In these I live although my life is o'er; Their dear embraces took the sting from death. Twice did my brother fill the curule chair,1 Now I bequeath our children to thy heart, Around one neck now all those arms must twine. Kiss for thyself and then for her that 's gone; Thy love alone the whole dear burden bears; If e'er for me thou weepest, weep alone, And see, to cheat their lips, thou driest thy tears. Be it enough by night thy grief to pour, By night to commune with Cornelia's shade; If to my likeness in thy secret bower Thou speakest, speak as though I answer made. Should time bring on another wedding day, My children, let your looks no gloom betray; Nor speak too much of me; the jealous ear That he will live unwedded for my sake, 1 Its use was confined to the chief state officials. 55 60 65 70 75 80 Learn, children, to forestall your sire's decline, And let no lonesome thought come near his life ; Add to your years what Fate has reft from mine; Blest in my children let him bless his wife. Though brief my day, I have not lived in vain ; My cause is pleaded. Now, ye mourners rise GOLDWIN SMITH. 85 90 OVID BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH At the end of the fourth book of the Tristia, Ovid, following a custom of Roman elegiac poets, has given a sketch of his life. He was born in 43 B. C., at Sulmo, a town of the Pelignians, about seventy miles east of Rome. His father, who belonged to the equestrian order, destined him for a legal and political career, and with this end in view sent him to Rome and afterwards to Athens to study under some of the distinguished rhetoricians of the day. His own inclinations, however, were towards literature rather than law, and when he was about twenty-four he abandoned his legal pursuits to devote himself entirely to poetry. The Amores made him famous as a writer of erotic elegies, and this success was followed up by the publication of the Heroides, a series of imaginary letters in elegiac verse from deserted women to their erring lovers, and the pseudodidactic poem on the Art of Love. Later came the Metamorphoses, a collection of mythological stories in fifteen books, written in hexameters, and the Fasti, a poetical calendar of the first six months of the year. He was at the height of prosperity when in 8 a. D. he was struck down by a decree of Augustus which banished him to Tomi, a desolate place on the shores of the Black Sea. The cause of his banishment has never been accurately determined, but the conjecture that he had been in some way implicated in the intrigue of Julia, the notorious granddaughter of Augustus, with Decimus Silanus, has a fair degree of probability. The sentence was never remitted, and he died at Tomi in 18 A. D. To the period of his exile belong the Epistolae ex Ponto, the Tristia, and other miscellaneous poems. While Propertius puzzles us by his curious self-absorption, Ovid amazes us by his cleverness, his quickness, his versatility, and his astounding facility in metrical composition. The Metamorphoses constitute one of the most remarkable tours de force in literary history. They show, successfully combined in one whole, a bewildering array of myths that have as their only common theme some kind of change of form. Fable is linked to fable, myth to myth, with a nicety of juncture that never fails, a variety of device that seems to be inexhaustible. In the stories themselves we find all the qualities of the literary artist whose natural gifts have been supplemented by training and practice: verve in narration, picturesqueness in description, skill in the elaboration of simile or metaphor, and the faculty of writing in smoothly flowing verse that knows no pause. Swift, vivid, brilliant, never wearying us except by the infinity of his surprises, coercing our admiration of his storyteller's art, he carries us along through his strange world of ever changing forms that begin with Deucalion and end with Julius Caesar. In the Fasti, with their explanations of the festivals of the different months, we see the same characteristics, but added to them something more serious, an aetiological spirit that makes them the most substantial of all the poet's works. His erotic elegies and his Art of Love, written to amuse himself and others as flippant as himself, show him to have been, in some moods at least, frivolous to the last degree of frivolity, careless of himself and of the society in which he moved, such a man as could only have been produced by an age in which the old republican virtue and simplicity had given way to luxury and even immorality. DIDO TO AENEAS1 (Heroides, VII.) So, on Maeander's 2 banks, when death is nigh, But, having lost whate'er was worth my care, While you, with loosened sails, and vows, prepare 5 10 15 Built walls you shun, unbuilt you seek; that land 20 1 The visit to Carthage was one of the most important episodes in the long voyage of Aeneas and his Trojans from Troy to Italy. Driven by a storm on the coast of Africa, they had been hospitably entertained by Queen Dido. When, after some time, Aeneas announced his intention to depart, the queen, loving him, urged him to remain and share her kingdom with her. He, however, refused, and was making his final preparations to leave the country, when she sent him this letter as a last appeal. 2 A river in Asia Minor. |