Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/82

70 father at the age of ninety; soon after whose decease his mother also died.

This is all the account that can be given of Ovid's life, from his birth to the age of fifty; and it has been for the most part drawn from his own writings. It is chiefly misfortune that swells the page of human history. The very dearth of events justifies the inference that his days glided away smoothly and happily, with just enough of employment to give a zest to the pursuits of his leisure, and in sufficient affluence to secure to him all the pleasures of life, without exposing him to its storms and dangers. His residence at Rome, where he had a house near the Capitol, was diversified by an occasional trip to his Pelignan farm, and by the recreation which he derived from his garden, situated between the Flaminian and Clodian ways. His devotion to love and to Corinna had not so wholly engrossed him as to prevent his achieving great reputation in the higher walks of poetry. Besides his love Elegies, his Heroical Epistles, which breathe purer sentiments in language and versification still more refined, and his Art of Love, in which he had embodied the experience of twenty years, he had written his Medea, the finest tragedy that had appeared in the Latin tongue. The Metamorphoses were finished, with the exception of the last corrections; on which account they had been seen only by his private friends. But they were in the state in which we now possess them, and were sufficient of themselves to establish a great poetic fame. He not only enjoyed the friendship of a large circle of distinguished men, but the regard and favour of Augustus and the imperial family. Nothing, in short, seemed wanting, either to his domestic happiness or to his public reputation. But a cloud now rose upon the horizon which was destined to throw a gloom over the evening of his days. Towards the close of the year of Rome, 761 (A. D. 8), Ovid was suddenly commanded by an imperial edict to transport himself to Tomi, or, as he himself calls it, Tomis (sing, fem.), a town on the Euxine, near the mouths of the Danube, on the very border of the empire, and where the Roman dominion was but imperfectly assured. Ovid underwent no trial, and the sole reason for his banishment stated in the edict was his having published his poem on the Art of Love. It was not, however, an exsilium, but a relegatio; that is, he was not utterly cut off from all hope of return, nor did he lose his citizenship.

What was the real cause of his banishment? This is a question that has long exercised the ingenuity of scholars, and various are the solutions that have been proposed. The publication of the Ars Amatoria was certainly a mere pretext; and for Augustus, the author of one of the filthiest, but funniest, epigrams in the language, and a systematic adulterer, for reasons of state policy (Suet. Aug. 69), not a very becoming one. The Ars had been published nearly ten years previously; and moreover, whenever Ovid alludes to that, the ostensible cause, he invariably couples with it another which he mysteriously conceals. According to some writers, the latter was his intrigue with Julia, But this, besides that it does not agree with the poet's expressions, is sufficiently refuted by the fact that Julia had been an exile since B. C. 2. (Dion Cass. lv. 10; Vell. Pat. ii. 100.) The same chronological objection maybe urged against those who think that Ovid had accidentally discovered an incestuous commerce between Augustus and his daughter. To obviate these objections on the score of chronology, other authors have transferred both these surmises to the younger Julia, the daughter of the elder one. But with respect to any intrigue with her having been the cause of Ovid's banishment, the expressions alluded to in the former case, and which show that his fault was an involuntary one, are here equally conclusive, and are, too, strengthened by the great disparity of years between the parties, the poet being old enough to be the father of the younger Julia. As regards the other point—the imputed incest of the emperor with his grand-daughter—arguments in refutation can be drawn only from probability, for there is nothing in Ovid's poems that can be said directly to contradict it. But in the first place, it is totally unsupported by any historical authority, though the same imputation on Augustus with regard to his daughter might derive some slight colouring from a passage in Suetonius's life of Caligula (c. 23). Again, it is the height of improbability that Ovid, when suing for pardon, would have alluded so frequently to the cause of his offence had it been of a kind so disgracefully to compromise the emperor's character. Nay, Bayle (art. Ovide) has pushed this argument so far as to think that the poet's life would not have been safe had he been in possession of so dangerous a secret, and that silence would have been secured by his assassination. The conjecture that Ovid's offence was his having accidentally seen Livia in the bath is hardly worthy of serious notice. On the common principles of human action we cannot reconcile so severe a punishment with so trivial a fault; and the supposition is, besides, refuted by Ovid's telling us that what he had seen was some crime. One of the most elaborate theories on the subject is that of M. Villenave, in a life of Ovid published in 1809, and subsequently in the Biographie Universelle. He is of opinion that the poet was the victim of a coup d'état, and that his offence was his having been the political partizan of Posthumus Agrippa; which prompted Livia and Tiberius, whose influence over the senile Augustus was then complete, to procure his banishment. This solution is founded on the assumed coincidence of time in the exiles of Agrippa and Ovid. But the fact is that the former was banished, at least a year before the latter, namely some time in A. D. 7 (Dion Cass, lv. 32; Vell. Pat. ii. 112), whereas Ovid did not leave Rome till December A. D. 8. Nor can Ovid's expressions concerning the cause of his disgrace be at all reconciled with Villenave's supposition. The coincidence of his banishment, however, with that of the younger Julia, who, as we learn from Tacitus (Ann. iv. 71) died in A. D. 28, after twenty years' exile, is a remarkable fact, and leads very strongly to the inference that his fate was in some way connected with hers. This opinion has been adopted by Tiraboschi in his Storia della Letteratura Italiana, and after him by Rosmini, in his Vita d' Ovidio, who, however, has not improved upon Tiraboschi, by making Ovid deliberately seduce Julia for one of his exalted friends. There is no evidence to fix on the poet the detestable character of a procurer. He may more probably have become acquainted with Julia's profligacy by accident, and by his subsequent conduct, perhaps, for instance, by