He is,
in a poem of the twelfth century, a satire
on a jealous priest, for whose admonition the
authority is cited:
In just decree Pope Ovid swore,
One woman may have loves galore.
in a poem of the twelfth century, a satire
on a jealous priest, for whose admonition the
authority is cited:
In just decree Pope Ovid swore,
One woman may have loves galore.
Ovid - 1901 - Ovid and His Influence
He does not cry ser-
mons from the house-tops, but his works are
stored with acute observations on men and
morals which, if the context be forgotten,
might be fitted into a letter of St. Paul's or a
satire of Juvenal's. Both poets declare that
beauty is no aid to chastity. One says:
Lis est cum forma magna pudicitiae,
the other:
Rara est adeo concordia formae
Atque pudicitiae.
Metre aside, which is which? 40 In a stretch of
seven lines in which this epigram appears in
Juvenal, there are four reminiscences of Ovid.
The weeping moralist turns to the laughing for
counsel now and then.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
We may follow the literature of the later
Empire and note Ovid's presence here and
there. He was one of the standard authors.
But except in Martial, his influence was not
profound. His spirit was still in exile.
i. Ovid in the Middle Ages
When the Dark Ages swept over Europe,
Ovid was submerged, nor did he make much
impression on the writers of the Carolingian
Renaissance. Ludwig Traube, an immortal
name in the history of Mediaeval studies, aptly
termed the Carolingian period of literature
aetas Vergiliana. Virgil was the supreme model
for the epic that glorified the ideals of the
Emperor in an age of renaissance, and for a
new and delightful pastoral that embodied a
popular theme in the ancient form. Ovid's day
was yet to come. His ghost would say, again,
if it crossed from Tomis to Aix la Chapelle:
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand.
In the latter part of the eleventh century,
our poet came at last to his own. If the Middle
Ages had been slow in claiming him, they now
made up for lost time. Nothing could be more
happy than Traube's title of aetas Ovidiana
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
for this period, which includes the twelfth cen-
tury and runs the length of the thirteenth.
First of all, Ovid's works were taken into the
schools; they were regarded as an essential
element in a liberal education. Nor did the
Mediaeval master leave the text of Ovid un-
explained. The presence of glosses is apparent
in manuscripts of various of his works as early
as the ninth century, and by the twelfth, a most
thorough method of interpretation had been
evolved, in which we see that the amatory
poems were not always subjected to a mystical
interpretation. They were understood in the
Middle Ages as they are today. Many choice
passages from Ovid were culled for florilegia,
or "bouquets," the flowers in which were
picked to delight the nose, not merely to exer-
cise the hands. All the works of Ovid have their
place in a more ample library than a five-foot
shelf, the Biblionomia of Richard de Fournival,
chancellor of the cathedral of Amiens in the
thirteenth century. Hugo of Trimberg, in a
poem written in 1280 on the authors that no
gentleman should neglect, thus pays his re-
spects to Ovid in doggerel verse:
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Master Ovid cometh next,
Jolly dog and witty.
Fragrant posies of rick thought
Grow in many a ditty.
If the order you would learn
Of each and every poem,
Follow but the titles through,
And you'll quickly know 'em.
The Art of Love is not lacking in this list.
i. ELEGIAC COMEDIES
The Carolingians, though mainly the dis-
ciples of Virgil, had taken kindly to Ovid's
elegiac distich, and employed it for all sorts of
themes. A new and more skilful use of this
metre is to be noted in the eleventh century,
and is nowhere displayed with greater delicacy
than by Hildebert of Lavardin (11134), who
ended his career as Archbishop of Tours.
Hildebert, like other poets in the Middle Ages,
is master of two kinds of verse, the one simple
and generally unmetrical, appropriate for a
rustic singer as he pours forth his devotion in
a hymn. But the poet is only momentarily rus-
tic; he is writing in a certain style; he has not
forgotten his quantities. Hildebert could also
compose elegiacs with an easy grace that would
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
have excited Ovid's admiration. He is at his
best in a poem elegiac in form, tragic in spirit,
called Mathematicus. Its peer in comedy is his
poem on the story of Susanna, Versus de Sancta
Susanna. *1 Matter of this kind would ordi-
narily go into a Biblical epic. Hildebert turns
it into a little drama in elegiac verse. The lines
on Susanna at her bath, -- the heat of the
summer day, her haste, her hesitant testing of
the water and quick plunge into it, her inno-
cent confidence in her solitude, contrasting with
the leering glances of the old men -- show
Ovid's dexterous rapidity, a mastery of his
rhetorical effects, and an apt use of his phrases.
Aestus erat, color instabat, sol flammeus imdas
lusserat immemores frigoris esse sui . . .
llluc invitant Susannam balnea; swgit,
Hue pro per at; fraudem nescit inesse loco.
Tentat aquam; laudat tentatam; nuda subintrat
Laudatam; nudam vidit uterque senum;
Vidit et incaluit.
Such verse might be written in the hey-day of
the Renaissance or by some admirer of Ovid
in the Augustan Age.
Hildebert's poem is the best representative
of a flourishing Mediaeval variety that, start-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
ing with the imitation of Plautus and Terence
in elegiac verse, turned more and more to
Ovid for matter as well as manner. In some
of the specimens, the wit is exceedingly coarse.
Woman fares badly in these comedies. She
whose charm has adorned the tale is used to
point the awful moral. Ovid, while largely re-
sponsible for the creation of this literary form,
would not approve the crude lack of courtesy
that its coarser examples exhibit. He would
have conveyed the same satire with an art that
even the fair victim would have found delect-
able.
ii. THE TALE
A tradition which Ovid did not found but
which he helped to perpetuate is that of the
novel or tale. Greek romance, and Latin, as
represented by Petronius and Apuleius, handed
over something of its spirit to Christian hagiog-
raphy; the lives of the saints contain many
good stories. Various waifs and strays from
the ancient authors were floating about, and
attracted similar matter that came in from
India or was disseminated by the Arabs. These
were increased by a host of popular fabliaux.
Stories in the Latin, accompanied by a proper
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
moralization, were collected in the Gesta Ro-
manorum. At the end of the tradition stand
those immortal raconteurs, Boccaccio and
Chaucer. It is natural that some of Ovid's
stories should be taken from their settings and
remoulded into popular form. Thus the tale of
Pyramus and Thisbe, which Ovid alone had
rescued from oblivion, appears in two Latin
poems of the thirteenth century, then in Old
French, German and Netherlandish. Thisbe is
among the good women whose legends Chaucer
immortalizes; Gower has the story in his Con-
fessio Amantis; the youthful and ardent Boc-
caccio tells it in L'Amorosa Fiametta; the aged
and scholastic Boccaccio retells it in his trea-
tise De Claris Mulieribus. Tasso is not wearied
of repeating it; in Spanish literature we see it
in Montemayor; then it is caught up in trag-
edy, comedy and farce in the drama of all the
European countries; Bottom's performance in'
A Midsummer Night's Dream has a noble lin-
eage behind it.
iii. VAGABOND POETRY AND SATIRE
The jolly vagabonds, or Goliards, whose
poetry John Addington Symonds illustrated in
a little volume of attractive title and not dis-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
appointing contents, found much in Master
Ovid well suited to their needs. He is the chief
priest of their order, with Horace second in the
hierarchy. They have learned the arts of love
and sing without restraint of the modes and
mysteries of Venus, sometimes with a merry
Macaronic refrain.
Audi bela mia,
Mille modos Veneris
Da hizevaleria.
In sadder vein, the bard laments the changes of
Fortune and expounds the law of her mutability
as Ovid had done in the Tristia, or he tells of
a new sort of metamorphosis in a scathing de-
nunciation of the stingy rich, who, instead of
bestowing their garments on the poor poet,
have them refitted for themselves in another
shape; he himself manages to remould the first
verse of Ovid's poem into good Goliardic form.
In nova fert animus
Dicere mutata
Vetera, vel potius
Sunt inveterata.
In another mood, he displays the schoolboy's
exultation at a holiday, when he can fling aside
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Nasonis carmina, vel aliorum pagina, and fare
forth to the green fields. Again, in Phyllis and
Flora, one of the best of Mediaeval debates,
the poet follows the gay cavalcade to the Court
of Love, where fawns and nymphs are sporting
in the woods, and Silenus, still as disreputable
as Ovid pictures him in the Art of Love, rides
up on his donkey.
"Ho/ ", he shouts in gurgling tones,
Stepping pedetentim.
Fain he'd join the Maenads' cry;
Wine and age prevent him.
The case of Knight versus Cleric is tried, and
with no slight help from Ovid, the verdict is
reached that the Cleric is the greater expert in
the art of Love. The most tremendous homage
paid to our poet is in a graceful amorosa vi-
sione, modelled on one of the letters Ex Ponto.
Cupid appears in the watches of the night, and
laments that the high standard of Ovid's amor-
ous precepts is maintained no longer: o tem-
pora, o mores I Each strophe in this poem is
capped with a resonant hexameter from the
Art of Love or the Remedies. The prophet
himself is speaking in reproof of a degenerate
age!
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
The verse of the Goliards is found as early
as the ninth century. Collections were made of
the various poems, gay and grave, amatory,
convivial, political, religious, which these wan-
dering minstrels sang at courts and monasteries.
At least as early as the tenth century, some-
body hit on the happy idea of creating an
eponymous hero. Whatever their name may
mean, they ultimately claimed descent from
Goliath, who had become in popular fancy a
close rival to Satan, more interesting and lov-
able than Satan, because more human. We
have poems on the confession of Golias, his
sermon, his complaint to the Pope, his address
to the person who stole his purse, and his ad-
vice (dissuasive) on matrimony, his elevation
to the Bishopric, his metamorphosis, and his
apocalypse. This lively fiction serves the poet
as a medium for satirizing foibles of the laity
and corruption in the Church; it should not,
however, be taken too seriously as a "picture
of the times. " The spirit of Ovid is manifest
in the creation of this master of the sons of
Belial, and there are marked resemblances to
Ovid in the life and poetry of one of the known
Goliardic minstrels of the twelfth century, who
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
went under the name of the Archipoeta of
Cologne.
In the vernacular poetry of France and Ger-
many, the Troubadours and the Minnesinger,
who continue the tradition of the Goliards, turn
back, like them, to Ovid for imagery, themes
and part, at least, of his "art" and "rem-
edies " of love. Whatever the poets may have
thought of Corinna, a certain generalizing or
symbolistic spirit in their poetry suggests the
Amores, and one of their most delightful in-
ventions comes, it would seem, direct from
Ovid. This is the alba or tageliet, the song at
dawn, in which the lover, like Ovid's gallant,
upbraids the day for tearing him all too soon
from the arms of his lady.
The vein conspicuous in the poems on
Goliath flows copiously in Walter Map's Dis-
tinctiones, a glorious medley, a mirror of life
as he saw it at the court of Henry II, and in
all the world of man. Among Map's stories
some are taken from Ovid, -- Myrrha and
Leucothea, for example. In recounting his tri-
umphs in a debate with the heretical Wal-
densians, he exploits their ignorance of the-
ology by remarking that they could have driven
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
a better course of argument, had they not, like
Phaethon, been unaware of the names of the
horses. In the thirteenth century, Nigellus
Wireker, Map's peer in satire, shows fools
their image in his Speculum Stultorum, which
tells the story of an ass who lost his tail and
in compensation endeavored to study theology
at Paris. The poem is written in admir-
ably Ovidian elegiacs. It is one of the best
satires ever directed against the parade of
learning.
Ovid is a master of parody, and parody of all
things above, beneath and on the earth was one
of the delights of the Middle Ages. Blasphemy
has more point, and less sting, in an age of
faith, because it is the obverse of devotion.
With Mediaeval freedom in mind, we may turn
back with a new intelligence to Ovid's blithe
comedy of the gods, enjoy its irreverence, and
then accompany the author, in a proper spirit
of worship, to the celebration of some ancient
rite. Ovid has his place, inevitably, in the mock
solemnities of the Middle Ages. A grand coun-
cil is held in spring-time at Remiremont, an
assembling of the Court of Love to try the
familiar case of Knight versus Cleric as adepts
in the art of love. No men are admitted to the
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
solemn assize, -- only women and priests. A
damsel opens the ceremony by reading, as a
quasi evangelium, selections from the "Pre-
cepts of the Illustrious Master Ovid. " At the
end, a dreadful anathema is pronounced against
the Knights, followed by their excommunica-
tion.
If Ovid is Evangelist, why not Pope?
He is,
in a poem of the twelfth century, a satire
on a jealous priest, for whose admonition the
authority is cited:
In just decree Pope Ovid swore,
One woman may have loves galore.
iv. ROMANCE AND EPIC
Mediaeval imagination delighted to make
over heroic characters and episodes into terms
of romance, to invite the great figures of an-
tiquity to march down the centuries and make
themselves at home in the Middle Ages; the
past is plastic in the author's hands. It is the
same process that ran a vigorous course in
the Hellenistic age of Greek literature and
culminated in Ovid himself. He was the first
of the Mediaeval romancers. He would have
enjoyed seeing his stories of Pyramus, Narcis-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
sus, Byblis and Phaethon extracted from their
context and retold in what to the Mediaeval
author seemed a modern way. The presence of
the ancient poet is also evident in the lengthier
romances, those of Crestien de Troyes as well
as those which deal with ancient subjects, such
as the anonymous Enias and the Roman de
Troie of Benoit de Sainte-More. The latter
poem is a kind of Mediaeval Homer, at several
removes; the former is the Mediaeval Virgil.
The authors are not illiterate yokels, peering at
antique figures through a mist of Mediaeval
ignorance. They are cultivated gentlemen who
know the Classics well. They are following the
rule of an established literary form and adjust-
ing their material to it. In contrast to these
romances, and in deliberate contrast, other
poets retold ancient stories in the Latin heroic
hexameter with a closer conformity to history.
Such works deserve the name of epic rather
than romance. Thus Joseph of Exeter in the
twelfth century wrote a poem De Bello Troiano
in very decent Latin verse, and applying the
same method to a contemporary subject, sought
to immortalize the Crusades in his Antiocheis.
Similarly, the story of Alexander the Great re-
ceived a twofold treatment. The career of the
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Macedonian, something of a romance even in
its strictly historical form, had been embel-
lished with marvels from various sources, and
it furnished the theme for several romances in
the popular tongues. Ovid has contributed
something to their making. For instance, the
author of the Spanish poem, Libro de Alex-
andre, in the thirteenth century, imitates him
in more than one passage. But Ovid's influence
is no less obvious in the soberer Latin epic
Alexandreis which Gualterus de Insulis wrote
a hundred years earlier.
V. ARTS OF LOVE AND THE KNIGHTLY CODE
The Renaissance of the twelfth century was,
among other things, an age of knight-errantry
and courtly love. The poets of chivalry ac-i
cepted as a standard authority, with some mod-
ifications, Ovid's gay text-book on the art of
love. Crestien de Troyes translated it, and
though the translation is lost, Ovid is abun-
dantly present in the poet's romances. If the
historical Ovid took Paris and Helen from
Homeric epic and metamorphosed them into
figures for his comedy of love, the posthumous
Ovid assisted Crestien in a similar abstraction
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
of Lancelot and Guinevere from Celtic fairy-
legend, and a similar adaptation of their char-
acters to his romance.
In the next century, Ovid's poem is imme-
diately the inspiration of various poetical
treatises on the art of love. From France, Ovid
passes to Spain, and furnishes many sugges-
tions for the Libro de Buen Amor of the Ar-
cipreste de Hita, Juan Ruiz.
The acme of the Mediaeval transformation
of Ovid's treatise is reached in the Romance
of the Rose, one of the greatest works of the
period and of all time. It is a composite pro-
duction by two very different authors. Guil-
laume de Lorris, probably between 1225 and
1230, began a romance in the form of a vision.
A lover in his dream wanders amid a garden of
enchantment, where the Rose, the symbol of
his loved one, is guarded in a castle. With the
help of the god of love, Amors, he is about to
pluck the rose, when the poem abruptly ends;
the author, after some four thousand lines,
had not finished his work. The treatment is
leisurely, for Mediaeval romancers were not
pressed for time; like other undertakings of
the period, their work was done sub specie
aeternitatis. An air of dreamy mysticism, la
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
douce savor de la rose, pervades the story. The
poet takes much from Ovid, but what is taken
is absorbed and refined. The sentiment of love
is as pure, and as passionate, as in some of the
later Mediaeval hymns to the Blessed Virgin,
the Rose of Heaven.
Forty years later, the work was completed
by Jean Clopinel, or Chopinel, de Meun. He
enters at the eleventh hour and allows no pluck-
ing of the rose for over fifteen thousand verses
more. The Lover is not to win without knowing
what he wins and why. Jean de Meun is no
dreamer, but a scholar, versed in all the Latin
Classics, a philosopher, familiar with ancient
and contemporary thought, and a satirist, alive
to the weaknesses of nobles and churchmen
and women. He is likewise a poet and a wit,
and doubtless knew full well that he was strain-
ing the plot to the limits of its elasticity. The
Lover still dreams his dream, and, at the far-
off end, plucks the Rose; but the poem has
been changed from a romance into what the
author calls it, "A Mirror of Love. " It is a
grand debate among diverse types of thought
and feeling. Ovid and Boethius clash at the
start, and after other contestants have had their
say, Ovid emerges triumphant. He has, in the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
process, been considerably reformed. Perhaps
the most profitable of all his metempsychoses
is that in the genius of Jean de Meun.
Vi. FORGERIES
A great name attracts to itself both inter-
esting stories, told originally about somebody
else, and seemingly characteristic works, which
somebody else had written. A number of such
writings clusters about Ovid's name. In the
twelfth century, the multitudinous Ovidians of
that period not only wrought out a new elegiac
comedy in Ovid's spirit, but sought fame, at
the expense of their identity, by ascribing some
of their performances to Ovid himself. A
comedy of enormous vogue and influence, en-
titled Pamphilus sive de Amore, was perhaps
not attributed to Ovid at the start. The author
of The Flea {De Pulice) may have wished to
provide his master with something to match
The Gnat {De Culice) ascribed to the youthful
Virgil. Other intruding bits are: The Fall of
Troy, Money, The She-Wolf, The Louse, Book
of the Three Maidens, The Rustic, The Won-
ders of the World, -- these titles indicate the
range of topics on which Ovid was made,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
whether by accident or intention, to have writ-
ten. In the case of the forgeries, the perpetra-
tors should not be regarded as literary bandits,
laying dark schemes to fool an innocent pub-
lic; they are rather confederates of the eminent
men of letters who startled our generation not
many years ago with the publication of a
"Fifth Book" of Horace's Odes.
The most famous of these Mediaeval hoaxes
is the poem called The Hag (De Vetula),
known almost surely to be the production of
Richard de Fournival in the thirteenth cen-
tury. The author asserts that the work was
found in the times of the Emperor Vastasius
(1222-1255) m Ovid's tomb in Colchis! To
understand the character of this fiction, we
must bear in mind the Mediaeval fondness for
romances, and for a particular variety, still
inadequately studied, that may well be called
historical romance. Its nature may be partly
illustrated by the vernacular poems on ancient
themes at which we have glanced, and is still
more evident in the work called Dolopathos,
written by Johannes de Alta Silva at the close
of the twelfth century. This author, starting
with the familiar story of the Seven Sages,
deliberately gives it an ancient setting with
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Virgil, the magician, as the hero. He is exceed-
ingly well read in the ancients, Ovid included,
and is perfectly familiar with Virgil's real char-
acter, but he moulds that character to fit his
design, just as he shapes the matter of his
story to fit the ancient background. Chaucer
applies the same art in his Troilus, as we have
recently learned to see. 42
In precisely this fashion, the author of the
Vetula introduces Ovid in an appropriate role;
he has been transmuted into a hero of romance.
The Hag is the ugly old nurse of a maiden with
whom the poet is in love. With a stratagem
that recalls a scene from the Fasti,43 she prom-
ises the lover a rendezvous with her mistress,
and at the appointed hour takes her mistress's
place. The girl marries another, and Ovid must
wait twenty years for the man to die; by that
time, his lady is vetula herself. Ovid then de-
cides that the best love is the love of learning.
The closing book, which somewhat suggests the
Convivio of Dante, is a series of meditations
on philosophy, astrology and religion. Ovid
reasons in an orthodox way on various theolog-
ical problems, sums up the heathen prophecies
of the Virgin's Son, and concludes with a
prayer to the Virgin. The poem had a wide
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
vogue, and was translated into the vernacular.
The jeu d'esprit was taken more seriously, per-
haps, than even its author had anticipated.
Vii. OVID'S TRANSFORMATIONS
We are now to follow our poet in a series of
mental and moral transformations which his
posthumous spirit, aided by the lively imagina-
tion of the Middle Ages, was called on to per-
form. First, he dons the sober disguise of a
moralist.
Ovidius Ethicus
Mediaeval thinkers were quick to see that
beneath Ovid's persiflage runs a vein of so-
briety and moral acuteness. Juvenal, we noted,
could study Ovid to good effect, for Ovid, as
Landor remarks, " with all his levity, had more
unobtrusively sage verses than any, be he Ro-
man or Athenian. " Landor was anticipated by
Chaucer. In his Tale of Meliboeus, translated
from a Latin work of the thirteenth century by
Albertano of Brescia, he preaches a fine sermon
on true friendship, with illustrations chosen
both from Holy Scripture and from the Pagans.
The work is a notable monument of Christian
humanism. Ovid appears here in good com-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
pany, with Seneca and St. Paul, Solomon and
Job.
Nor was Chaucer or his Latin predecessor
the first to treat our poet as a source of edifi-
cation. As early as the twelfth century, Hilde-
bert of Tours, or one of his contemporaries,
compiled a work entitled Moralis Philosophia
de Honesto et Utili, which consists of brief
definitions of various ethical terms followed by
copious quotations from the ancient authors
and the Bible. Ovid is cited, for instance, to
show that
Venus and wine shatter the heart's ideals,
and this line from the Fasti is capped by a
verse from Ecclesiasticus. ** The "moral Se-
nek " has his peer in the moral Naso. Human-
ists like John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois,
scholastics like Alanus de Insulis and Roger
Bacon, Vincent of Beauvais the encyclopaedist,
John of Garland the educator, mystics like
Hugo of St. Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux,
His Holiness Pope Innocent III in his De
Contemptu Mundi, -- these and many more
cite Ovid as an authority on morals and other
sober subjects. Abelard takes counsel with
Ovidius Ethicus in discussing monastic rules,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
for the benefit of Eloise. He warns against ex-
cessive strictness, quoting from the Amores:
We strain at rules and crave what is forbidden. *6
Eloise, on her part, in writing her lord and
master of her disapproval of a common table
for monks and nuns, adds that " even the poet
of wantonness and teacher of turpitudes has
shown in his Book of Amatory Art what chance
for improper conduct is afforded by a banquet. "
Then follow six lines from the Art of Love. *"
Either Eloise had these verses at her tongue's
end, or the volume itself was not far away. She
knows its character well enough, and yet seeks
its advice in a matter of morals, -- fas est et
ab hoste doceri.
To descend a moment into a later age, it is
of some interest to note that Martin Luther
wrote inside the cover of an edition of St.
Anselm four verses of the Amores, one of them
being that familiar line, veritably a winged
word in the Middle Ages:
We strain at rules and crave what is forbidden.
Luther was not breaking monastic rules in jot-
ting down these verses; he was paying tribute,
in the traditional way, to Ovidius Ethicus. It
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
is a pity that he was not more deeply read in
Ovid; Erasmus had read to some profit.
Ovidius Theologus
If Ovid can give instruction in morals, it is
no long step thence to theology. Again we find
the starting-point for the excessive zeal of later
interpreters in Ovid himself, in the unfeigned
piety of the tale of Philemon and Baucis, in the
apparent knowledge of the Old Testament dis-
played in his story of the Creation and the
Flood, in the theistic modification of atomism
likewise apparent in this story, in the philo-
sophical competence of his Pythagorean solu-
tion presented in the last book of his cosmic
epic. It was natural, then, that Ovid, like Vir-
gil, should be subjected to the same spell of
allegory that was cast over all literature, all art,
and all natural phenomena in the Middle Ages;
it was a universal reading of life.
With the twelfth century, this new interpre-
tation is perfected into a science. A certain
Johannes reveals in his versified Integumenta
the secrets concealed in the Metamorphoses.
A typical specimen of his ingenuity is his in-
terpretation of the tale of Mars and Venus, de-
tected in their amour by the jealous Vulcan.
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Vulcan is Summer, Venus is the Spring;
Vile Mars, the Fall, doth alien bounties bring.
Whatever the appositeness of this glossing,
"the smartest scandal Heaven ever heard"
here becomes safe enough for any heaven. The
work of Johannes is only one of many allegori-
cal commentaries written on the Metamor-
phoses in the twelfth century, still reposing,
unpublished, on library shelves. One exposition,
doubtless appreciated, was prepared in usum
nonnarum; nuns read Ovid moralized but not
expurgated, -- really a more courteous way to
treat the poor pagan, and the poor nun.
mons from the house-tops, but his works are
stored with acute observations on men and
morals which, if the context be forgotten,
might be fitted into a letter of St. Paul's or a
satire of Juvenal's. Both poets declare that
beauty is no aid to chastity. One says:
Lis est cum forma magna pudicitiae,
the other:
Rara est adeo concordia formae
Atque pudicitiae.
Metre aside, which is which? 40 In a stretch of
seven lines in which this epigram appears in
Juvenal, there are four reminiscences of Ovid.
The weeping moralist turns to the laughing for
counsel now and then.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
We may follow the literature of the later
Empire and note Ovid's presence here and
there. He was one of the standard authors.
But except in Martial, his influence was not
profound. His spirit was still in exile.
i. Ovid in the Middle Ages
When the Dark Ages swept over Europe,
Ovid was submerged, nor did he make much
impression on the writers of the Carolingian
Renaissance. Ludwig Traube, an immortal
name in the history of Mediaeval studies, aptly
termed the Carolingian period of literature
aetas Vergiliana. Virgil was the supreme model
for the epic that glorified the ideals of the
Emperor in an age of renaissance, and for a
new and delightful pastoral that embodied a
popular theme in the ancient form. Ovid's day
was yet to come. His ghost would say, again,
if it crossed from Tomis to Aix la Chapelle:
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand.
In the latter part of the eleventh century,
our poet came at last to his own. If the Middle
Ages had been slow in claiming him, they now
made up for lost time. Nothing could be more
happy than Traube's title of aetas Ovidiana
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
for this period, which includes the twelfth cen-
tury and runs the length of the thirteenth.
First of all, Ovid's works were taken into the
schools; they were regarded as an essential
element in a liberal education. Nor did the
Mediaeval master leave the text of Ovid un-
explained. The presence of glosses is apparent
in manuscripts of various of his works as early
as the ninth century, and by the twelfth, a most
thorough method of interpretation had been
evolved, in which we see that the amatory
poems were not always subjected to a mystical
interpretation. They were understood in the
Middle Ages as they are today. Many choice
passages from Ovid were culled for florilegia,
or "bouquets," the flowers in which were
picked to delight the nose, not merely to exer-
cise the hands. All the works of Ovid have their
place in a more ample library than a five-foot
shelf, the Biblionomia of Richard de Fournival,
chancellor of the cathedral of Amiens in the
thirteenth century. Hugo of Trimberg, in a
poem written in 1280 on the authors that no
gentleman should neglect, thus pays his re-
spects to Ovid in doggerel verse:
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Master Ovid cometh next,
Jolly dog and witty.
Fragrant posies of rick thought
Grow in many a ditty.
If the order you would learn
Of each and every poem,
Follow but the titles through,
And you'll quickly know 'em.
The Art of Love is not lacking in this list.
i. ELEGIAC COMEDIES
The Carolingians, though mainly the dis-
ciples of Virgil, had taken kindly to Ovid's
elegiac distich, and employed it for all sorts of
themes. A new and more skilful use of this
metre is to be noted in the eleventh century,
and is nowhere displayed with greater delicacy
than by Hildebert of Lavardin (11134), who
ended his career as Archbishop of Tours.
Hildebert, like other poets in the Middle Ages,
is master of two kinds of verse, the one simple
and generally unmetrical, appropriate for a
rustic singer as he pours forth his devotion in
a hymn. But the poet is only momentarily rus-
tic; he is writing in a certain style; he has not
forgotten his quantities. Hildebert could also
compose elegiacs with an easy grace that would
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
have excited Ovid's admiration. He is at his
best in a poem elegiac in form, tragic in spirit,
called Mathematicus. Its peer in comedy is his
poem on the story of Susanna, Versus de Sancta
Susanna. *1 Matter of this kind would ordi-
narily go into a Biblical epic. Hildebert turns
it into a little drama in elegiac verse. The lines
on Susanna at her bath, -- the heat of the
summer day, her haste, her hesitant testing of
the water and quick plunge into it, her inno-
cent confidence in her solitude, contrasting with
the leering glances of the old men -- show
Ovid's dexterous rapidity, a mastery of his
rhetorical effects, and an apt use of his phrases.
Aestus erat, color instabat, sol flammeus imdas
lusserat immemores frigoris esse sui . . .
llluc invitant Susannam balnea; swgit,
Hue pro per at; fraudem nescit inesse loco.
Tentat aquam; laudat tentatam; nuda subintrat
Laudatam; nudam vidit uterque senum;
Vidit et incaluit.
Such verse might be written in the hey-day of
the Renaissance or by some admirer of Ovid
in the Augustan Age.
Hildebert's poem is the best representative
of a flourishing Mediaeval variety that, start-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
ing with the imitation of Plautus and Terence
in elegiac verse, turned more and more to
Ovid for matter as well as manner. In some
of the specimens, the wit is exceedingly coarse.
Woman fares badly in these comedies. She
whose charm has adorned the tale is used to
point the awful moral. Ovid, while largely re-
sponsible for the creation of this literary form,
would not approve the crude lack of courtesy
that its coarser examples exhibit. He would
have conveyed the same satire with an art that
even the fair victim would have found delect-
able.
ii. THE TALE
A tradition which Ovid did not found but
which he helped to perpetuate is that of the
novel or tale. Greek romance, and Latin, as
represented by Petronius and Apuleius, handed
over something of its spirit to Christian hagiog-
raphy; the lives of the saints contain many
good stories. Various waifs and strays from
the ancient authors were floating about, and
attracted similar matter that came in from
India or was disseminated by the Arabs. These
were increased by a host of popular fabliaux.
Stories in the Latin, accompanied by a proper
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
moralization, were collected in the Gesta Ro-
manorum. At the end of the tradition stand
those immortal raconteurs, Boccaccio and
Chaucer. It is natural that some of Ovid's
stories should be taken from their settings and
remoulded into popular form. Thus the tale of
Pyramus and Thisbe, which Ovid alone had
rescued from oblivion, appears in two Latin
poems of the thirteenth century, then in Old
French, German and Netherlandish. Thisbe is
among the good women whose legends Chaucer
immortalizes; Gower has the story in his Con-
fessio Amantis; the youthful and ardent Boc-
caccio tells it in L'Amorosa Fiametta; the aged
and scholastic Boccaccio retells it in his trea-
tise De Claris Mulieribus. Tasso is not wearied
of repeating it; in Spanish literature we see it
in Montemayor; then it is caught up in trag-
edy, comedy and farce in the drama of all the
European countries; Bottom's performance in'
A Midsummer Night's Dream has a noble lin-
eage behind it.
iii. VAGABOND POETRY AND SATIRE
The jolly vagabonds, or Goliards, whose
poetry John Addington Symonds illustrated in
a little volume of attractive title and not dis-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
appointing contents, found much in Master
Ovid well suited to their needs. He is the chief
priest of their order, with Horace second in the
hierarchy. They have learned the arts of love
and sing without restraint of the modes and
mysteries of Venus, sometimes with a merry
Macaronic refrain.
Audi bela mia,
Mille modos Veneris
Da hizevaleria.
In sadder vein, the bard laments the changes of
Fortune and expounds the law of her mutability
as Ovid had done in the Tristia, or he tells of
a new sort of metamorphosis in a scathing de-
nunciation of the stingy rich, who, instead of
bestowing their garments on the poor poet,
have them refitted for themselves in another
shape; he himself manages to remould the first
verse of Ovid's poem into good Goliardic form.
In nova fert animus
Dicere mutata
Vetera, vel potius
Sunt inveterata.
In another mood, he displays the schoolboy's
exultation at a holiday, when he can fling aside
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Nasonis carmina, vel aliorum pagina, and fare
forth to the green fields. Again, in Phyllis and
Flora, one of the best of Mediaeval debates,
the poet follows the gay cavalcade to the Court
of Love, where fawns and nymphs are sporting
in the woods, and Silenus, still as disreputable
as Ovid pictures him in the Art of Love, rides
up on his donkey.
"Ho/ ", he shouts in gurgling tones,
Stepping pedetentim.
Fain he'd join the Maenads' cry;
Wine and age prevent him.
The case of Knight versus Cleric is tried, and
with no slight help from Ovid, the verdict is
reached that the Cleric is the greater expert in
the art of Love. The most tremendous homage
paid to our poet is in a graceful amorosa vi-
sione, modelled on one of the letters Ex Ponto.
Cupid appears in the watches of the night, and
laments that the high standard of Ovid's amor-
ous precepts is maintained no longer: o tem-
pora, o mores I Each strophe in this poem is
capped with a resonant hexameter from the
Art of Love or the Remedies. The prophet
himself is speaking in reproof of a degenerate
age!
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
The verse of the Goliards is found as early
as the ninth century. Collections were made of
the various poems, gay and grave, amatory,
convivial, political, religious, which these wan-
dering minstrels sang at courts and monasteries.
At least as early as the tenth century, some-
body hit on the happy idea of creating an
eponymous hero. Whatever their name may
mean, they ultimately claimed descent from
Goliath, who had become in popular fancy a
close rival to Satan, more interesting and lov-
able than Satan, because more human. We
have poems on the confession of Golias, his
sermon, his complaint to the Pope, his address
to the person who stole his purse, and his ad-
vice (dissuasive) on matrimony, his elevation
to the Bishopric, his metamorphosis, and his
apocalypse. This lively fiction serves the poet
as a medium for satirizing foibles of the laity
and corruption in the Church; it should not,
however, be taken too seriously as a "picture
of the times. " The spirit of Ovid is manifest
in the creation of this master of the sons of
Belial, and there are marked resemblances to
Ovid in the life and poetry of one of the known
Goliardic minstrels of the twelfth century, who
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
went under the name of the Archipoeta of
Cologne.
In the vernacular poetry of France and Ger-
many, the Troubadours and the Minnesinger,
who continue the tradition of the Goliards, turn
back, like them, to Ovid for imagery, themes
and part, at least, of his "art" and "rem-
edies " of love. Whatever the poets may have
thought of Corinna, a certain generalizing or
symbolistic spirit in their poetry suggests the
Amores, and one of their most delightful in-
ventions comes, it would seem, direct from
Ovid. This is the alba or tageliet, the song at
dawn, in which the lover, like Ovid's gallant,
upbraids the day for tearing him all too soon
from the arms of his lady.
The vein conspicuous in the poems on
Goliath flows copiously in Walter Map's Dis-
tinctiones, a glorious medley, a mirror of life
as he saw it at the court of Henry II, and in
all the world of man. Among Map's stories
some are taken from Ovid, -- Myrrha and
Leucothea, for example. In recounting his tri-
umphs in a debate with the heretical Wal-
densians, he exploits their ignorance of the-
ology by remarking that they could have driven
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
a better course of argument, had they not, like
Phaethon, been unaware of the names of the
horses. In the thirteenth century, Nigellus
Wireker, Map's peer in satire, shows fools
their image in his Speculum Stultorum, which
tells the story of an ass who lost his tail and
in compensation endeavored to study theology
at Paris. The poem is written in admir-
ably Ovidian elegiacs. It is one of the best
satires ever directed against the parade of
learning.
Ovid is a master of parody, and parody of all
things above, beneath and on the earth was one
of the delights of the Middle Ages. Blasphemy
has more point, and less sting, in an age of
faith, because it is the obverse of devotion.
With Mediaeval freedom in mind, we may turn
back with a new intelligence to Ovid's blithe
comedy of the gods, enjoy its irreverence, and
then accompany the author, in a proper spirit
of worship, to the celebration of some ancient
rite. Ovid has his place, inevitably, in the mock
solemnities of the Middle Ages. A grand coun-
cil is held in spring-time at Remiremont, an
assembling of the Court of Love to try the
familiar case of Knight versus Cleric as adepts
in the art of love. No men are admitted to the
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
solemn assize, -- only women and priests. A
damsel opens the ceremony by reading, as a
quasi evangelium, selections from the "Pre-
cepts of the Illustrious Master Ovid. " At the
end, a dreadful anathema is pronounced against
the Knights, followed by their excommunica-
tion.
If Ovid is Evangelist, why not Pope?
He is,
in a poem of the twelfth century, a satire
on a jealous priest, for whose admonition the
authority is cited:
In just decree Pope Ovid swore,
One woman may have loves galore.
iv. ROMANCE AND EPIC
Mediaeval imagination delighted to make
over heroic characters and episodes into terms
of romance, to invite the great figures of an-
tiquity to march down the centuries and make
themselves at home in the Middle Ages; the
past is plastic in the author's hands. It is the
same process that ran a vigorous course in
the Hellenistic age of Greek literature and
culminated in Ovid himself. He was the first
of the Mediaeval romancers. He would have
enjoyed seeing his stories of Pyramus, Narcis-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
sus, Byblis and Phaethon extracted from their
context and retold in what to the Mediaeval
author seemed a modern way. The presence of
the ancient poet is also evident in the lengthier
romances, those of Crestien de Troyes as well
as those which deal with ancient subjects, such
as the anonymous Enias and the Roman de
Troie of Benoit de Sainte-More. The latter
poem is a kind of Mediaeval Homer, at several
removes; the former is the Mediaeval Virgil.
The authors are not illiterate yokels, peering at
antique figures through a mist of Mediaeval
ignorance. They are cultivated gentlemen who
know the Classics well. They are following the
rule of an established literary form and adjust-
ing their material to it. In contrast to these
romances, and in deliberate contrast, other
poets retold ancient stories in the Latin heroic
hexameter with a closer conformity to history.
Such works deserve the name of epic rather
than romance. Thus Joseph of Exeter in the
twelfth century wrote a poem De Bello Troiano
in very decent Latin verse, and applying the
same method to a contemporary subject, sought
to immortalize the Crusades in his Antiocheis.
Similarly, the story of Alexander the Great re-
ceived a twofold treatment. The career of the
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Macedonian, something of a romance even in
its strictly historical form, had been embel-
lished with marvels from various sources, and
it furnished the theme for several romances in
the popular tongues. Ovid has contributed
something to their making. For instance, the
author of the Spanish poem, Libro de Alex-
andre, in the thirteenth century, imitates him
in more than one passage. But Ovid's influence
is no less obvious in the soberer Latin epic
Alexandreis which Gualterus de Insulis wrote
a hundred years earlier.
V. ARTS OF LOVE AND THE KNIGHTLY CODE
The Renaissance of the twelfth century was,
among other things, an age of knight-errantry
and courtly love. The poets of chivalry ac-i
cepted as a standard authority, with some mod-
ifications, Ovid's gay text-book on the art of
love. Crestien de Troyes translated it, and
though the translation is lost, Ovid is abun-
dantly present in the poet's romances. If the
historical Ovid took Paris and Helen from
Homeric epic and metamorphosed them into
figures for his comedy of love, the posthumous
Ovid assisted Crestien in a similar abstraction
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
of Lancelot and Guinevere from Celtic fairy-
legend, and a similar adaptation of their char-
acters to his romance.
In the next century, Ovid's poem is imme-
diately the inspiration of various poetical
treatises on the art of love. From France, Ovid
passes to Spain, and furnishes many sugges-
tions for the Libro de Buen Amor of the Ar-
cipreste de Hita, Juan Ruiz.
The acme of the Mediaeval transformation
of Ovid's treatise is reached in the Romance
of the Rose, one of the greatest works of the
period and of all time. It is a composite pro-
duction by two very different authors. Guil-
laume de Lorris, probably between 1225 and
1230, began a romance in the form of a vision.
A lover in his dream wanders amid a garden of
enchantment, where the Rose, the symbol of
his loved one, is guarded in a castle. With the
help of the god of love, Amors, he is about to
pluck the rose, when the poem abruptly ends;
the author, after some four thousand lines,
had not finished his work. The treatment is
leisurely, for Mediaeval romancers were not
pressed for time; like other undertakings of
the period, their work was done sub specie
aeternitatis. An air of dreamy mysticism, la
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
douce savor de la rose, pervades the story. The
poet takes much from Ovid, but what is taken
is absorbed and refined. The sentiment of love
is as pure, and as passionate, as in some of the
later Mediaeval hymns to the Blessed Virgin,
the Rose of Heaven.
Forty years later, the work was completed
by Jean Clopinel, or Chopinel, de Meun. He
enters at the eleventh hour and allows no pluck-
ing of the rose for over fifteen thousand verses
more. The Lover is not to win without knowing
what he wins and why. Jean de Meun is no
dreamer, but a scholar, versed in all the Latin
Classics, a philosopher, familiar with ancient
and contemporary thought, and a satirist, alive
to the weaknesses of nobles and churchmen
and women. He is likewise a poet and a wit,
and doubtless knew full well that he was strain-
ing the plot to the limits of its elasticity. The
Lover still dreams his dream, and, at the far-
off end, plucks the Rose; but the poem has
been changed from a romance into what the
author calls it, "A Mirror of Love. " It is a
grand debate among diverse types of thought
and feeling. Ovid and Boethius clash at the
start, and after other contestants have had their
say, Ovid emerges triumphant. He has, in the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
process, been considerably reformed. Perhaps
the most profitable of all his metempsychoses
is that in the genius of Jean de Meun.
Vi. FORGERIES
A great name attracts to itself both inter-
esting stories, told originally about somebody
else, and seemingly characteristic works, which
somebody else had written. A number of such
writings clusters about Ovid's name. In the
twelfth century, the multitudinous Ovidians of
that period not only wrought out a new elegiac
comedy in Ovid's spirit, but sought fame, at
the expense of their identity, by ascribing some
of their performances to Ovid himself. A
comedy of enormous vogue and influence, en-
titled Pamphilus sive de Amore, was perhaps
not attributed to Ovid at the start. The author
of The Flea {De Pulice) may have wished to
provide his master with something to match
The Gnat {De Culice) ascribed to the youthful
Virgil. Other intruding bits are: The Fall of
Troy, Money, The She-Wolf, The Louse, Book
of the Three Maidens, The Rustic, The Won-
ders of the World, -- these titles indicate the
range of topics on which Ovid was made,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
whether by accident or intention, to have writ-
ten. In the case of the forgeries, the perpetra-
tors should not be regarded as literary bandits,
laying dark schemes to fool an innocent pub-
lic; they are rather confederates of the eminent
men of letters who startled our generation not
many years ago with the publication of a
"Fifth Book" of Horace's Odes.
The most famous of these Mediaeval hoaxes
is the poem called The Hag (De Vetula),
known almost surely to be the production of
Richard de Fournival in the thirteenth cen-
tury. The author asserts that the work was
found in the times of the Emperor Vastasius
(1222-1255) m Ovid's tomb in Colchis! To
understand the character of this fiction, we
must bear in mind the Mediaeval fondness for
romances, and for a particular variety, still
inadequately studied, that may well be called
historical romance. Its nature may be partly
illustrated by the vernacular poems on ancient
themes at which we have glanced, and is still
more evident in the work called Dolopathos,
written by Johannes de Alta Silva at the close
of the twelfth century. This author, starting
with the familiar story of the Seven Sages,
deliberately gives it an ancient setting with
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Virgil, the magician, as the hero. He is exceed-
ingly well read in the ancients, Ovid included,
and is perfectly familiar with Virgil's real char-
acter, but he moulds that character to fit his
design, just as he shapes the matter of his
story to fit the ancient background. Chaucer
applies the same art in his Troilus, as we have
recently learned to see. 42
In precisely this fashion, the author of the
Vetula introduces Ovid in an appropriate role;
he has been transmuted into a hero of romance.
The Hag is the ugly old nurse of a maiden with
whom the poet is in love. With a stratagem
that recalls a scene from the Fasti,43 she prom-
ises the lover a rendezvous with her mistress,
and at the appointed hour takes her mistress's
place. The girl marries another, and Ovid must
wait twenty years for the man to die; by that
time, his lady is vetula herself. Ovid then de-
cides that the best love is the love of learning.
The closing book, which somewhat suggests the
Convivio of Dante, is a series of meditations
on philosophy, astrology and religion. Ovid
reasons in an orthodox way on various theolog-
ical problems, sums up the heathen prophecies
of the Virgin's Son, and concludes with a
prayer to the Virgin. The poem had a wide
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
vogue, and was translated into the vernacular.
The jeu d'esprit was taken more seriously, per-
haps, than even its author had anticipated.
Vii. OVID'S TRANSFORMATIONS
We are now to follow our poet in a series of
mental and moral transformations which his
posthumous spirit, aided by the lively imagina-
tion of the Middle Ages, was called on to per-
form. First, he dons the sober disguise of a
moralist.
Ovidius Ethicus
Mediaeval thinkers were quick to see that
beneath Ovid's persiflage runs a vein of so-
briety and moral acuteness. Juvenal, we noted,
could study Ovid to good effect, for Ovid, as
Landor remarks, " with all his levity, had more
unobtrusively sage verses than any, be he Ro-
man or Athenian. " Landor was anticipated by
Chaucer. In his Tale of Meliboeus, translated
from a Latin work of the thirteenth century by
Albertano of Brescia, he preaches a fine sermon
on true friendship, with illustrations chosen
both from Holy Scripture and from the Pagans.
The work is a notable monument of Christian
humanism. Ovid appears here in good com-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
pany, with Seneca and St. Paul, Solomon and
Job.
Nor was Chaucer or his Latin predecessor
the first to treat our poet as a source of edifi-
cation. As early as the twelfth century, Hilde-
bert of Tours, or one of his contemporaries,
compiled a work entitled Moralis Philosophia
de Honesto et Utili, which consists of brief
definitions of various ethical terms followed by
copious quotations from the ancient authors
and the Bible. Ovid is cited, for instance, to
show that
Venus and wine shatter the heart's ideals,
and this line from the Fasti is capped by a
verse from Ecclesiasticus. ** The "moral Se-
nek " has his peer in the moral Naso. Human-
ists like John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois,
scholastics like Alanus de Insulis and Roger
Bacon, Vincent of Beauvais the encyclopaedist,
John of Garland the educator, mystics like
Hugo of St. Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux,
His Holiness Pope Innocent III in his De
Contemptu Mundi, -- these and many more
cite Ovid as an authority on morals and other
sober subjects. Abelard takes counsel with
Ovidius Ethicus in discussing monastic rules,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
for the benefit of Eloise. He warns against ex-
cessive strictness, quoting from the Amores:
We strain at rules and crave what is forbidden. *6
Eloise, on her part, in writing her lord and
master of her disapproval of a common table
for monks and nuns, adds that " even the poet
of wantonness and teacher of turpitudes has
shown in his Book of Amatory Art what chance
for improper conduct is afforded by a banquet. "
Then follow six lines from the Art of Love. *"
Either Eloise had these verses at her tongue's
end, or the volume itself was not far away. She
knows its character well enough, and yet seeks
its advice in a matter of morals, -- fas est et
ab hoste doceri.
To descend a moment into a later age, it is
of some interest to note that Martin Luther
wrote inside the cover of an edition of St.
Anselm four verses of the Amores, one of them
being that familiar line, veritably a winged
word in the Middle Ages:
We strain at rules and crave what is forbidden.
Luther was not breaking monastic rules in jot-
ting down these verses; he was paying tribute,
in the traditional way, to Ovidius Ethicus. It
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
is a pity that he was not more deeply read in
Ovid; Erasmus had read to some profit.
Ovidius Theologus
If Ovid can give instruction in morals, it is
no long step thence to theology. Again we find
the starting-point for the excessive zeal of later
interpreters in Ovid himself, in the unfeigned
piety of the tale of Philemon and Baucis, in the
apparent knowledge of the Old Testament dis-
played in his story of the Creation and the
Flood, in the theistic modification of atomism
likewise apparent in this story, in the philo-
sophical competence of his Pythagorean solu-
tion presented in the last book of his cosmic
epic. It was natural, then, that Ovid, like Vir-
gil, should be subjected to the same spell of
allegory that was cast over all literature, all art,
and all natural phenomena in the Middle Ages;
it was a universal reading of life.
With the twelfth century, this new interpre-
tation is perfected into a science. A certain
Johannes reveals in his versified Integumenta
the secrets concealed in the Metamorphoses.
A typical specimen of his ingenuity is his in-
terpretation of the tale of Mars and Venus, de-
tected in their amour by the jealous Vulcan.
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Vulcan is Summer, Venus is the Spring;
Vile Mars, the Fall, doth alien bounties bring.
Whatever the appositeness of this glossing,
"the smartest scandal Heaven ever heard"
here becomes safe enough for any heaven. The
work of Johannes is only one of many allegori-
cal commentaries written on the Metamor-
phoses in the twelfth century, still reposing,
unpublished, on library shelves. One exposition,
doubtless appreciated, was prepared in usum
nonnarum; nuns read Ovid moralized but not
expurgated, -- really a more courteous way to
treat the poor pagan, and the poor nun.
