Meanwhile poetry continued to flourish, but not quite on the lines of Augustus’ desire. Only supreme artists like Virgil or Horace can produce good verse to governmental specifications; greater men would refuse, lesser men are unable to comply. Of the three major sources of poetry—religion, nature, love—two had been brought under imperial sway; the third remained lawless, even in Horace’s Odes. Now, mildly in Tibullus and Propertius, recklessly in Ovid, poetry escaped from the bureau of propaganda and staged a rebellion that proceeded with mounting gaiety to a tragic end.
Albius Tibullus (54-19), like Virgil, lost his ancestral lands when the Civil War reached the little town of Pedum–near Tibur—that had seen his birth. Messala rescued him from poverty and took him in his train to the East, but Tibullus fell ill on the way and returned to Rome. He was happy to be free from war and politics; now he could give himself to genderless love and the polishing of elegiac verse in the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks. To Delia (otherwise unknown, and perhaps one name for many) he addressed the usual supplications, “sitting like a gatekeeper [ianitor] before her stubborn doors”69 and reminding her, as so many maids have been reminded, that youth comes but once and soon steals away. It did not disturb him that Delia was married; he put the husband to sleep with undiluted wine—but fumed when her new lover played the same trick upon him.70 These ancient themes might not have harassed Augustus; what made Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid really disagreeable to a government that was finding it hard to enlist recruits for the army was the persuasive anti-militarism of this love-loose set. Tibullus laughs at warriors who forage for death when they might have been seducing women. He mourns for the age of Saturn, when, he imagines,
there were no armies, no hatred, and no war. . . . There was no war when men drank from wooden cups. . . . Give me but love, and let others go to war. . . . The hero is he whom, when his children have been begotten, old age overtakes in his humble cottage. He follows his sheep, his son follows the lambs, while the good wife heats the water for his weary limbs. So let me live till the white hairs glisten on my head, and I tell in my old man’s fashion of the days gone by.71
Sextus Propertius (49-15) sang less simply and tenderly, and with more learned ornaments, the same idyl of peaceful lechery. Born in Umbria, educated in Rome, he soon lapsed into verse; and though few readers could fetch his thought from the wells of his pedantry, Maecenas took him into his circle on the Esquiline. He describes with pride and pleasure the dinners there on the banks of the Tiber, when he would drink the wine of Lesbos in cups chiseled by great artists, and, “seated as on a throne amid merry women,” would watch the vessels gliding by on the river below.72 To please his patron and his prince Propertius now and then plucked his lyre in praise of war; but to his mistress Cynthia he sang another tune: “Why should I raise sons for Parthian triumphs? No child of ours shall be a soldier.”73 Not all the martial glory in the world, he assured her, could equal one night with Cynthia.74
Of all these epicureans, light of heart and head, who spent their lives climbing and descending the mount of Venus, Publius Ovidius Naso was the happy model and poet laureate. Sulmo (Soloma) saw his birth (43 B.C..) in a pleasant valley of the Apennines some ninety miles east of Rome; how beautiful, from the cold exile of his later years, would seem Sulmo’s vineyards, olive groves, cornfields, and streams! His rich middle-class father sent him to Rome to study law, and was shocked to hear that the boy wished to be a poet; he held up to the lad the awful fate of Homer, who, according to the best authorities, had died blind and poor. So warned, Ovid managed to rise to the post of a judge in the praetorial courts. Then, to his father’s dismay, he refused to run for the quaestorship (from which he would have emerged a senator), and retired to the cultivation of literature and love. He pleaded that he could not help being a poet; “I lisped in numbers and the numbers came.”75
Ovid traveled leisurely to Athens, the Near East, and Sicily, and, returning, joined the loosest circles in the capital. Possessed of charm, wit, education, and money, he was able to open all doors. He married twice in early manhood, was twice divorced, and then grazed for a time in public pastures. “Let the past please others,” he sang; “I congratulate myself on being born into this age, whose morals are so congenial to my own.”76 He laughed at the Aeneid, and merely concluded from it that since the son of Venus had founded Rome, it should, if only out of piety, become the city of love.77 He lost his head to a pretty courtesan, whose anonymity or multiplicity he hides under the name of Corinna. His racy couplets about her had no trouble in finding a publisher; under the title of Amores they were soon (14 B.C.) on the lips and lyres of youthful Rome. “On every hand people want to know who is this Corinna that I sing about.”78 He mystified them, in a second series of Amores, by writing a pronunciamento of promiscuity:
It is no fixed beauty that calls my passion forth; there are a hundred causes to keep me always in love. If it is some fair one with modest eyes downcast upon her lap, I am aflame, and her innocence is my ensnaring; if it is some saucy jade, I am smitten because she is not rustic simple, and gives me hope of enjoying her supple embrace on the soft couch. If she seems austere, and affects the rigid Sabine dame, I judge she would yield, but is deep in her conceit. If you are versed in books you win me by your rare accomplishments. . . . One treads softly, and I fall in love with her step; another is hard, but can be softened by the touch of love. Because this one sings sweetly … I would snatch kisses as she sings; this other runs with nimble fingers over the complaining strings—who could but fall in love with such cunning hands? Another takes me by her movement, swaying her arms in rhythm and curving her tender side with supple art—to say naught of myself, who take fire from every cause; put Hippolytus in my place, and he will be Priapus! . . . Tall and short are after the wish of my heart; I am undone by both. . . . My love is candidate for the favors of them all.79
Ovid apologizes for not chanting the glory of war; Cupid came and stole a foot from his verse and left it lame.80 He wrote a lost play, Medea, which was well received, but for the most part he preferred “the slothful shade of Venus,” and was content to be called “the well-known singer of his worthless ways.”81 Here are the lays of the troubadours a thousand years beforetime, addressed like them to married ladies, and making flirtation the main business of life. Ovid instructs Corinna how to communicate with him by signs as she lies on her husband’s couch.82 He assures her of his eternal fidelity, his strictly monogamous adultery: “I am no fickle philanderer, not one of those who love a hundred women at a time.” At last he wins her and intones a paean of victory. He commends her for having denied him so long, and advises her to deny him again, now and then, so that he may love her forever. He quarrels with her, strikes her, repents, laments, and loves her more madly than before. Romeo-like he begs the dawn to delay, and hopes some blessed wind will break the axle of Aurora’s car. Corinna deceives him in his turn, and he is furious on finding that she holds her favors insufficiently rewarded by the homage of his verse. She kisses him into forgiveness, but he cannot pardon the new skill of her loving; some other master has been teaching her.83 A few pages later he is “in love with two maids at once, each beautiful, each tasteful in dress and accomplishment.”84 Soon, he fears, his simultaneous duties will undo him; but he will be happy to die on the field of love.85
These poems were tolerantly received by Roman society four years after the passing of the Julian reform laws. Great Senatorial families like the Fabii, the Corvini, the Pomponii continued to entertain Ovid in their homes. Buoyant with success, the poet issued a manual of seduction called Ars amatoria (2 B.C.). “I have been appointed by Venus,” he says, “as tutor to tender love.”86 He chastely warns readers that his precepts must be applied only to courtesans and slaves; but his pictures of whispered confidences, secret assignations, billets-doux, raillery and wit, deceived husbands, and resourceful handmaids suggest the middle and upper classes of Rome. Lest his lessons should prove too apt, he added another treatise, Remedia amoris, on curing love. The best remedy is hard work; next, hunting; third, absence; “it is also useful to surprise your lady in the morning, before she has completed her toilette.”90 Finally, to make the balance even, he wrote De medicamina faciei feminineae, a metrical manual of cosmetics, pilfered from the Greeks. These little volumes sold so well that Ovid soared to heights of insolent fame. “So long as I am celebrated all the world over, it matters not to me what one or two pettifoggers say about me.”91 He did not know that one of these pettifoggers was Augustus, that the Prince resented his poems as an insult to the Julian laws, and would not forget the insult when imperial scandal should touch the poet’s careless head.
About the third year of our era Ovid married a third time. His new wife belonged to one of the most distinguished families in Rome. Now forty-six, the poet settled down to domestic life and seems to have lived in mutual faith and happiness with Fabia. Age did to him what law could not; it cooled his fires and made his poetry respectable. In the Heroides he told again the love stories of famous women—Penelope, Phaedra, Dido, Ariadne, Sappho, Helen, Hero; told them, perhaps, at too great length, for repetition can make even love a bore. Startling, however, is a sentence in which Phaedra expresses Ovid’s philosophy: “Jove decreed that virtue is whatever brings us pleasure.”92 About A.D. 7 the poet published his greatest work, the Metamorphoses. These fifteen “books” recounted in engaging hexameters the renowned transformations of inanimate objects, animals, mortals, and gods. Since almost everything in Greek and Roman legend changed its form, the scheme permitted Ovid to range through the whole realm of classical mythology from the creation of the world to the deification of Caesar. These are the old tales that until a generation ago were de rigueur in every college, and whose memory has not yet been erased by the revolution of our time: Phaëthon’s chariot, Pyramus and Thisbe, Perseus and Andromeda, the Rape of Proserpine, Arethusa, Medea, Daedalus and Icarus, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Atalanta, Venus and Adonis, and many more; here is the treasury from which a hundred thousand poems, paintings, and statues have taken their themes. If one must still learn the old myths there is no more painless way than by reading this kaleidoscope of men and gods—stories told with skeptical humor and amorous bent, and worked up with such patient art as no mere trifler could ever have achieved. Little wonder that at the end the confident poet announced his own immortality: per saecula omnia vivam—“I shall live forever.”
He had hardly written the words when news came that Augustus had banished him to cold and barbarous Tomi on the Black Sea—even today unalluring as Constanta. It was a blow for which the poet, rounding fifty-one, was wholly unprepared. He had just composed, toward the close of the Metamorphoses, an elegant tribute to the Emperor, whose statesmanship he now recognized as the source of that peace, security, and luxury which Ovid’s generation had enjoyed. He had half completed, under the title of Fasti, an almost pious poem celebrating the religious feasts of the Roman year. In these verses he was on the way to making an epic out of a calendar, for he applied to the tales of the old religion, and to the honoring of its shrines and gods, the same lucid facility, delicacy of word and phrase, and even flow of racy narrative that he had devoted to Greek mythology and Roman love. He had hoped to dedicate the work to Augustus as a contribution to the religious restoration and as an apologetic palinode to the faith he once had scorned.
The Emperor gave no reason for his edict, and no one today can fathom its causes confidently. He offered some hint, however, by at the same time banishing his granddaughter Julia, and ordering that Ovid’s works should be removed from the public libraries. The poet had apparently played some role in Julia’s misconduct—whether as witness, accomplice, or principal. He himself declared that he was punished for “an error” and his poems, and implied that he had been the unwilling observer of some indecent scene.93 He was given the remaining months of the year (A.D. 8) to arrange his affairs. The decree was relegatio, softer than exile in allowing him to retain his property, harsher in commanding him to stay in one city. He burned his manuscripts of the Metamorphoses, but some readers had made copies, and preserved them. Most of his friends avoided him;94 a few dared the lightning by staying with him till his departure; and his wife, who remained behind at his bidding, supported him with affection and loyalty. Otherwise Rome took no notice as the bard of its joys sailed out of Ostia on the long voyage from everything that he had loved. The sea was rough nearly all the days of that trip, and the poet thought once that the waves would engulf the vessel. When he saw Tomi he regretted that he had survived, and gave himself over to grief.
On the voyage he had begun those verses which we know as Tristia, “Sorrows.” Now he continued them, and sent them to his wife, his daughter, his stepdaughter, and his friends. Probably the sensitive Roman exaggerated the horrors of his new home: a treeless rock where nothing would grow, and yet shut out from the sun by the Euxine mists; the cold so bitter that in some years the snow remained all summer long; the Black Sea stiff with ice through gloomy winters, and the Danube so frozen that it offered no bar to the raids of hinterland barbarians upon the city’s mixture of knife-wearing Getae and half-breed Greeks. When he thought of Roman skies and Sulmo’s fields his heart broke, and his poetry, still beautiful in form and phrase, took on a depth of feeling that it had never fathomed before.
These Tristia, and the poetic letters to his friends Ex Ponto—“From the Pontus” or Black Sea—have nearly all the charms of his greater works. A simple vocabulary that made him a pleasure even in school, scenes vividly realized by insight and imagery, characters brought to life by touches of psychological subtlety, phrases compact with experience or thought,V an unfailing grace of speech and flowing ease of line: all these stayed with him in his exile, attended by a seriousness and tenderness whose absence makes the earlier poems unworthy of a man. Strength of character never came to him; as once he had spoiled his verse with superficial sensuality, so now he flooded his lines with tears and suppliant adulation of the Prince.
He envied these poems which could go to Rome. “Go, my book, and in my name greet the places I love” and “the dear soil of my native land”;95 perhaps, he tells it, some brave friend will hand it to a relenting emperor. In every letter he still hopes for pardon, or pleads for at least some milder home. He thinks each day of his wife and calls her name in the night; he prays that he may kiss her whitened hairs before he dies.96 But no pardon came. After nine years of exile the broken man of sixty welcomed death. His bones, as he had begged, were brought to Italy and buried near the capital.
His prediction of lasting fame was justified by time. His hold on the Middle Ages rivaled Virgil’s; his Metamorphoses and Heroides became rich sources of medieval romance; Boccaccio and Tasso, Chaucer and Spenser, drew upon him without stint; and the painters of the Renaissance had a treasure trove of subjects in his sensuous verse. He was the great romanticist of a classic age.
With his passing ended one of the great flowering epochs in the history of letters. The Augustan was not a supreme literary age, like the Periclean or Elizabethan; even at its best there is in its prose a pompous rhetoric, and in its verse a formal perfection, that seldom come from soul to soul. We find no Aeschylus here, no Euripides, no Socrates, not even a Lucretius or a Cicero. Imperial patronage inspired and nourished, repressed and narrowed, the literature of Rome. An aristocratic age—like that of Augustus, or Louis XIV, or eighteenth-century England—exalts moderation and good taste and tends in letters to a “classic” style in which reason and form dominate feeling and life. Such literature is more finished and less powerful, more mature and less influential, than the literature of passionately creative periods or minds. But within the classic range this age deserved the compliment of its name. Never had sober judgment found expression in such perfect art; even the madcap revelry of Ovid was cooled into a classic mold. In him and Virgil and Horace the Latin language as a poetic medium reached its zenith. It would never be so rich and resonant, so subtle and compact, so pliant and melodious again.
I Astraea, or Justice, the last immortal to leave the earth in the legend of the Saturnian age.
II Horace’s estate, unearthed in 1932, turned out to be a spacious mansion, 363 by 142 feet, with twenty-four rooms, three bathing pools, several mosaic floors, and a large formal garden surrounded by a covered and enclosed portico. Beyond this was an extensive farm, worked by eight slaves and five families of leasehold coloni.28a
III This is the curious and happy phrase applied to Horace by Petronius.41
IV Almost neglected in the Middle Ages, Horace came into his own in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the age of modern classicism, when every statesman and pamphleteer, above all in England, turned the poet’s phrases into prose clichés. Boileau’s L’Art poétique revived Horace’s Ad Pisones and formed and chilled the French drama till Hugo; Pope’s Essay on Criticism attempted a similar refrigeration in England, but was thawed by Byron’s fire.
V E.g., video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor—“I see and approve the better, I follow the worse”; est deus in nobis agitante calescimus illo—“there is a god in us, and by his action we have the warmth of life.”