Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/90

 80 OVID younger society of the Palatine, although in the midst of his most fulsome flattery he does not claim ever to have enjoyed the favour of Augustus. Whether he was in any way mixed up with this intrigue is not known. But that the work which appeared coincidently with it excited deep resentment in the mind of the emperor, as the pander to the passions by which the dignity of his family had been outraged and his state policy thwarted, is shown by his edict, issued ten years later, against the book and its author. Augustus had the art of dissembling his anger ; and Ovid appears to have had no idea of the storm that was gather ing over him. He still continued to enjoy the society of the court and of the fashionable world ; he passed before the emperor in the annual procession among the ranks of the equites ; he filled a more important judicial place; and he had developed a richer vein of genius than he had shown in his youthful prime. But he was aware that public opinion had been shocked, or professed to be shocked, by his last work ; and after writing a kind of apology for it, called the Remedia Amoris, he directed his genius into other channels, and wrote during the next ten years the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. He had already written one work, the Heroides, in which he had imparted a modern and romantic interest to the heroines of the old mythology, 1 and a tragedy, the Medea, which must have afforded greater scope for the dramatic and psychological treatment of the passion with which he was most familiar. In the Fasti Ovid assumes the position of a national poet 2 by imparting poetical life and interest to the ceremonial observances of Roman religion ; but it is as the brilliant narrator of the romantic tales that have got so strangely blended with the realistic annals of Rome that he succeeds in the part assumed by him. The Metamorphoses professed to trace the relations of the gods with human affairs from the reign of Chaos to the deification of Augustus ; and in the later books that work also may claim something of a national character. But it consists for the most part of a series of tales of the love adventures of the gods with nymphs and heroines, told in a tone of mixed irony and romance. This work, which he regards as his most serious claim to immortality, had not been finally revised at the time of his disgrace, and he committed it to the flames ; but other copies were in existence, and the book was given to the world in his absence. He often regrets that it had not obtained his final revisal. The Fasti also was broken off by his exile, after the comple tion and publication of the first six books, treating of the first six months of the year. The actual offence which gave occasion for his banish ment is not exactly known. In his frequent references to it he wavers between assertions of his innocence of anything beyond simplicity and error and the admission that, though he had done nothing, he yet deserved his punishment. He had witnessed something which was a cause of pain and offence to the emperor. In a letter to one of his intimate friends, to whom he had been in the habit of confiding all his secrets, he says that had he confided this one he would have escaped condemnation. In writing to another friend in reference to his disgrace, he warns him against the danger of courting too high society &quot; praelustria vita.&quot; The cause which excited or renewed the anger of Augustus was connected with the old offence of writing and publish ing the Ars Amatoria. All this points to his having been in some way mixed up with some scandal affecting the imperial family. He distinctly disclaims the idea that he had anything to do with any treasonable plot ; and he 1 The essentially modern character of the work appears in his making a heroine of the time of the Trojan war speak of visiting &quot;barned&quot; Athens (lleroid., ii. 83). 8 &quot; Animos ad publica cariuina flexi &quot; (Trist., v. 23). certainly appears to have been the last man who ever could have been made the confederate of a serious conspiracy. All this seems to connect him with one event, coincident in time with his disgrace, the intrigue of the younger Julia, granddaughter of the emperor, with Silanus, mentioned by Tacitus in the third book of the Annals. Tacitus tells us how deeply Augustus felt these family scandals, looking upon them as acts of treason and sacrilege. It seems, at first sight, strange that the chief punishment fell, not on the real offenders, but on Ovid, who at the worst could only have been the confidant of their intrigue, perhaps may have lent his house as a place of rendezvous for the lovers. To Julia herself was assigned the lighter penalty of seclusion in one of the towns of Italy, and Silanus had no other punishment than that of exclusion from the court. Augustus must have regarded Ovid and his works as, if not the corrupter of the age, yet the most typical representative of that corruption which in its effects on his own family might be regarded as the nemesis attending on, as it was the direct consequence of, the outward success of his policy. The date of this scandal must have been 7 or early in 8 A.D., as Tacitus, under the date 28 A.D., mentions the death of Julia after twenty years of seclusion. A delay of nearly two years seems to have taken place between the disgrace and the sentence passed on Ovid, and it must have been during this interval that he visited his friend Fabius at Elba, 3 probably with the view of inducing him to intercede for him. At last the edict, dictated by relentless policy rather than personal vindictiveness, was published. He was left in the enjoy ment of the rights of citizenship and in the possession of his property (perhaps through the exercise of the influence of Li via in favour of his wife), but was ordered to leave Rome on a particular clay, and to settle at the very out skirts of civilization, in the semi-Greek semi-barbaric town of Tomi, near the mouth of the Danube. He tells vividly the story of the agony of his last night at Rome, of the dangers and hardships of his winter voyage down the Adriatic, and of his desolate feelings on his first arrival at his new abode. But this was merely the beginning of his miseries. For eight years he bore up in his solitude, in the dreariest circumstances, suffering from the unhealthi- ness of the climate and exposed to constant alarm from the incursions of the neighbouring barbarians. He continued to be buoyed up by hopes first of a remission of his sentence, afterwards of at least a change to another place of exile. He wrote his complaints first in a series of books sent successively to Rome, afterwards in a number of poetical epistles, also collected into books, addressed to all his friends who were likely to have influence at court. He believed that Augustus had softened towards him before his death, but his successor was inexorable to his complaints. Perhaps the person who most deeply resented the offence was the one who exercised the greatest influence over both, the empress Livia, whose life and example were a protest against the laxity of the age, and who was an unsympathetic stepmother to the members of the imperial family. His chief consolation was the exercise of his art, and the only expression of a worthy feeling of resistance to his misery is in a letter to his daughter Perilla, in which he asserts that over his genius Augustus had no control : &quot; Ingenio tamen ipsc ineo comitorque fruorquc : Csesar in hoc potuit juris liabcre iiihil.&quot; Tristia, iii. 7, 47. Yet as time goes on he is painfully conscious of failure in power, and of the absence of all motive to perfect his work. He had access to no books except such as he may have brought with him, and the zest for reading, as for all 3 Ex Ponto, ii. 3, 83.