No More Learning

The fancy of the Romans, leaving the gods
alone, played freely about the heroes; this was
the kind of myth wherewith, as Livy puts it,
they hallowed the origins of Rome. The more
we must detract from the authenticity of early
Roman history, the more we must add to the
poetical creativeness of the Romans.
Ovid is deeply interested, perhaps particu-
larly interested, in the faith of his primitive
ancestors, in the days when
The stars in annual path free roamed the sky
All unobserved; and yet the gods were nigh. 22
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
It was the Golden Age of liberty for the
planets, before they were shackled to scientific
theory. The gods were worshipped in plain
images of straw, but, says the poet, no less
reverent was the worship of that straw than of
the Roman eagles which symbolized the might
of Augustus's divinity. In those happy times,
the gods moved freely among men, visiting the
cottage unawares. The hearth of Vesta was a
sacred thing; the farmer and his family would
sit on long benches before the fire and believe
that the gods had their place at the table. The
shepherd knows that every grove is full of
deities. He prays to his goddess Pales for par-
don if ever he has entered a forbidden grove,
or by peeping about has made the nymphs
scamper with the half-goat god at their heels,
or if he has lopped off a bough from a sacred
tree as browze for a sick sheep, or if in a sud-
den hail-storm he has driven his little flock
into a rustic shrine. These were desperate
cases, but the sin had been done. May the god-
dess have mercy, and grant that he may ne'er
look on a Dryad, or Dian at her bath, or rout
old Faunus from his noon-day napl
All Roman poets are liturgical, even Lucre-
tius, who describes the rites of Cybele with no
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
little zest. 23 Many a solemn measure in Virgil
and Horace sounds most deeply to those who
can hear the same music in the Catholic Mass.
Ovid, too, is fond of liturgical lines, which call
to one another like choristers chanting antiph-
onally. After the flood, says the poet in the
Metamorphoses, Jupiter saw that of the thou-
sands of mankind only two remained. This
statement is not made simply but sung liturgi-
cally, with a bit of rhyme, in a verse and its
response:
Et superesse virum de tot modo milibus unum,
Et superesse videt de tot modo milibus unam. 2*
There are similar passages in the Fasti. The
Great Mother of the gods is brought to Rome
in a vessel of state at night-fall. They tie the
cable to a stump of oak and after a slight re-
past, lie down to sleep. At day-break they con-
struct a hearth, offer incense upon it, and cast
off. The liturgical character of the act is not
stated in words but sung in the verse:
Nox aderat: querno religant a stipite funem
Dantque levi somno corpora functa cibo.
Lux aderat: querno solvunt a stipite funem,
Ante tamen posito tura dedere foco. 26
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Ovid has not merely a liturgical manner at
his command. He has an expert's acquaintance
with hosts of rites, usual and unusual, and can
set them into poetry with vivid charm and
delicate sympathy. He describes with zest the
merrymakings attending the feast of Anna
Perenna, when the people build booths of
boughs by the Tiber and drink as many cups
as the years they wish to live, -- the poet de-
clares that he has seen those who by grace of
much potation rivalled the longevity of Nestor
or the Sibyl. As they reel home at the end of
the day, the crowd cheers them and calls them
blessed. A quieter scene is the feast of Termi-
nus, god of the farmer's bounds, a humble god,
but ancient, and firm to maintain the true line
f division even though the farmer beat him
ver the head with a ploughshare or a rake.
More solemn is the Parentalia, the festival of
the dead, whose shades are satisfied with the
humble offerings of the devout, -- garlands and
fruit, a pinch of salt thrown on the flames, or
loose violets in some potsherd, found in the
country road. Pictures like these indicate no
dull round of obligations, but the pleasant
feasts of immanent deities, to whom costly
victims were a less ample oblation than the
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
prayers of the poor. Ovid's poem reflects the
colors, gay and sombre, of the life of a people
more deeply penetrated with religion than
people are today.
If Ovid's calendar consisted merely of a
series of festivals and rites described as he de-
scribes them, there would be for us life and
variety enough, but not for him. He has not
forgotten his earliest title to fame. Venus, it
would seem, imagines that he has. At the be-
ginning of her own month, April, he makes the
goddess a courteous apology, which would
seem a bit superfluous; for love runs in and
out of the poem as it does in the Metamorpho-
ses. There is a Rabelaisian tale of the ass of
Silenus who by an untimely braying inter-
rupted Priapus's wooing of the nymph. The ass
is promptly sacrificed, and has ever since been
sacrificed, to Silenus; what would seem to us
a commendable moral protest was imputed to
the poor beast as original sin. But the gods
are sometimes not nice in ethical distinctions.
Flora, the charming but disreputable goddess
who contests with Jupiter the right to name the
first of May, declares:
We gods love honor, altars, festal song;
Like politicians, we're a greedy throng.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
The sinner often moves celestial hate,
Yet oft a victim doth our anger sate.
Jove have I seen, his bolts about to rain,
At whiff of incense drop his arm again. 2"
Such is the message of the wanton goddess of
flowers, who at the end of the conversation de-
parts, if not in the odor of sanctity, at least
amid an agreeable fragrance. Primitive Italian
awe has melted with her into the insubstantial
air. Flora is responsible for a bit of what we
might call, in the midst of so much liturgy,
"blasphemous relief" or, better, the irrepres-
sible bubbling up of the poet's wit.
There is more of this witty irreverence in the
poem, and it can intermingle with devotion.
Ovid's mind is at its Protean play again. He
opens the last of the six books in a serious
strain:
A god within us animates the soul
With sacred sparks of the celestial whole.
This mood does not last long. So, then, the
poet continues, it is no sin to meet goddesses
face to face, as he did! Juno, addressing him
respectfully as "founder of the Roman year,"
asserts her right to name the month of June.
Juventa, the bride of Hercules, interrupts her
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
argument boisterously, when Concordia ap-
pears, not to reconcile the disputants but to
claim the honor for herself. The poet, remem-
bering the unhappiness that Paris brought into
the world, refuses to become famous for a
judicium Nasonis. He sends the goddesses
away without a decision:
Taris by arbitration Troy overthrew;
Less joy had he from one than woes from two.
The poet's conversation with Janus is more
profitable. Ovid approaches, with the assur-
ance of a modern reporter, salutes the god, as
an ancient Italian deity, to whom Greece has
nothing similar, and asks why he alone of im-
mortals can see his own back. The god affably
consents to be interviewed, and the poet whisks
out his note-book. Janus explains that as a
veritable antiquity, -- nam sum res prisca --
he goes back to the days of Chaos, at which
time he was a shapeless mass. Some of the first
experiments at creation, as the reader may
verify from Lucretius, were curious; the god
is one of those early monstrosities or freaks of
nature; that is why he has a face before and
behind. However, this peculiarity_is_put to use.
He survives as the fittest creature to become
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
concierge of the sky. After a fusilade of ques-
tions, the poet is anxious to know the symbol-
ism of the coin which the devout offer to the
god. The latter, smiling with a far-away look
of worldly wisdom, points out that long ago
customs were simple.
In his small shrine, Jove scarce upright could stand,
And sped clay thunder-bolts with mightiest hand.
With leaves, not gems, adorned Rome's temple
stood.
Himself the statesman gave his sheep their food.
No shame it was to rest the tired head
On a straw pillow in a stubble bed. "
But times have ? changed, -- and Janus has
changed with them. It is the new Age of Gold,
when gods find a better omen in golden coin
than in the ancient copper. Despite his an-
tiquity? this god is up-to-date.
We praise old times but use the present age.
In this burlesque, there is a deeper feeling in
the lines on antique simplicity, and in those in
which Janus dwells on the happy days
When gods could walk the earth
And hospitably sit by human hearth.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
The Fasti, no less than the Metamorphoses,
is colored with both Roman and Italian senti-
ment. There are unforgettable glimpses of the
Italy that Virgil glorified in the Georgics and
the modern traveller loves. Silvia the Vestal,
carrying an earthen jar on her head, like a
peasant-woman today, goes to the Tiber to
fetch water for the sacrifice. Wearied, she sits
down on the bank, opens her breast to the cool-
ing breeze and sets in order her dishevelled
locks. A glimpse of ancient Italy that may
seem only too realistic to some travellers in
the modern land is given in the prayer of the
business man, addressed to Mercury, god of
business men and of thieves.
"Forgive my perjuries; they're in the past.
Forgive false prices, for they did not last.
If e'er I sent thee, as I'm sending now,
An affidavit, and then broke my vow;
If e'er I aimed an oath at great Jove's ear,
On the condition that he should not hear;
If god or goddess I have taken in;
Let the wild winds evaporate my sin!
Aye, let my perfidies be clear as day,
If heaven will discount the next thing I say.
Grant me the joy of getting millions quick,
And grant the skill my customers to trick. "
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
When thus our merchant-prince puts up his
prayer,
Old Hermes chortles in the upper air,
And feasts his fancy with the memory fine
Of how he cleaned Apollo of his kine. 28
Panegyric of Augustus is hard to make con-
vincing when Augustus and Jupiter are almost
convertible terms and when the poet of the
Metamorphoses would magnify Augustus. We
must distinguish between the amorous Jupiter
of Greek myth and the majestic Jupiter of the
Roman Capitol. But that is not easy. Ovid
does his best as though he had not already done
his worst. Augustus would take no offence, --
provided that he had not read the Metamorpho-
ses. The verses on March sixth, when Julius
Caesar became Pontifex Maximus, ring true in
the prayer to those ancient gods of Troy that
the hero Aeneas brought on his long journey to
Rome. The Fasti, like the Metamorphoses, is
a mirror of the poet's mind, with its perpetual
interchanging of grave and gay. It is not prop-
aganda written for Augustus's plans for the
revival of religion, yet beneath the merriment
there is homage to simple piety and a love of
the old-fashioned rite. Though the busy poet
of the days completed but half of his work, it
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? 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.