult point. Some have imagined an intrigue with the elder Julia, the profligate daughter of Augustus; but this is scarcely consistent with the manner in which Ovid himself speaks of his fault; and besides this, Julia was banished to Pandataria eight years before. The banishment of the younger Julia to Trimerus, about the same time with that of Ovid, would make it far more probable that his fall was connected with that of this equally profligate princess. Tiraboschi supposed that he had surprised one of the royal family in some disgraceful act; and some have even imagined that he might have witnessed such conduct on the part of the Emperor himself. Dryden believed that he accidentally saw Livia in the bath; and the author of the article in the Biographie Universelle, as well as Schoell,[[744]] surmise that he was in some way implicated in the fortunes of Agrippa Posthumus, and thus incurred the hatred of Livia and Tiberius.
Whatever the cause may have been, the punishment was a cruel one, except for a crime of the deepest dye, and would never have been inflicted by the gentle Augustus so long as he was under the salutary influence of Mæcenas and his party. But in his old age he submitted to the baneful rule of the dark Tiberius and the implacable Livia. Any pretext, therefore, sufficed to remove one, who, from some cause or other, had excited their enmity. The alleged reason was the immorality of his writings; but they are not more immoral than those of Horace; and, besides, the worst of them had been published ten years before. Nor was the morality of the Emperor himself of such a character as to lead him to punish so severely a licentious poet in a licentious age. The exclusion of his works from the Palatine[[745]] library was a merited and more appropriate visitation. Nevertheless, this was made the pretext for a banishment, the misery of which was solaced by the empty mockery of the reservation of his civil rights.
Tomi was on the very frontiers of the Roman empire, inhabited by the Getæ, who were rude and uncivilized. The country itself, a barren and treeless waste, cold, damp, and marshy, producing naturally scarcely anything but wormwood, and yielding scanty crops to the unskilled toil of ignorant cultivators, was rendered still more desolate by frequent incursions of the neighbouring savage tribes, who used poisoned arrows, and offered up as sacrifices their prisoners of war.[[746]] Ovid, who, with all his faults, was affectionate and tender-hearted, was torn from all the voluptuous blandishments of the capital, from the sympathies of congenial spirits, who could appreciate his talents, and from the arms of his weeping wife,[[747]] amidst the voice of wailing and of prayer, which filled every corner of his desolate dwelling. The blow fell suddenly upon him like a thunder-clap,[[748]] and so stupefied him that he could make no preparations for his voyage. The season of his departure was the depth of winter, and he was exposed to some peril by a tempest in the Ionian Gulf. The climate of his new abode was as inclement as that of Scythia. Not only the Danube, but even the sea near its mouth, was for some extent covered with ice: even the wine froze into blocks, and was broken in pieces before it could be used. He lived in exile only ten years; constant anxiety preyed upon his bodily health; he suffered languor, but no pain; he loathed all food; the little that he ate would not digest; sleep failed him; his body became pale and emaciated, and so he died. The Tomitæ showed their respect by erecting a tomb to his memory.
In the midst of such a contrast between the present and the past, no wonder that his complainings appear almost pitiful and unmanly, and his urgent petitions to Augustus couched in too fulsome a strain of adulation. No wonder that he painted in the most glowing colours the story of his woes and privations. Yet he was destitute neither of patience nor fortitude: he relied on the independence and immortality of genius; and although the enervating effect of a luxurious and easy life and a delicate constitution, rendered him a prey to grief, and he gradually pined away, still he had strength of mind to relieve his sorrows by devotion to the Muse, and he suffered with tranquillity and resignation. Poetry was his resource during his stormy voyage. Poetry gained him the affection and esteem of his new fellow-citizens, notwithstanding their barbarism,[[749]] and procured him the honour of a tomb.
All the extant poems of Ovid, with the exception of the Metamorphoses, are elegiac. It was the metre then most in vogue. All the minor poets, his contemporaries, wrote in it. One of his earliest works is the “Amores,” a collection of elegies, most of which are addressed to his favourite mistress Corinna. Some of them, however, were composed subsequently to his Epistles and Art of Love.[[750]] An epigram, which is prefixed, states that there were originally five books, but that the author subsequently reduced them to the present number, three. Licentiousness disfigures these annals of his amours; but they teem with the freshness and buoyancy of youth, and sparkle with grace and ingenuity.
The twenty-one Epistolæ Heroidum, i. e. Epistles to and from Women of the Heroic Age, are a series of love-letters: their characteristic feature is passion; the ardour of which is sometimes interfered with by too laboured conceits and excessive refinement. They are, in fact, the most polished efforts of one whose natural indolence often disinclined him from expending that time and pains on the work of amending and correcting which distinguished Virgil. Their great merit consists in the remarkable neatness with which the sentiments are expressed, and the sweetness of the versification; their great defect is want of variety. The subject necessarily limited the topics. The range of them is confined to laments for the absence of the beloved object, the pangs of jealousy, apprehensions of inconstancy, expressions of warm affection, and descriptions of the joys and sorrows of love.