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 OVID (Publius Ovidius Naso) was born at Sulmo in Central Italy, a centre of disaffection in the Social War. He lived a loose literary life at Rome till his 52nd year, when a rescript from Augustus banished him to Tomi on the Euxine, where he died after eight years of lonely wretchedness. The immortality of much of his writing, and the suspicion of an intrigue with Julia, probably pointed him out to Augustus as a fit instance of his censorship of morals. The most prolific of Latin poets, he has left us three long series of amatory poems, a poem on the "Reasons and Seasons" of Roman ceremonial, two series of lamentations from Pontus -- all in elegiacs -- and one poetical romance in hexameters, longer than any of the other poems.
The few years which separate Ovid from Tibullus mark a clear advance in the social and political conditions. The Empire and its surroundings were firmly established and no one "moved a wing or opened a mouth." The poetry of Ovid reflects this social rest.
Its form contains the germ of post-Augustan decay. The pride of perfect diction began to chafe at the trammels of meaning. This is more obvious in the hexameters, for we are bound to read them side by side with Virgil, where diction and meaning are perfectly adjusted. But an elegiac couplet demands a certain sacrifice of matter to form, and in bringing it to the highest perfection known, Ovid undoubtedly proved himself one of the subtlest masters of language the world has ever seen.
He carried the same ingenuity into the development of his ideas. His poetry, except when he is in trouble, never springs from the heart; it is a clever, pointed, unexpected contrivance of the head. No great public or private devotion had ever seized his affections and powers, and restrained their selfish but not ungenerous bent. Some of his love-writing is true, and what is immoral we must forgive, partly for its satiric turn, partly because it is nearly forgotten. The peculiar force of his mind, which found a partial outlet in the reconstruction of antiquarian details in the Fasti, was most fully and worthily employed in the Metamorphoses. This book, with the exception, perhaps, of Lucian, is the only forecast in classical times of the modern novel, a growing force of which we can probably only underrate the value.
Ovid was the beginning of the end of Roman poetry. His manner supplied the scanty graces and initiated the pervading weakness of later writers. His presence in the works of all poets of the decline, united to his own attractive grace, ensured him a wider circle of readers and admirers in the Middle Ages than any other ancient poet enjoyed.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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