His
thoughts
turn to death.
Ovid - 1901 - Ovid and His Influence
THE WORLD OF POETRY
is the finest monument preserved to us of the
liturgy of ancient Rome.
4. The Poet in Exile
In the year 8 a. d. Ovid's career, hitherto
blameless, as he says, was blasted by a thunder-
bolt from the real and Roman Jupiter. Augustus
banished the poet to Tomis on the shores of
the Black Sea. A mystery underlies this sen-
tence that possibly may never be solved. Ovid
assigns two sorts of offence that had brought
the punishment upon him, his poem and his
error, -- carmen et error. The poem is the Art
of Love, published about eight years before.
If that was cause for banishment, it is a won-
der that the poet was not banished forthwith,
or at least soon after, when in 2 a. d. the per-
formances of the smart set at court culminated
in the disgrace of the Emperor's daughter Julia.
Ovid's wit, though doing little harm to temper-
aments like his own, had profaned the mys-
teries and stimulated intrigue; the Art of Love
was more, not less, dangerous, than the Amores
from its very profession that it was perfectly
safe. Now in 8 A. D. , when the younger Julia,
following her mother's example, capped a cli-
max of high living by an amour with Silanus,
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Augustus may well have felt that his reform of
morals, glorified in the panegyrics of Virgil and
Horace, had come to a grievous end. He would
have read with a bitter sense of irony Horace's
rejoicings at the advent of a time when
Mothers are praised for offspring of like kind. 19
The Emperor doubtless knew Ovid by reputa-
tion; he picked up a copy of the Art of Love,
-- one of those best sellers that potentates do
not have time to read -- scanned enough of its
contents to corroborate his opinion, and acted.
He visited light penalties on the guilty pair;
Julia lived for the rest of her days in one of the
towns of Italy, while Silanus, though he went
into voluntary exile, was merely excluded from
court. On Ovid, supposedly the high priest of
this disastrous cult, was visited the full sum
of the Emperor's wrath.
So much for the carmen. It was the ostensi-
ble cause, and perhaps in itself might have oc-
casioned the poet's disgrace. But there was
some deeper offence, something that had
touched Augustus to the quick. On Ovid's part,
this was merely an "error," a " fault," with-
out a tinge of crime. His eyes, he tells us, were
chiefly to blame; like Actaeon, or the peeping
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? On dit que l'amour me^me fut cause en partie . . .
Et qu'il vint tout expre`s au fond de la Scythie.
LINGENDES
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
shepherd in the Fasti, he had seen more than
he should have seen. What this unhallowed
sight was, he does not once suggest. Everybody
may have known all about it, but a gentlemanly
decency sealed his lips. The guesses of schol-
ars have been various. Some have thought that
the plottings of the Empress Livia against the
household of her step-children, the Julias in-
cluded, may have been ultimately responsible
for the poet's fate, -- a fine bit of tragic irony
for the poet of the loves, to perish in a bataille
de dames! He may have been caught at a gath-
ering of conspirators, or a stance of magicians
who were scheming by their arts the death of
Augustus. Or perhaps he had observed His
Majesty himself in some delicate predicament!
Perhaps he hit him off in a burlesque. If the
gods of Greece and the heroes of Rome, if Jove
himself, if Apollo, the favored deity of the
Augustan age, can be exhibited on the poet's
comic stage, why not the champion of Apollo
and counterpart of Jove? There is no evidence
that Ovid was specially adverse to the cult of
Apollo, which symbolized Augustus's cherished
ideals. Ovid is no sectarian; he is not " anti"
anything. He could hardly have directed the
Emperor's particular attention to the Meta-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
morphoses if that poem had included a tract
against the worship of Apollo. But could Au-
gustus have read the Metamorphoses through,
he might have thought that performance still
more fatal than the Art of Love to his pro-
gramme of religious reform. The tender poet
of Jupiter's amours might have been banished
even for the Metamorphoses alone. But all this
is guess-work. We may let the curtain fall once
more on the mystery, finding the ultimate cause
of the poet's ruin in the words of his confession
"ingenio perii. "
Tristia
Car sachies que toutes vos choses
Sunt en vous-meismes encloses.
JEAN DE MEUN
Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque
Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.
OVID
For a nature like Ovid's, banishment to the
chill shores of the Euxine Pontus amounted to
solitary imprisonment for life. The strictest
sort of exile had not been decreed in his case;
he retained his property, and eventual return to
Rome was not excluded. He immediately bent
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
his energies to lamenting his fate and securing
his return. The first of his letters from exile
were collected under the appropriate title
Tristia. His favorite metre was also still ap-
propriate; for elegy, by one theory, was origi-
nally a mournful form of verse, fiebile carmen,
and the grief of the lover or the mourning for
a poet of love had traditionally accompanied
love-poems of an entirely different caste. But
Ovid is pouring new wine into the ancient
bottle; it is doubtless his extension of the use
of the elegiac metre in the Tristia that
prompted Mediaeval Latin poets to employ it
for any subject whatsoever and led in our own
poetry to the restriction of elegy to mournful
verse.
Gvid's new essay in poetry may seem to re-
veal a spirit unmanned. Boethius in his dun-
geon wrote no Tristia, but a consolation of
philosophy, in which he sought to justify the
ways of God to men. Nothing could banish
Dante from himself. "Shall I not," he de-
clares, " in any place look on the mirror of the
sun and the stars? Can I not under whatever
sky contemplate the sweet and eternal veri-
ties? "30 To Ovid, sun and stars appeared ex-
iled too, if they did not shine on him from the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
sky of Italy. No chance for poetry when his
world has been tipped upside down:
Songs cannot flow but from a mind serene. 31
Despite these words of his, Ovid began to
write again the moment he got on shipboard
and had a new volume well-nigh ready when
he reached port. It is an agreeable little book,
with touches of pathos, of affection towards his
friends, of devotion to his wife. We may posi-
tively say, what we had suspected before, that
for all his witty audacities, Ovid had a high
conception of womanhood and was himself no
libertine. He turns to song for consolation.
With his castle of delight suddenly demolished,
he rebuilds; he adjusts himself, with no little
fancy, to a new mythology; his faithful wife is
added to the heroines, -- a new Penelope. He
is Ulysses, tossed about in a somewhat literary
storm with the spray moistening his tablets as
he writes. Or he is Aeneas, leaving his Troy,
not for the city's doom but for his own. There
is genuine grief and repentance beneath the
badinage; the poem on his departure is his real
apology for the Art of Love. On his arrival,
Ovid composed an encomium of the good ship
that had brought him safe to land, and wrote
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
an introductory address to his little book as it
fared forth on its hazardous voyage across the
seas and its still more hazardous wanderings
about Rome. He bids it steer clear of the
Palatine and make for the poet's house, where
it will find its brother-volumes, most of them
displaying their titles unabashed, though
Three in a corner dark their heads hang low,
For teaching love, which no one does not know.
Then there are those fifteen volumes of meta-
morphoses, lately rescued from the extinction
that had befallen their author.
Amongst their transformations, pray relate
A postscript legend on my shattered state.
Ovid's first volume, we see, is not unduly lu-
gubrious. We wonder if he is taking his exile
seriously enough. Perhaps he thought that the
time was not far distant when he could return
to his pleasant garden, and settle himself com-
fortably again, with pen and tablet, on his
accustomed couch.
The next effort of the exile was to transmit to
the Emperor, probably in 9 a. d. , an elaborate
apology; it forms Book II of the Tristia. He
divides his offence into his carmen and his er-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
ror, says no word on the latter, unwilling to
open his wounds again, and presents a lengthy
defence of the poem, to show that he ill de-
serves the title of "teacher of obscene adul-
tery. " Had he not warned all matrons away, at
the beginning of the work? He was only having
a little fun.
My life is pure, though sullied is my page;
My merry Muse frequents the comic stage.
Most of my verse is sheer mendacity;
She gives herself more license than to me.
This is a familiar apology, presented by Mar-
tial, Ausonius, Herrick and others. In reality,
the libertine whose life is sullied but whose
page is pure, is, like Chaucer's pardoner, much
more beneficial for the morals of posterity.
For, though myself be aful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I yow telle can.
Ovid next points out that he is not the only
poet who has written on the forbidden theme.
The examples that he cites make up a veritable
manual of Greek and Latin poetry. He himself
had been guilty before, if guilt that was. True
enough, the A mores is ostensibly a more fla-
grant transgression than the veiled rascality of
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
the Art of Love. But what did he hope to gain
by such argument? Ten volumes of exculpa-
tion of his carmen could have made his case
no better. He proves too much, especially, with
ill-timed wit, in dragging in the saintly Virgil
among the salacious.
The happy bard who thine Aeneid did sing,
Arms and the man to Dido's couch could bring.
In all that work no tale's more often read *
Than of those mates in lawless passion wed.
Instead of acknowledging his sin, the culprit
would demonstrate that he is no worse than
Virgil! He may mean to cry " Mea culpa, mea
maxima culpa," but he jests in the confessional.
One line gives evidence of a contrite heart. He
declares that he is sorry for his wit and for his
false judgment:
Faenitet ingenii iudiciique met.
Had he sent just this verse to Augustus it
might have had some effect. Alas, instead of
repenting of his wit, he continues to exhibit it
throughout his apology. The thing is too pro-
vokingly clever. Worst of all, he proceeds to
reprove the Emperor himself for lending his
sanction to other indecencies, such as the rough
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Roman vaudeville, and then being suddenly
shocked at the Art of Love. Ah, why, the poet
exclaims, had he not had the sense to write for
the vulgar stage, where gentlemanly adulterers
are heroes and the canny wife dupes her stupid
husband. And, most unkindest cut of all, the
writer of mimes draws a huge salary, while
Ovid draws exile! Just reflect, your Majesty,
on the kind of performances that you have
witnessed in your own exhibitions!
Such hast thou seen, and given us to see,
So kind a sovereignty resides in thee.
Thou, on whom looks the world, with thine own
eyes
Lenient hast gazed on stage adulteries.
In fine, unless the Emperor's intelligence was
encased in a hide of elephantine thickness, the
poet could have hardly expected a reprieve for
an appeal like this. Whatever Ovid's intention
was, this apologia pro vitiis suis is addressed
not to Augustus but to posterity.
The remaining books of the Tristia bring us
down into the year 12 a. d. They show an in-
crease of seriousness in Ovid, as he comes more
and more to realize that his missives are pro-
ducing no result.
His thoughts turn to death.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
He hopes that his ashes may be decently in-
terred in Rome. Again his spirit rises, and re-
fuses to be overborne by its afflictions. He
turns to the Muse, who is his rest and healing,
his guide and companion. She can transport
him from the Danube's bank to the slopes of
Helicon, or, better still, to his beloved Rome,
where he can talk as of old with his friends
the livelong day:
They're here, although beyond the body's call;
With the mind's vision, I can see them all. 32
After all, Ovid can free himself from his iron
bars with something of the defiance of a Love-
lace or a Boethius. His power to create a new
mythology is still active. He promises his loyal
wife an immortality in song, with Alcestis and
Andromache, -- and, let us not forget, with
Corinna. One of the letters is to the maiden
Perilla, probably the poet's step-daughter; she
is sitting by her mother's side, busy, he hopes,
with those studies that once he had shared with
her. He contrasts his own surroundings, the
horrors of the winter, when the natives wear
coats of fur, icicles hang on the beard and wine
is served in frozen chunks. Yet violets come
in the spring and boys and girls pick them
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
merrily. The poet finds himself a somewhat
useless member of the society of Tomis, where
everybody speaks Gothic, a few Greek, and no-
body Latin. Among these aborigines, Ovid is
in the plight of Horace's sane man among the
insane.
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand. 33
Still, he manages to learn both Getic and Sar-
matic and suggests a new and wintry theme for
a pastoral, with a shepherd piping a frozen lay
through his helmet.
As one ends the five volumes of Tristia, it is
patent that bit by bit, a feeling of dreariness
or even despair is closing in about the poet. He
recounts his bodily ailments with the precise-
ness of a chronic invalid, -- malaria, insomnia,
emaciation, indigestion, jaundice. His spirit is
breaking. Several times he feels that his end is
approaching, and writes what he may well have
thought the last of his poems. One of these
contains his epitaph:
I that lie here, the bard of playful love,
The poet Ovid, perished for my play.
Oh passing lover, scorn not thou to pray
That no ill chance my restful bones may move. 3*
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Last Works
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
SHELLEY
Fortiter Euxinis immoriemur aquis
ovm
Ovid's exiled Muse was fertile in other
themes than Tristia. He composed, in the
manner of Callimachus, a poem of curses, en-
titled Ibis, and directed against an ancient
enemy. Six hundred and forty-four verses of
malediction in one breath! Still, there is little
vehemence behind them; it might seem that
this enemy, like Corinna, was imaginary and
composite, -- an objectification of the poet's
many protests against his fate. What astounds
the reader, and often baffles the scholar, is
Ovid's profound acquaintance with rare myths.
Either he is lying, or, if he really had no books
in Tomis, his powers of memory deserve to be
recorded among the prodigies of antiquity. This
is a fable for those critics who assume some
handbook of mythology or, if they are liberal,
two handbooks, as the main source of the
Metamorphoses, not observing that the poet
himself was a walking library of myths.
Ovid's learning is no less apparent in a poem
on the art of fishing, Halieutica, of which only
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
a fragment remains. The work aroused the ad-
miration of no less a scientist than the elder
Pliny, who found, fish in Ovid's list not men-
tioned elsewhere, and concluded that the poet
must have noted them in the Euxine Pontus. 86
Ovid speaks as an angler of some experience.
One of his couplets was chosen, not many years
ago, as a motto by an excellent authority on
sea-fishing:36
There's much in chance; trawl your line anywhere.
When you would least expect, a fish is there.
These verses, to be sure, are from another work
of the poet's, -- intended for fishers of men --
but the principle applies also to sea-fishing.
The stars were visible from Tomis, and Ovid
wrote a poem, which has not come down to us,
on astronomy, entitled, after the famous work
of the Greek poet Aratus, Phaenomena. He
had been preceded in this subject, among the
Romans, by Cicero and by his own contempo-
rary Germanicus Caesar. In honor of the lat-
ter, he wrote a dedication of the Fasti and gave
that work a partial revision. Here and there
we can detect an added verse as in the lines on
his birth-place, pathetically contrasted with his
present home among the Goths. There is a
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
brave utterance in contempt of exile, which if
not inserted at the time of the revision, is
grimly prophetic of his coming fate.
As birds the air and fish the ocean roam,
So a bold heart finds all the world a home. "
We have evidence of other works composed
by Ovid in exile, an epithalamium for his friend
Fabius Maximus, an ode of jubilation on the
triumph of Tiberius in 13 a. d. , a threnody on
the death of Augustus, and even a panegyric
in the Getic tongue on the imperial family. A
poem on the nut-tree, Liber Nucis, though long
regarded as of doubtful genuineness, is in all
probability an allegory of his exile; the tree
complains that innocent as it is, every passer-
by pelts it with stones. Not its own fault but
its very productivity is the cause of its ill
treatment; the tree wonders that the Emperor,
who protects all, can suffer it to be thus perse-
cuted.
Love, the poet declares, is an impossible
theme for him. Still, Cupid appears to him in
a vision and is asked to intercede for him;
everybody else had been asked, and, besides,
Cupid is the cousin of Augustus. Cupid swears
by his torch and his arrows, by his mother and
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by Caesar's head that the Art of Love is per-
fectly proper and never was meant for matrons.
Here is the old Ovid, in command of a genial
and saucy wit, particularly in that oath by
Caesar's head. Could he have continued that
vein for such works as the Double Heroides,
which by certain metrical tests best fit in with
the poetry of his exile? It seems unlikely.
Ovid's sprightliness still comes in flashes, --
flashes against a prevailing background of
gloom.
Epistulae Ex Ponto
The letters of the latter part of Ovid's exile
show nothing new in the poet's genius or his
mood, except that whatever hope he had enter-
tained of a restoration has gone for good; the
twilight of the Tristia is settling into night.
At least he can now name the friends to whom
he writes; it is no longer dangerous for them
to be known as his correspondents. The num-
ber of them is amazing; there seems to have
been nobody worth knowing, at least in the
literary set, that Ovid did not know. His ap-
peals do not cease, fruitless though they must
be. They become monotonous, and he tells us
so. Yet they become so varied that he can con-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
struct a new art, -- safer, and less effective
than his former invention --? ? an ars precandi!
His pupil is no longer Corinna, but that other
heroine of mythology, Penelope; she is urged
to apply the new precepts in a final address
to Livia.
Ovid dwells several times on the sacred bond
that unites fellow-poets; he goes back in fond
reminiscence to his travels with Macer, in Asia,
in Sicily, at the fountain in Syracuse where
Arethusa had made her way up from the deep!
Something it is together seas to brave,
Together pay our vows to gods that save. 38
Again, the poet's fancy takes him back to the
little garden which he used to water with his
own hands, and in which he had set out some
plants -- are they still alive? He thinks of tak-
ing up farming in his new abode; he must learn
the calls that Gothic oxen know, -- he will
make them mind! This pastoral description
recalls the delightful account in the Meta-
morphoses of the wooing of Pomona; the al-
tered context gives the repeated words a vivid
pathos. In fact, reminiscence now brings him
pain; the dwelling of his mind on Rome
freshens the grief of exile. The poet anticipates
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Francesca's bitter epigram that it is sorrow's
crown of sorrow to remember happiness in
misery. 38
There are reflections on immortality in the
letters from the Pontus, but the poet is less
interested in his own immortality than in that
which his power of song can confer on others,
-- on the Emperor, on Cotta, and above all,
on his wife. Yes, the gods themselves, if it be
not blasphemy to say it, he declares, depend
for a part of their majesty on the poet's song.
This is indeed a subdued sort of blasphemy for
Ovid; there are no divine burlesques in the
poems of his exile.
Ovid's studies in Gothic had progressed, and
he had made friends among the uncouth in-
habitants. Ovid is the least snobbish of men;
he craved sympathy and society. "If I have
said anything bad about Gothland," he writes
a friend, "please assume that I meant the
country and not the people, -- the people are
not a bad lot. " Ovid read one of his poems in
the vernacular to a native, to the latter's de-
light. Another told him, as a bit of local tra-
dition, the story of Iphigenia in Tauris. If this
incident is as mythical as the tale, it only shows
that the Goths have entered with Corinna and
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Penelope into the poet's imaginary world of
living myths.
But more and more the poet's fancy weakens,
or turns into a morbid nervousness. The dream
becomes a nightmare; he is fighting on a
Gothic battle-field, grazed by the enemy's ar-
rows, shackled with their bonds. He rehearses
his ailments again, with an unpleasant wealth
of circumstance. His present existence is a life
in death. He would welcome a metamorphosis,
-- not to a conscious being but to a thing of
wood or stone. He fights to the end; his is no
coward's death. All his strength fails but the
mind conquers all. Aye, he will die bravely by
the Pontic Sea. But the fight is over; Ovid has
his death-blow. The last lines of his book, and
for all we know, of his life, are these:
All have I lost; enough of life remains
To furnish substance for my spirit's pains.
Stab on. The torture can no further go;
There is no place for yet another blow.
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? n. OVID THROUGH THE
CENTURIES
Si quid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
ovm
Compagni d'alto ingegno e da trastullo
Di quei che volentier gia '1 mondo lesse,--
L'un era Ovidio.
PETRARCH
Among all the poets who take rank merely as story-tellers
and creators of mimic worlds, Ovid still stands supreme.
GILBERT MURRAY
OVID, the poet of changing forms, was
aware that his exile was for himself
a metamorphosis. If he could have
followed the career of his posthumous self, he
would have noted, presumably with amuse-
ment, many a transformation which ideas about
his character, his purposes and his art were to
undergo. He found himself famous at an early
age; the lays of the mysterious Corinna were
sung all over town, and some of his poems, even
after his exile, were rendered in the theatres
to the accompaniment of song and dance. Exile
had threatened the extinction of his works
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
when he burned his copy of the Metamorpho-
ses and the libraries ejected his works from
their shelves. But all copies of his greatest
work had not been destroyed, and the others
were doubtless circulated as before. The sen-
sational advertisement given to the Art of Love
could hardly have interfered with its sale. Ovid
was a man's man, -- and something of a lady's
man as well -- and throughout his career had
many friends among the poets about town.
These friends took care that his works were
not forgotten. Some of his verses, in his time
or later, were scribbled on the walls of Pom-
peii. Before his death, busts were made of him
and his features were engraved on gems; un-
fortunately, no certified copy of his likeness
remains today.
Eventually, Ovid became a school-book.
This fate befell the Metamorphoses at the
hands of a certain, or uncertain, Lactantius
Placidus. Ovid's comedies of the gods and his
studies of human moods were relieved of their
sparkle and reduced to the lowest terms of fact
in usum puerorum.
Turn what he would to verse, his toil was vain;
The sober teacher made it prose again.
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is the finest monument preserved to us of the
liturgy of ancient Rome.
4. The Poet in Exile
In the year 8 a. d. Ovid's career, hitherto
blameless, as he says, was blasted by a thunder-
bolt from the real and Roman Jupiter. Augustus
banished the poet to Tomis on the shores of
the Black Sea. A mystery underlies this sen-
tence that possibly may never be solved. Ovid
assigns two sorts of offence that had brought
the punishment upon him, his poem and his
error, -- carmen et error. The poem is the Art
of Love, published about eight years before.
If that was cause for banishment, it is a won-
der that the poet was not banished forthwith,
or at least soon after, when in 2 a. d. the per-
formances of the smart set at court culminated
in the disgrace of the Emperor's daughter Julia.
Ovid's wit, though doing little harm to temper-
aments like his own, had profaned the mys-
teries and stimulated intrigue; the Art of Love
was more, not less, dangerous, than the Amores
from its very profession that it was perfectly
safe. Now in 8 A. D. , when the younger Julia,
following her mother's example, capped a cli-
max of high living by an amour with Silanus,
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Augustus may well have felt that his reform of
morals, glorified in the panegyrics of Virgil and
Horace, had come to a grievous end. He would
have read with a bitter sense of irony Horace's
rejoicings at the advent of a time when
Mothers are praised for offspring of like kind. 19
The Emperor doubtless knew Ovid by reputa-
tion; he picked up a copy of the Art of Love,
-- one of those best sellers that potentates do
not have time to read -- scanned enough of its
contents to corroborate his opinion, and acted.
He visited light penalties on the guilty pair;
Julia lived for the rest of her days in one of the
towns of Italy, while Silanus, though he went
into voluntary exile, was merely excluded from
court. On Ovid, supposedly the high priest of
this disastrous cult, was visited the full sum
of the Emperor's wrath.
So much for the carmen. It was the ostensi-
ble cause, and perhaps in itself might have oc-
casioned the poet's disgrace. But there was
some deeper offence, something that had
touched Augustus to the quick. On Ovid's part,
this was merely an "error," a " fault," with-
out a tinge of crime. His eyes, he tells us, were
chiefly to blame; like Actaeon, or the peeping
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? On dit que l'amour me^me fut cause en partie . . .
Et qu'il vint tout expre`s au fond de la Scythie.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
shepherd in the Fasti, he had seen more than
he should have seen. What this unhallowed
sight was, he does not once suggest. Everybody
may have known all about it, but a gentlemanly
decency sealed his lips. The guesses of schol-
ars have been various. Some have thought that
the plottings of the Empress Livia against the
household of her step-children, the Julias in-
cluded, may have been ultimately responsible
for the poet's fate, -- a fine bit of tragic irony
for the poet of the loves, to perish in a bataille
de dames! He may have been caught at a gath-
ering of conspirators, or a stance of magicians
who were scheming by their arts the death of
Augustus. Or perhaps he had observed His
Majesty himself in some delicate predicament!
Perhaps he hit him off in a burlesque. If the
gods of Greece and the heroes of Rome, if Jove
himself, if Apollo, the favored deity of the
Augustan age, can be exhibited on the poet's
comic stage, why not the champion of Apollo
and counterpart of Jove? There is no evidence
that Ovid was specially adverse to the cult of
Apollo, which symbolized Augustus's cherished
ideals. Ovid is no sectarian; he is not " anti"
anything. He could hardly have directed the
Emperor's particular attention to the Meta-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
morphoses if that poem had included a tract
against the worship of Apollo. But could Au-
gustus have read the Metamorphoses through,
he might have thought that performance still
more fatal than the Art of Love to his pro-
gramme of religious reform. The tender poet
of Jupiter's amours might have been banished
even for the Metamorphoses alone. But all this
is guess-work. We may let the curtain fall once
more on the mystery, finding the ultimate cause
of the poet's ruin in the words of his confession
"ingenio perii. "
Tristia
Car sachies que toutes vos choses
Sunt en vous-meismes encloses.
JEAN DE MEUN
Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque
Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.
OVID
For a nature like Ovid's, banishment to the
chill shores of the Euxine Pontus amounted to
solitary imprisonment for life. The strictest
sort of exile had not been decreed in his case;
he retained his property, and eventual return to
Rome was not excluded. He immediately bent
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
his energies to lamenting his fate and securing
his return. The first of his letters from exile
were collected under the appropriate title
Tristia. His favorite metre was also still ap-
propriate; for elegy, by one theory, was origi-
nally a mournful form of verse, fiebile carmen,
and the grief of the lover or the mourning for
a poet of love had traditionally accompanied
love-poems of an entirely different caste. But
Ovid is pouring new wine into the ancient
bottle; it is doubtless his extension of the use
of the elegiac metre in the Tristia that
prompted Mediaeval Latin poets to employ it
for any subject whatsoever and led in our own
poetry to the restriction of elegy to mournful
verse.
Gvid's new essay in poetry may seem to re-
veal a spirit unmanned. Boethius in his dun-
geon wrote no Tristia, but a consolation of
philosophy, in which he sought to justify the
ways of God to men. Nothing could banish
Dante from himself. "Shall I not," he de-
clares, " in any place look on the mirror of the
sun and the stars? Can I not under whatever
sky contemplate the sweet and eternal veri-
ties? "30 To Ovid, sun and stars appeared ex-
iled too, if they did not shine on him from the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
sky of Italy. No chance for poetry when his
world has been tipped upside down:
Songs cannot flow but from a mind serene. 31
Despite these words of his, Ovid began to
write again the moment he got on shipboard
and had a new volume well-nigh ready when
he reached port. It is an agreeable little book,
with touches of pathos, of affection towards his
friends, of devotion to his wife. We may posi-
tively say, what we had suspected before, that
for all his witty audacities, Ovid had a high
conception of womanhood and was himself no
libertine. He turns to song for consolation.
With his castle of delight suddenly demolished,
he rebuilds; he adjusts himself, with no little
fancy, to a new mythology; his faithful wife is
added to the heroines, -- a new Penelope. He
is Ulysses, tossed about in a somewhat literary
storm with the spray moistening his tablets as
he writes. Or he is Aeneas, leaving his Troy,
not for the city's doom but for his own. There
is genuine grief and repentance beneath the
badinage; the poem on his departure is his real
apology for the Art of Love. On his arrival,
Ovid composed an encomium of the good ship
that had brought him safe to land, and wrote
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
an introductory address to his little book as it
fared forth on its hazardous voyage across the
seas and its still more hazardous wanderings
about Rome. He bids it steer clear of the
Palatine and make for the poet's house, where
it will find its brother-volumes, most of them
displaying their titles unabashed, though
Three in a corner dark their heads hang low,
For teaching love, which no one does not know.
Then there are those fifteen volumes of meta-
morphoses, lately rescued from the extinction
that had befallen their author.
Amongst their transformations, pray relate
A postscript legend on my shattered state.
Ovid's first volume, we see, is not unduly lu-
gubrious. We wonder if he is taking his exile
seriously enough. Perhaps he thought that the
time was not far distant when he could return
to his pleasant garden, and settle himself com-
fortably again, with pen and tablet, on his
accustomed couch.
The next effort of the exile was to transmit to
the Emperor, probably in 9 a. d. , an elaborate
apology; it forms Book II of the Tristia. He
divides his offence into his carmen and his er-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
ror, says no word on the latter, unwilling to
open his wounds again, and presents a lengthy
defence of the poem, to show that he ill de-
serves the title of "teacher of obscene adul-
tery. " Had he not warned all matrons away, at
the beginning of the work? He was only having
a little fun.
My life is pure, though sullied is my page;
My merry Muse frequents the comic stage.
Most of my verse is sheer mendacity;
She gives herself more license than to me.
This is a familiar apology, presented by Mar-
tial, Ausonius, Herrick and others. In reality,
the libertine whose life is sullied but whose
page is pure, is, like Chaucer's pardoner, much
more beneficial for the morals of posterity.
For, though myself be aful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I yow telle can.
Ovid next points out that he is not the only
poet who has written on the forbidden theme.
The examples that he cites make up a veritable
manual of Greek and Latin poetry. He himself
had been guilty before, if guilt that was. True
enough, the A mores is ostensibly a more fla-
grant transgression than the veiled rascality of
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
the Art of Love. But what did he hope to gain
by such argument? Ten volumes of exculpa-
tion of his carmen could have made his case
no better. He proves too much, especially, with
ill-timed wit, in dragging in the saintly Virgil
among the salacious.
The happy bard who thine Aeneid did sing,
Arms and the man to Dido's couch could bring.
In all that work no tale's more often read *
Than of those mates in lawless passion wed.
Instead of acknowledging his sin, the culprit
would demonstrate that he is no worse than
Virgil! He may mean to cry " Mea culpa, mea
maxima culpa," but he jests in the confessional.
One line gives evidence of a contrite heart. He
declares that he is sorry for his wit and for his
false judgment:
Faenitet ingenii iudiciique met.
Had he sent just this verse to Augustus it
might have had some effect. Alas, instead of
repenting of his wit, he continues to exhibit it
throughout his apology. The thing is too pro-
vokingly clever. Worst of all, he proceeds to
reprove the Emperor himself for lending his
sanction to other indecencies, such as the rough
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Roman vaudeville, and then being suddenly
shocked at the Art of Love. Ah, why, the poet
exclaims, had he not had the sense to write for
the vulgar stage, where gentlemanly adulterers
are heroes and the canny wife dupes her stupid
husband. And, most unkindest cut of all, the
writer of mimes draws a huge salary, while
Ovid draws exile! Just reflect, your Majesty,
on the kind of performances that you have
witnessed in your own exhibitions!
Such hast thou seen, and given us to see,
So kind a sovereignty resides in thee.
Thou, on whom looks the world, with thine own
eyes
Lenient hast gazed on stage adulteries.
In fine, unless the Emperor's intelligence was
encased in a hide of elephantine thickness, the
poet could have hardly expected a reprieve for
an appeal like this. Whatever Ovid's intention
was, this apologia pro vitiis suis is addressed
not to Augustus but to posterity.
The remaining books of the Tristia bring us
down into the year 12 a. d. They show an in-
crease of seriousness in Ovid, as he comes more
and more to realize that his missives are pro-
ducing no result.
His thoughts turn to death.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
He hopes that his ashes may be decently in-
terred in Rome. Again his spirit rises, and re-
fuses to be overborne by its afflictions. He
turns to the Muse, who is his rest and healing,
his guide and companion. She can transport
him from the Danube's bank to the slopes of
Helicon, or, better still, to his beloved Rome,
where he can talk as of old with his friends
the livelong day:
They're here, although beyond the body's call;
With the mind's vision, I can see them all. 32
After all, Ovid can free himself from his iron
bars with something of the defiance of a Love-
lace or a Boethius. His power to create a new
mythology is still active. He promises his loyal
wife an immortality in song, with Alcestis and
Andromache, -- and, let us not forget, with
Corinna. One of the letters is to the maiden
Perilla, probably the poet's step-daughter; she
is sitting by her mother's side, busy, he hopes,
with those studies that once he had shared with
her. He contrasts his own surroundings, the
horrors of the winter, when the natives wear
coats of fur, icicles hang on the beard and wine
is served in frozen chunks. Yet violets come
in the spring and boys and girls pick them
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
merrily. The poet finds himself a somewhat
useless member of the society of Tomis, where
everybody speaks Gothic, a few Greek, and no-
body Latin. Among these aborigines, Ovid is
in the plight of Horace's sane man among the
insane.
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand. 33
Still, he manages to learn both Getic and Sar-
matic and suggests a new and wintry theme for
a pastoral, with a shepherd piping a frozen lay
through his helmet.
As one ends the five volumes of Tristia, it is
patent that bit by bit, a feeling of dreariness
or even despair is closing in about the poet. He
recounts his bodily ailments with the precise-
ness of a chronic invalid, -- malaria, insomnia,
emaciation, indigestion, jaundice. His spirit is
breaking. Several times he feels that his end is
approaching, and writes what he may well have
thought the last of his poems. One of these
contains his epitaph:
I that lie here, the bard of playful love,
The poet Ovid, perished for my play.
Oh passing lover, scorn not thou to pray
That no ill chance my restful bones may move. 3*
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Last Works
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
SHELLEY
Fortiter Euxinis immoriemur aquis
ovm
Ovid's exiled Muse was fertile in other
themes than Tristia. He composed, in the
manner of Callimachus, a poem of curses, en-
titled Ibis, and directed against an ancient
enemy. Six hundred and forty-four verses of
malediction in one breath! Still, there is little
vehemence behind them; it might seem that
this enemy, like Corinna, was imaginary and
composite, -- an objectification of the poet's
many protests against his fate. What astounds
the reader, and often baffles the scholar, is
Ovid's profound acquaintance with rare myths.
Either he is lying, or, if he really had no books
in Tomis, his powers of memory deserve to be
recorded among the prodigies of antiquity. This
is a fable for those critics who assume some
handbook of mythology or, if they are liberal,
two handbooks, as the main source of the
Metamorphoses, not observing that the poet
himself was a walking library of myths.
Ovid's learning is no less apparent in a poem
on the art of fishing, Halieutica, of which only
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
a fragment remains. The work aroused the ad-
miration of no less a scientist than the elder
Pliny, who found, fish in Ovid's list not men-
tioned elsewhere, and concluded that the poet
must have noted them in the Euxine Pontus. 86
Ovid speaks as an angler of some experience.
One of his couplets was chosen, not many years
ago, as a motto by an excellent authority on
sea-fishing:36
There's much in chance; trawl your line anywhere.
When you would least expect, a fish is there.
These verses, to be sure, are from another work
of the poet's, -- intended for fishers of men --
but the principle applies also to sea-fishing.
The stars were visible from Tomis, and Ovid
wrote a poem, which has not come down to us,
on astronomy, entitled, after the famous work
of the Greek poet Aratus, Phaenomena. He
had been preceded in this subject, among the
Romans, by Cicero and by his own contempo-
rary Germanicus Caesar. In honor of the lat-
ter, he wrote a dedication of the Fasti and gave
that work a partial revision. Here and there
we can detect an added verse as in the lines on
his birth-place, pathetically contrasted with his
present home among the Goths. There is a
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
brave utterance in contempt of exile, which if
not inserted at the time of the revision, is
grimly prophetic of his coming fate.
As birds the air and fish the ocean roam,
So a bold heart finds all the world a home. "
We have evidence of other works composed
by Ovid in exile, an epithalamium for his friend
Fabius Maximus, an ode of jubilation on the
triumph of Tiberius in 13 a. d. , a threnody on
the death of Augustus, and even a panegyric
in the Getic tongue on the imperial family. A
poem on the nut-tree, Liber Nucis, though long
regarded as of doubtful genuineness, is in all
probability an allegory of his exile; the tree
complains that innocent as it is, every passer-
by pelts it with stones. Not its own fault but
its very productivity is the cause of its ill
treatment; the tree wonders that the Emperor,
who protects all, can suffer it to be thus perse-
cuted.
Love, the poet declares, is an impossible
theme for him. Still, Cupid appears to him in
a vision and is asked to intercede for him;
everybody else had been asked, and, besides,
Cupid is the cousin of Augustus. Cupid swears
by his torch and his arrows, by his mother and
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by Caesar's head that the Art of Love is per-
fectly proper and never was meant for matrons.
Here is the old Ovid, in command of a genial
and saucy wit, particularly in that oath by
Caesar's head. Could he have continued that
vein for such works as the Double Heroides,
which by certain metrical tests best fit in with
the poetry of his exile? It seems unlikely.
Ovid's sprightliness still comes in flashes, --
flashes against a prevailing background of
gloom.
Epistulae Ex Ponto
The letters of the latter part of Ovid's exile
show nothing new in the poet's genius or his
mood, except that whatever hope he had enter-
tained of a restoration has gone for good; the
twilight of the Tristia is settling into night.
At least he can now name the friends to whom
he writes; it is no longer dangerous for them
to be known as his correspondents. The num-
ber of them is amazing; there seems to have
been nobody worth knowing, at least in the
literary set, that Ovid did not know. His ap-
peals do not cease, fruitless though they must
be. They become monotonous, and he tells us
so. Yet they become so varied that he can con-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
struct a new art, -- safer, and less effective
than his former invention --? ? an ars precandi!
His pupil is no longer Corinna, but that other
heroine of mythology, Penelope; she is urged
to apply the new precepts in a final address
to Livia.
Ovid dwells several times on the sacred bond
that unites fellow-poets; he goes back in fond
reminiscence to his travels with Macer, in Asia,
in Sicily, at the fountain in Syracuse where
Arethusa had made her way up from the deep!
Something it is together seas to brave,
Together pay our vows to gods that save. 38
Again, the poet's fancy takes him back to the
little garden which he used to water with his
own hands, and in which he had set out some
plants -- are they still alive? He thinks of tak-
ing up farming in his new abode; he must learn
the calls that Gothic oxen know, -- he will
make them mind! This pastoral description
recalls the delightful account in the Meta-
morphoses of the wooing of Pomona; the al-
tered context gives the repeated words a vivid
pathos. In fact, reminiscence now brings him
pain; the dwelling of his mind on Rome
freshens the grief of exile. The poet anticipates
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Francesca's bitter epigram that it is sorrow's
crown of sorrow to remember happiness in
misery. 38
There are reflections on immortality in the
letters from the Pontus, but the poet is less
interested in his own immortality than in that
which his power of song can confer on others,
-- on the Emperor, on Cotta, and above all,
on his wife. Yes, the gods themselves, if it be
not blasphemy to say it, he declares, depend
for a part of their majesty on the poet's song.
This is indeed a subdued sort of blasphemy for
Ovid; there are no divine burlesques in the
poems of his exile.
Ovid's studies in Gothic had progressed, and
he had made friends among the uncouth in-
habitants. Ovid is the least snobbish of men;
he craved sympathy and society. "If I have
said anything bad about Gothland," he writes
a friend, "please assume that I meant the
country and not the people, -- the people are
not a bad lot. " Ovid read one of his poems in
the vernacular to a native, to the latter's de-
light. Another told him, as a bit of local tra-
dition, the story of Iphigenia in Tauris. If this
incident is as mythical as the tale, it only shows
that the Goths have entered with Corinna and
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Penelope into the poet's imaginary world of
living myths.
But more and more the poet's fancy weakens,
or turns into a morbid nervousness. The dream
becomes a nightmare; he is fighting on a
Gothic battle-field, grazed by the enemy's ar-
rows, shackled with their bonds. He rehearses
his ailments again, with an unpleasant wealth
of circumstance. His present existence is a life
in death. He would welcome a metamorphosis,
-- not to a conscious being but to a thing of
wood or stone. He fights to the end; his is no
coward's death. All his strength fails but the
mind conquers all. Aye, he will die bravely by
the Pontic Sea. But the fight is over; Ovid has
his death-blow. The last lines of his book, and
for all we know, of his life, are these:
All have I lost; enough of life remains
To furnish substance for my spirit's pains.
Stab on. The torture can no further go;
There is no place for yet another blow.
[107]
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-26 11:21 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015039815975 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? n. OVID THROUGH THE
CENTURIES
Si quid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
ovm
Compagni d'alto ingegno e da trastullo
Di quei che volentier gia '1 mondo lesse,--
L'un era Ovidio.
PETRARCH
Among all the poets who take rank merely as story-tellers
and creators of mimic worlds, Ovid still stands supreme.
GILBERT MURRAY
OVID, the poet of changing forms, was
aware that his exile was for himself
a metamorphosis. If he could have
followed the career of his posthumous self, he
would have noted, presumably with amuse-
ment, many a transformation which ideas about
his character, his purposes and his art were to
undergo. He found himself famous at an early
age; the lays of the mysterious Corinna were
sung all over town, and some of his poems, even
after his exile, were rendered in the theatres
to the accompaniment of song and dance. Exile
had threatened the extinction of his works
[108]
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-26 11:21 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015039815975 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
when he burned his copy of the Metamorpho-
ses and the libraries ejected his works from
their shelves. But all copies of his greatest
work had not been destroyed, and the others
were doubtless circulated as before. The sen-
sational advertisement given to the Art of Love
could hardly have interfered with its sale. Ovid
was a man's man, -- and something of a lady's
man as well -- and throughout his career had
many friends among the poets about town.
These friends took care that his works were
not forgotten. Some of his verses, in his time
or later, were scribbled on the walls of Pom-
peii. Before his death, busts were made of him
and his features were engraved on gems; un-
fortunately, no certified copy of his likeness
remains today.
Eventually, Ovid became a school-book.
This fate befell the Metamorphoses at the
hands of a certain, or uncertain, Lactantius
Placidus. Ovid's comedies of the gods and his
studies of human moods were relieved of their
sparkle and reduced to the lowest terms of fact
in usum puerorum.
Turn what he would to verse, his toil was vain;
The sober teacher made it prose again.
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