promise of rising to distinction in public life.* The father, who seems to have been a man of practical Roman character, early brought his sons to Rome, and gave them the best advantages of education, and especially the choicest instruction in law and eloquence, that thus they might, like all Roman youth, be trained to the service of the state. To these Roman pursuits the elder brother developed an inborn tendency; but the younger, marked in his very nature by the Muse for her own, was even in his boyish years drawn into her service. Even in his declamations in the rhetorical schools, which he attended in compliance with his father's will, he betrayed his poetic instincts; and, as we learn from the rhetorician Seneca, t his prose diction had in it something of the rhythm of verse. He tells us also himself, in a characteristic passage, that when, to please his father, he tried to write prose, "the verse came of its own accord into fitting numbers."

Soon after assuming the manly gown, our studentpoet, when about seventeen years of age, entered upon a course of foreign travel and study, visiting Sicily, and then the chief cities of Asia, in the company of his friend, the poet Macer,# and especially resorting to Athens,|| and there quickening his genius and increasing his literary resources by congenial communion with the master spirits of Greek literature, and especially of Greek poetry. On his return to Rome, in his twentieth year, he held in succession several of those humbler offices with which

* Tristia, iv. 10, 10; ib. 17 and 18; ib. 31 and 32.

A

Controversiae, ii. 11: Memini me videre Nasonem declamare.Oratio ejus jam tum nihil aliud poterat videri quam solutum carmen. Tristia, iv. 10, 25 and 26. # Ex Ponto, ii. 10, 21-30.

quas quondam petii studiosus, Athenas. Tristia, i. 2, 77. A Tristia, iv. 10, 33; ib. ii. 93; Fasti, iv. 384; Tristia, iv. 10, 35-38.

young Romans of his rank were wont to open for themselves a career of statesmanship. But he had no taste for either the labors or the rewards of public life; it was distinctly a case of Horace's invita Minerva, quite contrary to the native bent of his mind; and so, never aspiring to the higher offices which would have entitled him to senatorial rank, he readily yielded his will to the gentle persuasions of the Muses,* and gave himself exclusively to their service as a poet.

He was in just opening manhood, when he began to read his poetry in public; so he records it himself in a passage in the Tristia (iv. 19, 57 and 58):

Carmina cum primum populo juvenilia legi,

Barba resecta mihi bisve semelve fuit.

He soon won his way into favor as a poet, not only with the people, but also with all his brother-poets then living in Rome, to most of whom he became united by ties of personal as well as of literary companionship. These he mentions in an interesting passage in that poem in which he tells us so much of his life; some of them, now unknown except in such passages as this, as Macer, Ponticus, Bassus; but others of a world-wide fame, as Horace and Vergil, and especially the three who with himself. make now, as they then made, the quartette of Roman elegiac poets, Tibullus, Gallus, and Propertius:

Successor fuit hic (Tibullus) tibi, Galle; Propertius illi;
Quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui.

As the companion and friend of such literary men as these, and also of the chief political characters of the time, and sharing with his brother-poets the favor and

* Et petere Aoniae suadebant tuta sorores

Otia, judicio semper amata meo.-Tristia, iv. 10, 39 and 40.
Tristia, iv. 10, 41-56.

patronage of the emperor; in possession of a comfortable home near by the Capitol, and a fortune with it, which made him independent, he developed, amid all these fortunate circumstances, a genius distinctively poetic in quality, and also far more productive than that of most of his contemporaries in Roman poetry. Yet the fruitfulness of production and the singular facility which Ovid had as a writer, seem never to have betrayed him into careless composition. On the contrary, the style of no poet in that highly cultivated Roman society, unless it be that of Horace, shows the traces of a more assiduous culture, of more patient toil in the exercise of his art, than that of Ovid in all the various efforts of his Muse.

In respect to the family relations of Ovid, we learn from himself that he was thrice married: first,* when very young, to one whom he describes as "neither worthy nor useful," a union which was a very brief one; the second time to one who was of blameless character, from whom, however, he was also soon divorced. His third wife was of the noble Fabian family; and with her the union seems to have been long and happy, their mutual affection continuing through all the many weary years of the husband's exile from country and home. The poet had one daughter, the Perilla to whom he wrote one of the most touching of his Tristia (iii. 7); she was twice. married, and was the mother of two children.#

Ovid's life flowed on undisturbed in a current of prosperous fortune till his fifty-first year. Then it was that, when his genius was mature and was yielding its best fruits, there fell upon it, as upon his whole life, a sudden blight, in the order of the emperor, that he

*Tristia, iv. 10, 69 and 70.

Ib. 73 and 74; Ex Ponto, i. 2, 138; ib. ii. 11, 13. #Tristia, iv. 10, 75 and 76.

Ib. 71 and 72.

should leave Rome forthwith and for ever, and go into
banishment at Tomi, a colony planted among the Getae,
on the western shore of the Black Sea. This imperial
order was inexorable and ultimate, and had to be in-
stantly obeyed; and the grief it brought to the poet in
parting from his wife and daughter, and from all his
happy surroundings in the metropolis, is touchingly de-
scribed in one of his most characteristic elegies.*
It was
not a formal exile, a Roman exsilium, which was always
a result either of a judicial sentence or of a decree of the
senate; it was a Roman relegation, which emanated sim-
ply from the emperor's will. Many have been the labored
and curious discussions of ingenious writers touching the
cause of this relegation; but they have all left it an un-
solved problem. In several passages the poet lays the
blame of his misfortune upon his poetry. For instance,
in the Ex Ponto, iv. 13, 41, he says:

Carmina nil prosunt; nocuerunt carmina quondam :
Primaque tam miserae causa fuere fugae.

He refers here to one of his early poems, the "Ars Amatoria," as having brought upon him, by its immoral character, the emperor's displeasure; this he himself makes clear in the Ex Ponto, ii. 10, 15, where he says:

Naso parum prudens, artem dum tradit amandi,
Doctrinae pretium triste magister habet;

and he speaks with equal clearness on this head in several passages of the second book of the Tristia; indeed, the burden of that book is an elaborate defense of that youth

ful and licentious poem. It were easy to believe that Augustus, who had sent away into hopeless exile, for their profligacy, his only daughter Julia, and his daughTristia, ii. 211, 240, 345.

* Tristia, i. 3.

ter's daughter, the second Julia, would visit a like punishment upon a poet whose writings might directly minister to such profligacy; but apart from the fact that this poem was published ten years before Ovid's banishment, there are other passages in the poet's writings which clearly show that there was another and probably the direct and chief cause of the emperor's severe displeasure. This cause, of which the poet always speaks in a cautiously reticent tone, he yet insists was no crime of his, but rather a blameless error. Thus, when addressing the manes of his parents in Tristia, iv. 10, 89 and 90, he says:

Scite, precor, causam-nec vos mihi fallere fas est-
Errorem jussae, non scelus, esse fugae.

In another passage* he couples this cause with the other, which has just been mentioned:

Perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error,

Alterius facti culpa silenda mihi.

While, however, he does not venture to reveal what this error was, lest he should further displease the emperor,

Quem nimio plus est indoluisse semel,†

yet he says distinctly in two passages that it consisted in his having been a witness of something, though quite unintentionally, and by mere accident, and that thus his having had eyes constituted his only offense. In the first passage his words are these:

Cur aliquid vidi? cur noxia lumina feci?

Cur imprudenti cognita culpa mihi?
Inscius Actaeon vidit sine veste Dianam:

Praeda fuit canibus non minus ille suis.

*

Tristia, ii. 207, 208.

Tristia, ii. 210.

Tristia, ii. 103-106; ib. iii. 5, 49 and 50.