Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/89

 OVID 79 with the music of his verse. He had a closer bond of intimacy with the younger poets of the older generation, Tibullus, whose death he laments in one of the few pathetic pieces among his earlier writings, and Propertius, to whom he describes himself as united in the close ties of comradeship. The name of Maecenas occurs nowhere in his poems. The time of his paramount influence both on public affairs and on literature was past before Ovid entered on his poetical career, but Messala and Fabius Maximus, whose name is mentioned by Juvenal along with that of Maecenas as the type of a munificent patron of letters in the Augustan age, encouraged his earliest efforts. With their sons he lived in intimacy in after years, and, as he speaks of having known the younger Fabius in his cradle, his friendship with his family must have begun early in his career. He enjoyed also the intimacy of poets and men of literary accomplishment belonging to a younger generation ; and with one of them, Macer, he travelled for more than a year. It is not mentioned whether he travelled immediately after the completion of his education, or in the interval between the publication of his earlier poems and that of the Medea and Ars Amatoria ; but it is in his later works, the Fasti and Metamorphoses, that we seem chiefly to recognize the impressions of the scenes he visited. In one of the epistles written from Pontus to his fellow-traveller there is a vivid record of the pleasant time they had passed together. Athens was to a Roman of that time what Rome is to an educated Englishman of the present day. Ovid speaks of having gone there under the influence of literary enthusiasm (&quot;studiosus &quot;) ; but the impression of his visit which remains on his writings is not of the wisdom taught &quot;among the woods of Academus,&quot; but of the flowers that grow on the neighbour ing Hymettus. A similar impulse induced him to visit the supposed site of Troy. The two friends saw together the splendid cities of Asia, which had inspired the enthusiasm of travel in Catullus, and had become familiar to Cicero and Horace during the years they passed abroad. They spent nearly a year in Sicily, which attracted him, as it had attracted Lucretius 1 and Virgil, 2 by its manifold charm of climate, of sea-shore and inland scenery, and of legendary and poetical association, a charm which has found its most enduring expression in some of his most delightful tales. He recalls with a fresh sense of pleasure the incidents of their tour (which they made sometimes in a pinnace or yacht, sometimes in a light carriage), and the endless delight which they had in each other s conversation. We would gladly exchange the record of his life of pleasure in Rome for more of these recollections. The highest type of classic culture realized in ancient Rome the type realized in such men as Cicero and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Germanicus shows its affinity to a type which is the result of essentially similar studies in modern times by nothing more clearly than the enthusiasm for travel among lands famous for their natural beauty, their monuments of art, and their historical associations. When settled at Rome, although a public career, leading to senatorian position, was open to him, and, although he filled various judicial offices, and claims to have filled them well, he had no ambition for such distinction, and looked upon pleasure and poetry as the occupations of his life. He tells us that he was married, when little more than a boy, to a wife for whom he did not care, who, he implies, was not worthy of him, and from whom he was soon &quot; Quae cum magna modis multis miranda videtur Gentibus humanis regio visendaque fertur. &quot; 2 &quot; Quanquam secessu Campanise Siciliaeque plurimum uteretur.&quot; Donat. separated, and afterwards to a second wife, with whom his union, although through no fault of hers, did not last long. But he had other objects of his volatile affections, and one of them, Corinna, after the example of his predecessors Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and their Alexandrian prototypes Callimachus, Philetas, &c., he makes the heroine of his love elegies. It is doubtful whether, like Lesbia, Delia, and Cynthia, she belonged to the class of Roman ladies of recognized position, or to that to which the Chloes and Lalages of Horace s artistic fancy evidently belong. If trust can be placed in the later apologies for his life, in which he states that he had never given occasion for any serious scandal, it is probable that she belonged to the class of &quot; libertinse.&quot; Ovid is not only a less constant but he is a much less serious lover than Catullus, Tibullus, or Propertius. His tone is that either of mere sensual self- regarding feeling or of persiflage. That tone is in many ways offensive to modern taste, but in nothing is it more charac teristic of his age than in his light-hearted justification of his choice both of a theme and of a career. In his complete emancipation from all sense of restraint or wish for better things, Ovid goes beyond all his predecessors, although Tibullus and Propertius, and even Horace in the ironical dis claimers of his earlier Odes, give indication of the same state of feeling. In this Ovid reflects the tastes and tone of fashionable, well-born, and wealthy Roman society between the years 20 B.C. and the beginning of our era. The memory of the civil wars no longer weighed on the world. The career of ambition was so far from attracting men that they had to be urged and coerced into filling official places and carrying on the routine duties of the senate. Society was bent simply on amusement. There was less of coarse ness in the pursuit of pleasure than had prevailed among the contemporaries of Catullus. We find little trace in Ovid of the convivial pleasures which Horace celebrates in his lighter odes, or of the excesses of which Propertius makes confession. Ovid says of himself that he drank scarcely anything but water, and from what he tells us of his appearance and constitution he was evidently not of the temperament to which convivial excesses bring any temptation. 3 But probably it was not the fashion of the time to live intemperately. As a result of the loss of political interests, women came to play a more important and brilliant part in society, and the tone of fashionable conversation and literature was adapted to them. Julia, daughter of the emperor, was by her position, her brilliant gifts, and her reckless laxity of character the natural leader of such a society. The awakening of the Roman world out of this fool s paradise of pleasure was due to the discovery of her intrigue with lulus Antonius, son of Mark Antony, and to the open and violent display of anger with which Augustus resented what was at once a shock to his affections and a blow to his policy. Nearly coinci- dently with the publicity given to this scandal appeared the famous Ars Amatoria of Ovid, perhaps the most immoral and demoralizing work ever written, at least in ancient times, by a man of genius. Ovid was the favourite poet of the fashionable world ; he lived on terms of intimacy with its leading members, the younger representatives of the old nobility, who had survived the proscriptions and the fatal day of Philippi. His poetical accomplishment would naturally recommend him to lulus Antonius, of whose gifts Horace has spoken so eulogistically. His marriage with his third wife, a lady of the great Fabian house, and a friend of the empress Livia, had probably taken place before this time. It thus seems likely that he may have been admitted into the intimacy of the 3 Compare Am. , ii. 23 &quot; Graciles, non sunt sine viribus artus ; Pondere, non nervis, corpora nostra careiit.&quot;
 * Cf. Lucret., i. 726