~78 min read • Updated Mar 25, 2026
The Augustan Impulse
Although peace, tranquillity, and security are more favorable to the production of literature and art than war, war and profound social upheavals turn the earth upside down around the seedling of thought and nurture seeds that would not bear fruit in times of calm. A tranquil life does not produce great ideas or great men; rather, the pressure of crisis and the imperatives of survival tear out the withered weeds by the roots and accelerate the growth of ideas and the opening of new paths. The peace that follows a victorious war enjoys all the stimuli of a period of rapid improvement; at such a time people take pleasure simply in being alive and sometimes break into song.
The Roman people were grateful to Augustus because he had cured, even if by major surgery, the cancer of anarchy that was destroying their civil life. They were astonished to find themselves so quickly rich again after ruin, and they rejoiced to see that, despite the recent incurable chaos, they were still masters of a land that seemed to them the world. They looked back over their country’s history from Romulus I, the founder of Rome, to Romulus II, the restorer of Rome, and regarded it as a marvelous epic. When Virgil and Horace expressed their gratitude, pride, and glory in verse, and Livy did the same in prose, the people were not surprised. Better still, only a part of their possessions was barbarian; the greater part was the Hellenistic cultural sphere—that is, the sphere of eloquent speech, refined literature, illuminating sciences, mature philosophy, and noble arts. This spiritual wealth now poured into Rome, arousing imitation and rivalry, and forcing language and literature toward refinement and growth. Thousands of Greek words entered the Latin vocabulary, and thousands of Greek statues and paintings were installed in the squares, temples, streets, and houses of Rome.
Money flowed from the conquerors of Egypt’s treasury, the absentee landlords of Italian soil, and the exploiters of the empire’s resources and trade toward the lower classes and even toward poets and artists. Writers dedicated their works to the wealthy in the hope of receiving a gift and being able to continue their laborious task. It was for this reason that Horace dedicated his odes to Sallustius, Aelius, Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, and Munatius Plancus.
Messalla Corvinus gathered around himself a circle of refined men, whose star was Tibullus; and Maecenas redeemed poetry and wealth by giving gifts to Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. Until the years of his later irritability, Augustus maintained a liberal policy toward literature and was pleased that literature and art occupied the energies that had caused political disturbance. As long as the people did not interfere in his government, he did not grudge money for writing books. His generosity toward poets became so famous that wherever he went crowds of them gathered around him. One Greek every day, when Augustus left the palace, insistently placed a few verses in his hand. Augustus repaid him in kind one day by stopping, composing a few verses himself, and ordering an attendant to give them to the Greek. The Greek gave the emperor a few denarii and expressed regret that he had no more. Augustus rewarded his wit—not his verses—with 100,000 sesterces.
At this time the number of books increased to an unprecedented degree. From fools to philosophers, everyone wrote poetry. Since all poetry and much literary prose was composed to be read aloud, gatherings were formed in which authors read their works to guests or the public, and, on rare occasions when they could bear to hear one another’s poetry, to each other. Juvenal believed that one strong reason for living outside the city was to escape the poets who infested Rome. In the bookshops, which filled the district called the Argiletum, writers gathered to assess literary genius, while poor book-lovers secretly read portions of books they could not afford to buy; on tablets fixed to the walls the names of new books and their prices were announced; small volumes sold for four or five sesterces and medium ones for ten sesterces (about one and a half dollars). Luxurious editions, such as Martial’s collection of epigrams, usually adorned with a portrait of the author, fetched about five denarii (three dollars). Books were sent to every corner of the empire or published simultaneously in Rome, Lyon, Athens, and Alexandria. Martial was delighted to learn that his works were bought and sold in Britain. Even poets of this time had private libraries; Ovid describes his own library with warm affection. From Martial’s works it appears that there were already bibliophiles who collected fine editions or rare copies. Augustus founded two public libraries; Tiberius, Vespasian, Domitian, and Hadrian built others; by the fourth century twenty-eight libraries were operating in the city of Rome. Foreign students and writers came to these libraries and the state archives for study. It was thus that Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus of Sicily came to Rome. At this time Rome, as the literary center of the Western world, had become the rival of Alexandria.
This splendor changed both literature and society. Literature and art acquired a new vigor. Scholars lectured on contemporary authors, and people read passages from their works in the streets and alleys. Writers and poets gathered with statesmen and noblewomen in magnificent “salons”; history remembers no such situation until the flowering of France. The nobility became literary and literature became aristocratic. The fiery force of Ennius and Plautus, Lucretius and Catullus gave way to a refined beauty or delightful ambiguity in expression and thought. Writers and poets no longer mingled with the people and therefore no longer described the life of the common man or spoke in his language. A separation arose between literature and life, and as a result the essence and spirit of Latin literature withered. The form of speech imitated Greek models, and the subject matter was determined by Greek tradition or the court of Augustus. Poetry, when it freed itself from Anacreontic love or Theocritean pastoral, turned instructively to the description of the pleasures of agriculture, the moral beliefs of the ancestors, the glory of Rome, and the majesty of its gods. Literature became the obedient servant of statesmanship and turned into a sermon that embraced various tones and called the nation toward Augustan ideas.
Two forces rose in resistance to the compulsory recruitment of poetry by the state: one was the “wicked gang” hated by Horace, which preferred the salty flavor of independence, the gibes, and the old comedies to the new fragrant and ornate beauty; the other was the courtesans immersed in pleasure and sin, among whom Clodia and Julia had their place. This younger group was deeply offended by the Julian laws, wanted no moral reforms, and had its own poets, circles, and standards. In literature as in real life these two forces fought each other, met in the works of Tibullus and Propertius, and competed with the innocent chastity of Virgil and the shameless boldness of Ovid. Two Julias and one poet were crushed by exile, and in the end they wore each other out in the Silver Age. But the surge of great events, the liberating leisure of peace and wealth, and the grandeur of a world that recognized Roman dominion overcame the corruption of official proclamations and imperial bounties and produced a golden age whose literature, in form and expression, was the most perfect of its kind that human memory recalls.
Virgil
In 70 BC, on a farm near Mantua, where the river Mincius flows peacefully toward the Po, the most beloved Roman of all was born. The capital of Rome thereafter produced fewer great Romans; these men, in the century that the birth of Christ divided in two, came from every corner of Italy and, after that century, from the provinces. Perhaps Celtic blood flowed in Virgil’s veins, for Mantua had long been a Gallic settlement. In principle Virgil was a Gaul, for it was twenty-one years after his birth that the region of Cisalpine Gaul received Roman citizenship rights from Caesar. That man, who spoke of the glory and destiny of Rome in the most eloquent language, never showed the harsh masculinity of the Roman race in his works, but touched the mystical strings and the delicate, refined Celtic sensibility that was rare in the Roman stock.
His father, a clerk in the treasury, had saved enough to buy a farm and devote himself to beekeeping. The poet spent his childhood in that humming tranquillity. The dense foliage of the well-watered northern region was reflected for years in the poet’s memory, and he was never truly happy far from those fields and streams. At the age of twelve he was sent to Cremona, at fourteen to Milan, and at sixteen to Rome for school. There, under the same teacher who later instructed Octavian, he learned grammar, rhetoric, and the related subjects. Probably after this period he attended the lectures of the Epicurean philosopher Siro in Naples. Virgil worked hard to accept the philosophy of pleasure, but his rural upbringing had not equipped him well for it. Apparently after his studies he returned to the north, for in 41 BC we hear of him fleeing in fear of death from a soldier who had forcibly seized his father’s farm, swimming to safety. Octavian and Antony had confiscated the farm because that district had shown favor to their enemies. Asinius Pollio, the learned governor of Cisalpine Gaul, tried to restore the farm, but his efforts came to nothing. He then took the young poet under his protection and encouraged him to continue the pastoral songs he was composing.
By 37 BC Virgil had become intoxicated with the wine of the city in Rome. The collection of pastoral songs had just been published and warmly received; an actress had read a few lines from it on the stage, and the audience had applauded with enthusiasm. The pastoral songs were pictures of shepherd life in the manner of Theocritus, sometimes with his very phrases, beautiful in style and meter, and the most melodious hexameters that had yet reached Roman ears: filled with thoughtful delicacy and imaginative love. The youth of the capital had been so far removed from soil and agriculture that they now praised rural life in their imagination. Everyone was pleased to imagine himself a shepherd grazing his flocks on the slopes of the Apennines and tearing his heart with unrequited love.
But more real than these Theocritean illusions were the rural scenes of those poems. Here too Virgil had taken a path of praise, but he had no need to imitate. He heard with his own ears the passionate song of the woodsmen and the restlessness of the bees, and he was well acquainted with the despair of the heartbroken farmers who, like thousands of their fellows, had lost their land. And above all he felt with all his heart the hope of the people of that age for the end of war and division. The Sibylline books had foretold that after the Iron Age the Golden Age of Saturn would return. When in 40 BC Virgil’s patron Asinius Pollio became a father, Virgil announced in the fourth pastoral that this birth heralded the coming of the ideal city:
Now the last age of the Cumaean Sibyl’s song has come; the great sequence of ages is born anew. Now the Virgin returns; the reign of Saturn returns; now a new race descends from heaven. O chaste Lucina (goddess of childbirth)! Smile upon the boy now being born, for in his time the race of iron will first pass away, and a golden race will arise throughout the world. Apollo is now king.
Ten years after these verses were written, Virgil’s prophecies were fulfilled. The iron tools of war were laid aside. A new generation came to power, armed with golden weapons and hearts devoted to gold. In the short period remaining to Virgil, Rome saw no more anarchy, happiness and joy increased, and Augustus was greeted as a savior—though not as Apollo. The half-royal court welcomed the optimistic verses of the poet. Maecenas invited him, approved of him, and recognized him as one of the popular factors in Octavian’s reforms. This judgment of Maecenas showed his insight, for outwardly Virgil, who was now thirty-three, was an awkward countryman who stammered with embarrassment in the presence of the great, avoided every public place where he might be recognized and pointed out, and found no comfort in the talkative and intrusive society of Rome. Moreover, he was even more sickly than Octavian, suffering from headaches, sore throats, stomach trouble, and nosebleeds. Virgil never married and apparently knew less of the pleasures of love than Aeneas, the hero of his own poem. It appears that for a time he consoled himself with the love of a slave boy; apart from that, we know that in Naples he was called “the chaste man.”
Maecenas did the young poet a kindness, persuaded Octavian to restore his farm, and suggested that he write poems in praise of agricultural life. At that time (37 BC) Italy was paying a heavy penalty for converting large areas of land into pasture, orchards, and vineyards. Sextus Pompeius had closed the route for food supplies from Sicily and Africa, and a grain shortage threatened another revolution. Urban life was injuring the sturdy stock of Italy. The health of the nation in every respect required the revival of agriculture. Virgil agreed at once. He was familiar with rural life and, although he himself had become too delicate to endure its hardships, he was still someone who knew well how to portray its pleasant aspects with an affectionate eye. He withdrew to Naples and after seven years of toil returned with his most perfect poems, the Georgics or “The Toil of the Earth.” Maecenas was delighted and took Virgil south with him to meet Octavian, who was then (29 BC) returning from his victory over Cleopatra. In the village of Atella the weary commander stayed for four consecutive days and listened with pleasure to two thousand lines of Virgil’s poetry. Those verses harmonized with his policy even more than Maecenas had foreseen, for Octavian was then planning to discharge most of the huge army that had won the world for him, settle them on the land, and at the same time, through the toil of the countryside, give soldiers peace, cities food, and the state survival. From that moment onward Virgil could think only of poetry and the poet’s calling.
In the Georgics a great artist speaks of the noblest of industries—that is, the cultivation of the earth. Virgil borrows from the verse and prose of Hesiod, Aratus, Cato, and Varro, but turns their harsh prose and unpolished verse into clear and delicate lines. As he must describe all the various branches of agriculture—the kinds of soil and how to work them, the seasons of sowing and harvest, the cultivation of olives and vines, the breeding of cattle, horses, and sheep, and beekeeping—he has described them all. Every aspect of farming attracts and delights Virgil; in order to be able to continue his discourse, he warns himself:
But time flies, irretrievable time flies, and while we linger over our theme we explore every corner of it.
Virgil has not neglected the diseases of livestock either; he mentions each one and shows a remedy for every disease. He describes the animals of the farm with understanding and tenderness. He never tires of praising the simplicity of their instincts, the power of their affection, and the perfection of their outward form. He has described rural life in an imaginative way, but he has not overlooked its hardships and labors, the heartbreaking toil, the ceaseless struggle against insects, and the frequent and tormenting occurrence of wind and storm. Nevertheless, “the greater the labor, the greater the reward.” In such toil and effort there is a purpose and a result that give it grandeur; no Roman man should be ashamed to drive the plow. Virgil says: “Morals are exalted on the farm, and all the old virtues that made Rome great were cultivated and nurtured on the farm. There is no part of agricultural work—from sowing to preserving the harvest, plowing, weeding, and reaping—that does not have an exact effect on the transformation and development of the spirit. Outside the plowed hands, where the miracle of plant growth and the jests of heaven speak of a thousand unseen forces, the spirit, far more easily than is possible in the city, perceives the presence of the life-giving force and sinks deep into insight, reverence, and religious devotion.”
It is here that Virgil composed his most famous lines, whose beginning has the noble ring of Lucretius’ verses, but whose continuation is peculiar to Virgil:
Happy is he who has known the causes of things, and has trampled underfoot all fears and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy Acheron; but happy too is he who has known the gods who aid the crops, Pan and great Silvanus and the woodland nymphs.
The farmer is right to try to win the favor of the gods with sacrifice and to secure their help. This pious act brightens the time of hardship with festival and joy and clothes the earth and life with meaning, subject, and poetry.
John Dryden called the Georgics “the best poem of the best poet.” This poem, which incidentally deals with the nature of things, has the rare merit of being both instructive and beautiful. Of course the Romans did not mistake this poem for a handbook of agricultural instruction; we have never heard of anyone who, after reading it, sold his forum for a farm. In fact, as Seneca says, Virgil probably composed these delightful rural songs to please the taste of the city-dwellers. In any case, when Augustus saw that Virgil had performed very well the task Maecenas had assigned him, he summoned the poet to his palace and entrusted him with a more serious task with a broader theme.
The Aeneid
At first the plan was to sing of Octavian’s battles. But the thought that his adoptive father was descended from Venus and Aeneas led the poet, and perhaps the emperor as well, to consider an epic about the founding of Rome. As the thread of the story was woven, the tale gradually expanded through prophecy and foresight to the expansion of Rome into an empire and the Augustan peace. In this poem the role of Roman virtues in these important works would be shown, and an attempt would be made to revive the approved old virtues; the hero of the epic was to honor the gods; and they in turn were to guide him; and finally the poet was to address Augustus’ moral and religious reforms. Virgil traveled to the corners of Italy to carry out his task and spent the last ten years of his life (29–19 BC) composing the Aeneid. He wrote poetry slowly and with the devotion of a Flaubert. He would dictate a few lines early in the morning and rewrite the same lines in the evening. Augustus waited impatiently for the completion of the poem, frequently inquired about its progress, and insistently asked Virgil to bring him every finished section. Virgil gave Octavian as many promises of “today and tomorrow” as he could, but finally read him Books Two, Four, and Six. Octavia, the sister of Octavian and widow of Antony, fainted when the poet described Marcellus, her recently deceased son. The epic was never finished or perfected. In 19 BC Virgil went to Greece, met Augustus in Athens, suffered sunstroke in Megara, returned to Italy, and died shortly after reaching Brundisium. On his deathbed he asked his friends to destroy the manuscript of his poems, because he needed at least three more years of work to polish and perfect them. Augustus forbade his friends to carry out this request.
Every schoolboy knows the story of the Aeneid. When Troy was burning, the spirit of the slain Hector appeared to the leader of the Dardan allies, “the pious Aeneas,” and told him to rescue the “sacred things and household gods” of Troy from the Greeks—and above all to recover the Palladium or “statue of Pallas Athena,” on whose preservation the survival of the Trojan people depended. Hector said to seek these sacred objects “in a city that, after wandering over the sea, you will finally found.” Aeneas fled with his old father Anchises and his son Ascanius, boarded a ship, and stopped at various places. But the voice of the gods always commanded them to move on. A favorable wind drove them ashore near Carthage, where a Phoenician princess named Dido was busy building a city. (When Virgil composed this section, Augustus was carrying out Caesar’s plan to rebuild Carthage.) Aeneas fell in love with Dido. A favorable storm drove them into a cave and forced them to do what Dido interpreted as marriage. Aeneas accepted this interpretation for a while and joined Dido and his followers in building the city. But the merciless gods—who in the old myths attached no importance to marriage—warned Aeneas to depart, for that city was not the capital he was to build. Aeneas obeyed, and left the grieving queen with these words:
O queen, I will never deny that you have had more claim on me than can be contained in words … I never lit the marriage torch or took the marriage oath. … But Apollo now urges me to set sail. … So do not destroy yourself and me with these laments. I do not seek the shores of Italy of my own will.
The secret of the story is this: “I do not seek the shores of Italy of my own will.” We, who after eight hundred years of reading sentimental literature judge Virgil and his hero by the standards of that kind of literature, attach far more importance to romantic love and illicit relations than the Greeks and Romans of that time did. But in the eyes of the ancients marriage was more a union of families than a union of bodies or souls; and the religion of individuals, whether to country or to faith, was recognized as far higher than individual rights or desires. Virgil speaks of Dido with tenderness and affection; the passage in which Dido, after Aeneas’ departure, throws herself on the pyre of mourning and burns alive is one of the most beautiful parts of Virgil’s poem. Then Virgil follows Aeneas to Italy.
The few Trojans land at Cumae, walk to Latium, and there are welcomed by Latinus, king of Latium. Latinus’ daughter Lavinia is betrothed to Turnus, the handsome leader of the Rutulian people who live in the neighborhood. Aeneas wins the affection of the daughter and the father away from Turnus, and Turnus declares war on him and Latium, and fierce battles ensue. The Cumaean Sibyl, in order to refresh and encourage Aeneas, takes him from the cave of Lake Avernus to Tartarus. Homer described the journey and dangers of Odysseus in the Odyssey and the war of the Greeks with Troy in the Iliad; Virgil also brings Aeneas’ journey, dangers, and war into his poem in the same style and takes Aeneas, like Odysseus, on a tour of hell. Just as Homer guided Virgil, Virgil paved the way for Dante. Virgil says: “The descent to hell is easy.” But his hero finds the road winding and the underworld dizzyingly confused. There he meets Dido and rebukes her for the love she had declared; he also sees the various torments with which the sins of earth are punished; and he observes the prison in which the rebellious demigods suffer in the manner of Lucifer (or the devil). After that the Sibyl takes Aeneas from the mysterious passages to the land of the blessed, where those who have lived well on earth enjoy endless pleasure in green valleys. Anchises, Aeneas’ father, who had died on the way, explains the Orphic theory of heaven, purgatory, and hell to his son here and, in a full visionary panorama, shows him the glory and heroes of future Rome. Later Venus also reveals to him the Battle of Actium and the victories of Augustus. Aeneas, with a renewed spirit, returns to the world of the living, kills Turnus, and with his heroic hands scatters death. He marries the shadowy Lavinia and, after the death of Lavinia’s father, inherits the throne and crown of Latium. Shortly afterward he is killed in battle and taken to the land of the dead. His son Ascanius or Iulus founds the city of Alba Longa as the new capital of the Latin peoples, and after him his descendants, Romulus and Remus, found Rome.
To criticize a spirit as noble as Virgil for all these grateful flatteries toward the emperor’s country or to find fault in a work that Virgil perhaps never wanted to compose and did not live long enough to perfect would be unworthy. It is obvious that he imitates Greek models; and this is a practice that is evident in all branches of Roman literature except satire and the novel. The battle scenes are nothing but a faint echo of the tumultuous scenes of the Iliad; and however many times Homer has described the rising of dawn by saying “Dawn with rosy fingers appeared,” in the Aeneid Aurora (dawn) rises. The poet borrows events, phrases, and sometimes entire lines from Naevius, Ennius, and Lucretius. Apollonius Rhodius, with the creation of the Argonautica, provided a model for the sorrowful love of Virgil’s Dido. In Virgil’s time, as in Shakespeare’s, such borrowing was considered legitimate. In the eyes of people of that time, all the literature of the Mediterranean world was the common heritage and storehouse of all Mediterranean peoples. The mythological background of the Aeneid tires us who are busy making our own myths, but these ambiguities and interventions of the gods were familiar and pleasing even to the skeptical readers of Roman poetry. In Virgil’s gentle, sickly epic there is no trace of the torrential storytelling and the realities of life that set the giants of the Iliad or the homely folk of Ithaca in motion. Virgil’s story often lags, and the people of his story are almost entirely lifeless, except for those whom Aeneas spares or destroys. Dido—whom Aeneas abandons—is a living, charming, delicate woman filled with affection. Turnus—whom Aeneas kills—is a simple-minded and upright warrior whom Latinus has deceived and whom the mocking gods have condemned to an unjust death. After reading ten books about the salvation and hypocrisy of Aeneas, we are dissatisfied with his “piety,” which leaves him no will of his own, excuses his betrayal, and succeeds only through supernatural intervention. We take no pleasure in those watery speeches that kill good men by saying them—speeches that have no art except to add the tedium of rhetoric to the mutilation of another, which is man’s last resort to prove his rightness.
To understand and evaluate the Aeneid we must always remember that Virgil was not engaged in composing a heroic or love story, but was writing a sacred book for Rome. This does not mean that he presents a clear and explicit theology. The gods who hold the strings of Virgil’s puppet show are as malicious as Homer’s created gods and, like them, are not human in a kindly way. In truth all the evil and suffering of the story come from the gods, not from the men and women in it. Perhaps Virgil intended these gods as poetic tools or symbols of tyrannical conditions and a joyless fate. In general Virgil is suspicious of Jupiter and an unknown god of fate as the ruler of the universe, loves the gods of the countryside and farm more than the gods dwelling on Olympus, never misses an opportunity to recall those gods and their worship, and wishes that his fellow men could recover the factors of “reverent affection,” which is worship—from respect for ancestors, country, and gods—and these were the very factors that primitive rural cults held sacred. Virgil laments with sorrow: “Alas for virtue! Alas for lost faith,” but he sets aside the old hellish hypothesis that all the dead suffer a gloomy fate, flirts with Orphic and Pythagorean ideas about reincarnation and the afterlife, and, as far as he is able, makes the concept of heaven alive and intelligible as a reward, purgatory as a place of purification from stains, and hell as a place of punishment.
True religion in the Aeneid is patriotism, and its greatest god is Rome. The destiny of Rome is the motivating plan of the story’s turning points, and all the misfortunes of the story gain meaning and significance in view of “the great task of establishing the Roman race.” The poet is so proud of the empire that he does not envy the higher and nobler culture of Greece. He says let other peoples bring marble and bronze to life and draw maps of the paths of the stars:
But you, Roman, must rule over men. Your art will be to learn the way of peace, to spare the conquered and to subdue the proud.
Virgil is not unhappy about the death of the Republic; he knows that the murderer of the Republic was class war, not Caesar. At every stage of his poem he foresees the life-giving rule of Augustus; he welcomes it as the return of Saturn’s reign; and he promises Augustus, as a reward, the prospect of ascending to the presence of the gods. No one has ever carried out a literary mission with such perfection.
Why do we feel so much affection for this priestly propagandist, moral peddler, excessive patriot, and imperialist? Part of it is because the grace of his spirit is reflected on every page. Because we know that his tenderness spread from his own beautiful Italy to all peoples and even to all life. He told of the suffering of small and great from the horror of denying war, of the short mortality that carries away the noblest of creatures, of sorrows and pains, and of “the tears in things” that sometimes darken and sometimes brighten the sun of the days of life. When he sings: “The nightingale under the white poplar mourns the loss of her young, which a farmer has seen and pulled wingless from the nest; the nightingale laments all night, and bending over a branch repeats her sad song and fills the forest with her mournful cry,” he is not merely imitating Lucretius. But what draws us again and again to Virgil is the constant grace of his language. If he pondered every line and “like a she-bear licking her cubs with her tongue and giving them form” polished the lines, it was not in vain, and only the reader who has himself tried to write poetry can guess the toil that made this narrative so gentle and adorned it with so many melodious and rhythmic phrases that one out of every two pages insists on being quoted exactly and tempts the tongue. Perhaps Virgil’s poem is too uniformly beautiful. Even beauty, when eloquence stretches it to length, wearies us. There is a delicate, feminine grace in Virgil, but less of the thoughtful and masculine force of Lucretius, or the rushing tide of that “sea of a thousand waves” that is called Homer. When we imagine Virgil preaching beliefs he could never regain, and spending ten years composing an epic whose every event and line required artificial artistic effort, and then dying with the disturbing thought that he had failed in his task and no living spark had kindled his imagination or given form to his creation, we finally understand why Virgil was called melancholy. But if the poet did not master the subject of his work, he completely triumphed over the means of his work. It has rarely been possible for poetic craft to produce a more brilliant result than this.
Two years after Virgil’s death his heirs gave his poem to the world. A few detractors stepped forward. One critic published a collection of the poem’s defects, another listed the passages and lines he had borrowed from others, and another printed eight volumes of parallels between Virgil’s verses and earlier poems. But Rome soon forgave this literary chaos. Horace enthusiastically called Virgil the equal of Homer, and from that day to this the verses of the Aeneid have been memorized in schools. Both plebeians and aristocrats knew his poems by heart; craftsmen and shopkeepers, tombstones and wall inscriptions quoted something from him; and the oracles of the temples, in response to the people’s entreaties, read the ambiguous verses of Virgil’s epics. The custom of fortune-telling with Virgil’s collected poems began at that time and continued until the Renaissance. His fame grew day by day, until in the Middle Ages he was regarded as a magician and a saint. Was it not he who, in the fourth pastoral, foretold the coming of the Messiah (Jesus Christ) and in the Aeneid described Rome as a holy city from whose site the power of religion would elevate the whole world? Was it not he who in that dreadful sixth book described the last judgment, the torment of the wicked, the purifying fire of purgatory, and the happiness of the blessed in paradise? Virgil, like Plato, was regarded as essentially Christian despite his belief in pagan gods. Dante loved the eloquence of his verses and made him not only his guide through hell and purgatory but also his model in the easy narrative and beautiful expression of art. Milton, when composing Paradise Lost and delivering the bombastic speeches of devils and men, had Virgil in mind. And Voltaire, from whom a harsher judgment might have been expected, called the Aeneid the most delicate literary work of antiquity.
Horace
One of the most delightful scenes in the world of literature—where envy is only less common than in the world of love—is Virgil’s introduction of Horace to Maecenas. The two poets met in 40 BC—Virgil was thirty and Horace twenty-five. A year later Virgil opened the doors of Maecenas’ house to Horace, and all three remained close friends until death.
In 1935 Italy celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. He was born in the village of Venusia in Apulia. His father was a freed slave who had risen to the rank of tax collector—or, according to some, had become a fishmonger. Flaccus means “big-eared” (and perhaps it was a nickname given him by the people), and Horace was probably the name of the master whom his father had served. In any case, his father saved money and sent Quintus to Rome to study grammar and rhetoric and to Athens to study philosophy. There the young Quintus joined the army of Brutus and became the commander of a legion. Yes, “it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” But Horace himself, who often imitated Archilochus, in the midst of the fray threw away his shield and fled. When the war ended he found himself deprived of all his property and inheritance: “Naked poverty drove me to poetry.” Nevertheless he actually earned a living by serving as clerk to a quaestor.
Horace was a short, stout man, proud and shy; he did not like common society, but he did not have the clothes or means to go to circles equal to him in education. Since he was too cautious to marry, he consoled himself with courtesans who may have had some reality or may have been a kind of poetic debauchery invented to display maturity. He wrote poetry about courtesans with scholarly restraint and intricate meter, and thought it very proper that he did not seduce married women. Since he was too poor to ruin himself with excess in sexual matters, he turned to books and composed odes in the most difficult Greek meters in both Greek and Latin. Virgil saw one of these poems and praised it to Maecenas. The kind, pleasure-loving man took Horace’s embarrassment, which also caused him to stammer, as a compliment to himself and found a secret pleasure in his scholarly charm. In 37 BC Maecenas took Virgil, Horace, and a few others on a trip to Brundisium by boat, carriage, litter, and on foot. Shortly afterward he introduced Horace to Octavian, and Octavian offered him the post of secretary. The poet, who had no interest in the job, excused himself. In 34 BC Maecenas gave him a house and a profitable farm in Ustica, about seventy-two kilometers from Rome. Now Horace was free to live in the city or outside it and, as writers dream, to write his works with comfort mixed with laziness and great care.
For a time he stayed in Rome and enjoyed life like a spectator watching the rushing world. He mingled with all classes, studied the various kinds of people who made up Rome, and with a physician-like pleasure observed the frivolities and vices of the capital. He reflected some of these types in two books of Satires (34 and 30 BC), the beginning of which imitated Lucilius, and the rest of which is gentler and milder. Horace himself called these poems sermones, not in the sense of sermon but in the sense of “chat” or private and overly friendly conversations, and their meter was conversational hexameter. He confessed that his poetry was prose in every respect except its meter, and “no one will call a man a poet who, like me, writes verses more similar to prose.” In these quick verses we meet living Roman men and women and hear the sound of their speech. But these men and women are not the shepherds and farmers or the heroes of Virgil, nor the legendary debauchees and heroic women of Ovid’s poems, but sharp-tongued slaves, worthless poets, bombastic orators, greedy philosophers, chatterbox nuisances, greedy Samians, merchants, statesmen, and street wanderers: in Horace’s poems we finally reach the success of legacy-hunters and inheritance-seekers. He laughs at gluttons who celebrate with delicious foods and then limp from gout. He recalls the “praiser of times past” who “if there were gods who could return you to the past, you would refuse every time.” The chief charm of the past is that we know we do not need to live through those days again. Like Lucretius he marvels at those restless souls who in the city long for the air of the countryside and in the countryside long for the city; they never enjoy what they have, because there is always someone who has more; and since they are not content with their own wives, with their weak but broad imagination they lust after other men’s wives who have lost their charm for their own husbands. Finally he says that Rome’s disease is the madness of money. He asks the greedy money-lover: “Why do you laugh at Tantalus, from whose thirsty lips water always recedes? Change the name, the story is yours.” He mocks himself too. In one poem he presents his slave standing face to face with him and saying that you, O teacher of morals, harsh man, do not even know what you want, you are a slave to your own lust. It is certain that when he recommends the “golden mean” or moderation, he addresses both others and himself. He says: “Everything has a limit and a rule” from which the wise man stays away from excess and deficiency. At the beginning of the second book of Satires he complains to a friend that the first book was criticized for being too harsh and weak. He asks that friend for advice and hears: “Take a vacation for a while.” The poet protests: “What shall I do? Stop writing poetry altogether?” “Yes.” “But then I cannot sleep.”
How good it would have been if he had followed that advice for a while. His next work, the Epodes (29 BC), is worth less than his other works: it is a harsh and sharp collection, lacking generosity, devoid of taste, and, as far as both sexes are concerned, immoral—composed only as an experiment in the two-syllable meter of Archilochus. Perhaps his dislike of “the smoke, wealth, and noise of Rome” had increased to the point of bitterness. He could no longer endure the pressure of “the ignorant and malicious crowd.” He pictures himself pushing forward with his elbows among the shipwrecked fragments of humanity in the capital or being pushed back by others’ elbows, and cries out: “O rural home! When shall I see you? When shall I be able, sometimes with the books of the ancients, sometimes with sleep and hours of idleness, or with a sweet draught of forgetfulness, to make the anxieties of life tolerable for myself? Ah, brothers of Pythagoras, when will you give me beans, and those greens fried in pork fat? O nights and banquets of the gods!” His periods of residence in Rome became shorter; he stayed so long in the house he had outside the city that his friends, even Maecenas, complained that he had driven them out of his life. After the heat and dust of the city, he found the clean air and the quiet daily work of the simple laborers on his own farm like a joy that wipes away pains and impurities. He was not very healthy, and like Augustus he was mostly vegetarian. “A clear stream, a few acres of woodland, and my sure expectation of the grain harvest give me more blessing and good fortune than the share of the fertile lord of Africa.” In his works too, like those of other poets of the Augustan age, the affection for rural life has a warm and engaging expression that is rare in Greek literature:
Happy is he who, far from the troubles of business, even like the oldest human race, plows his ancestral fields with his own oxen, and is free from every debt. … How sweet it is to lie under the ancient walnut tree, or on the intertwined grass, when the stream flows between the high furrows, and the birds of the forest sing, and the bubbling springs murmur, and call man to pleasant sleep!
Nevertheless, this point must be added: these lines are put into the mouth of a city usurer with a Horatian sneer, who as soon as he utters these words drowns himself in his own coins.
Probably it was in these calm returns of rural thoughts that Horace, with the “toilsome happiness,” worked on those odes that he knew would keep his name alive or cause it to perish. He had grown tired of the hexameter, its repetitive rhythm, and its rapid scansion, which chopped the line like a merciless guillotine. In his youth he had enjoyed the delicate and lively meters of Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Anacreon; now he intended to place these special Sapphic and Alcaic meters, or these iambic and eleven-syllable meters, in the form of the Roman ode, and to express his thoughts on love and wine, religion and state, and life and death in pieces that would be fresh and new, full of wit and delicacy, ready to accompany music, and would play with the mind through the complexity of their interwoven structure. He did not write these odes for simple or hasty people. In fact he warned such persons with the arrogant preface of the third book of odes not to read his poems:
I hate the profane crowd and keep them away. Be silent! I, the priest of the Muses, sing unheard songs for maidens and youths.
But the maidens, if they wished to find their way through the playful inversions of language and desire in Horace’s mind and pass leaping, might be pleasantly startled by the erotic refinements of these odes. The poet reflects the pleasure of friendship, eating and drinking, and lovemaking. Few readers of these praises would guess that their author was a recluse who ate little and drank less. He asks: Why should we disturb our time with the politics of Rome and distant wars? (The reader of these pages has already been told his opinion.) Why should we carefully plan the future whose map will laugh at our map? Youth and beauty rub against us and flee. Let us enjoy them now, “let us fall under the pine trees, and weave gray hair with flowers and perfume it with Syrian hyacinth.” Even as we speak, envious time is fleeing. Seize the opportunity and hold the day. He raises his hands in prayer and mentions the names of several frivolous women whom he claims to have loved: Lalage, Glycera, Neaera, Inachia, Cinara, Candida, Lyce, Pyrrha, Lydia, Tyndaris, Chloe, Phyllis, and Myrtale. There is no need to believe all his sinful claims. These are literary exercises that were almost obligatory among the poets of that day. The same ladies or names were used by other poets’ pens. Augustus, who was now reformed, was not deceived by these metrical adulteries. He was pleased to find, among the descriptions of adultery, a heavy and dignified praise of his government, his victories, his moral reforms, and the peace and tranquillity attributed to himself. The famous drinking song of Horace—“Now is the time for wine”—was composed on the occasion of the news of Cleopatra’s death and the conquest of Egypt; even his lost spirit was excited by the thought that the victorious empire was expanding in an unprecedented way. He warned his readers that the new laws could not replace the old moral beliefs. He mourned the spread of luxury and adultery, frivolity and Cynic unbelief. Referring to the last war he said: “Alas! Woe for the shame of our wounds and crimes, and woe for our slain brothers! What is there that we of this generation have avoided? What wickedness is there that we have not touched?” Nothing could save Rome except a return to the simplicity and stability of the old ways. The skeptical poet, who found it difficult to believe in anything, bowed his graying head before the old altars, admitted that people would perish without ritual and myths, and generously lent his pen to help the struggling gods.
In world literature there is nothing quite like these odes, delicate yet powerful, lofty and masculine, tender and complex; they hide their art behind perfect art and have an easy yet difficult expression. This is music in a key different from Virgil’s, less melodious and more thoughtful. Its audience is not youths and maidens but artists and philosophers. Here there is less trace of emotion or passion or delicacy. Even where the sentence is inverted, the expression is simple. But in the greater odes there is a pride and grandeur of thought, as if an emperor were speaking, and not with letters but with bronze:
I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze, loftier than the lofty peaks of the pyramids! It will not be damaged by storm or the powerless north wind, nor will the passage of countless years or the swift flight of time bring it down. I shall not wholly die.
The common people, who had been spoken of badly, paid no attention to the odes, the critics dismissed them as a tiresome artifice, and the purifiers turned away from the love songs. Augustus called the odes immortal and asked the poet to compose a fourth collection in which he would describe the campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany, and chose Horace to compose a hymn to be sung by the chorus at the secular games. Horace accepted, but his heart was not in the work. The effort he had put into the odes had exhausted him. In his last work he took refuge in the conversational hexameter of the Satires, and constructed his Epistles as if he were lounging in an easy chair. He had always wanted to be a philosopher; now in this work, even where he remains talkative, he surrenders himself to reason. Since the philosopher is a dead poet and the poet is approaching death, Horace, who had grown old at forty-five, was ready and mature to discuss God and man, morals, literature, and art.
The most famous of these letters, which later critics called the “Art of Poetry,” was addressed to the Pisos, that is, to an indefinite number of the Piso family; it was not an official treatise but a few friendly pieces of advice on how to write poetry. Horace says: Choose a subject within your power, but beware of producing, like the mountain in the story, after much labor, a mouse. The ideal book is one that is at once instructive and entertaining. “Whoever has mixed the useful with the delightful will win the voice of approval.” Avoid using new, obsolete, or very long words. Speak concisely as far as clarity of speech allows. Go straight to the point. When writing poetry, do not imagine that feeling does everything. It is true that if you want the reader to feel an emotion, you yourself must have felt that emotion. “If you want me to weep, you must first weep yourself.” But art is not perception, but form and appearance (and this is again the quarrel of the supporters of the old style against the supporters of the romantic style). In order to create artistic form, study the works of the Greeks day and night. As much as you write, erase; strike out every “purple patch” (showy). Submit your work to able critics and beware of your friends. If it passes these tests, set it aside for eight years. If at that time you do not see the benefit of oblivion, publish it, but remember that it will never be remembered except with the passage of time: speech passes, writing remains. If you write plays, let the action of the play itself, not your words, narrate the story and portray the characters. Do not show shocking scenes. Follow the three unities of action, time, and place: let the story be one and take place in a short time in one place. Study life and philosophy, for without observation and understanding, even a perfect style is something hollow. Take heart and learn.
Horace himself had followed all these principles except one—he had not learned to weep. Because his emotions were too thin or had become dry and silent, he rarely rose to the height of art, which gives form to sincere sympathy or to “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” He was too clever. “To be astonished at nothing” was not good advice; for the poet everything must be a miracle, even when it appears to him every day like the rising of the sun or a tree. Horace observed life, but he did not immerse himself in it as he should have. He read philosophy, but he clung so insistently to the idea of “immutability” that only his odes rise above the “golden mean.” Like the Stoics he respected chastity, and like the Epicureans he respected pleasure. He asks: “Who then is free?” and like Zeno answers: “The wise man; he who is master of himself; he who fears neither death, nor poverty, nor chains and fetters; he who rebukes his own desires, reproaches ambition, and is complete in himself.” In one of his noblest poems he has expressed a Stoic thought:
If a man is upright and steadfast, if the world falls on his head, you will find him fearless in that ruin.
But, with all that, with an amusing honesty he calls himself “a pig from Epicurus’ sty.” Like Epicurus he valued friendship more than love; like Virgil he praised Augustus’ reforms; and he remained single. He made his greatest effort to preach religion, but he himself was irreligious. He saw that death is the end of everything.
The last days of his life were hidden in his thoughts. He suffered as much as he should—stomach pain, joint pain, and many other pains. To mourning he said: “The years, as they pass, rob us of our joys one by one.” And to another friend he said: “Alas, Postumus, the fleeing years hasten past us, and neither piety nor wrinkles or unyielding death can keep them away.” He remembered how in his first satire he had wished that when his time came, “like a guest who has eaten to his throat, I may leave life with satisfaction.” Now he said to himself: “You have played, eaten, and drunk enough; now it is time to go.” Fifteen years had passed since he had said to Maecenas: “O merchant, I shall not outlive you long.” Maecenas died in 8 BC, and a few months later Horace followed him. He left his property to the emperor and was buried beside Maecenas’ tomb.
Livy
The prose of the Augustan age achieved no triumph equal to the triumph of its poetry. Since the making of laws and the taking of decisions, if not in appearance then in reality, had passed from the Senate and assemblies to the emperor’s private meetings, the art of oratory retreated. Scholarship continued its quiet course, for through its imaginary interests it was sheltered from the storms of the time. Only in the writing of history did that age produce a masterpiece in prose.
Titus Livius, who was born in 59 BC in Patavium (Padua), came to the capital, devoted himself to grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, and spent forty years of his life (23 BC – 17 AD) writing the history of Rome. This is all the information we have about him. “The historian of Rome has no history.” He too, like Virgil, came from the region of the Po, had preserved the old virtues of simplicity and piety, and—perhaps because of the charm of distance—had developed a profound respect for the eternal city. His work was planned and completed on a grand scale, and of his 142 “books” only thirty-five have reached us; and since these thirty-five books fill six volumes, we can grasp the greatness of the whole. Apparently it was published part by part, each part having a separate title, and the whole under one general title: From the Founding of the City. Since its religious, moral, and patriotic tone fully accorded with the emperor’s policy, Augustus was able to overlook its republican sentiments and republican heroes. He became friends with Livy and encouraged him as the prose Virgil, for Livy in his history began where Virgil had left off. Livy, in the middle of his long historical course from 753 to 9 BC, wanted to end his work at that point because he had actually reached immortal fame, but he says he continued his work because when he stopped writing he lost his peace.
Roman historians regarded history as a child of two parents: rhetoric on one side and philosophy on the other. If we accept their words, their purpose in writing history was to adorn moral concepts with eloquent prose; they decorated the moral result with story. Livy had been trained for oratory. When he found oratory censored and dangerous, he turned, as Quintilian says, “to history so that he could still be an orator.” He began his work with a strongly worded preface in which he severely criticized the wickedness, immorality, luxury, and womanizing of the age. He says he immersed himself in the past in order to forget the corruption of his own time, “when we can neither bear our diseases nor their remedies.” He wanted, through history, to determine the virtues and moral qualities that had made Rome great, and these were the unity and sanctity of family life, the reverent affection of children for their parents, the sacred relationship of the people with the gods at every step they took, the guarantee of a solemn oath, the struggle against the self in the Stoic manner, and dignity. He wanted to make that pious Rome so noble that the conquest of the Mediterranean world by it would be seen as morally necessary, and the order and law it brought would be a divine kingdom that overshadowed the chaos of the East and the barbarism of the West. Polybius had attributed Rome’s victory to its form of government; Livy wanted to present it as the guarantee of Rome’s moral character.
The major defects of his work stem from this moral intention. There are many signs in his work that show he was personally a rationalist. But the respect he had for religion was so great that he almost accepts every superstition and fills the pages of his book with omens, auguries, and prodigies, to the point that we see that in Livy’s history too, as in Virgil’s work, events are really carried out by the gods. He expresses doubt about the myths of ancient Rome and mentions with a sneer the myths that are less credible; but as he continues writing he no longer distinguishes myth from history, follows his predecessors in historiography with little discrimination, and accepts without change the heroic laudatory stories that earlier historians had invented to glorify their own ancestry. He rarely consults original sources or surviving works, and does not take the trouble to examine the scene of events. Sometimes several pages of his book are a paraphrase of Polybius. He adopts the old, outdated method of annalistic writing and narrates events as if only the consuls were the agents; as a result, apart from the moral framework of the words, there is no tracing of causes in Livy’s work, but only a sequence of brilliant events. No distinction is made between the fathers of the early Republic and the aristocracy of his own time, or between the turbulent plebeians who created democratic government in Rome and the money-loving crowd that destroyed that government. His mental records always favor the nobility.
That patriotic pride that makes all Roman actions seem right in Livy’s eyes is the secret of his own greatness. It was this pride that kept him happy throughout that long toil. Few writers have executed so vast a plan so faithfully to the original. It is this same pride that conveyed to his contemporary readers and to us a sense of the grandeur and destiny of Rome. This awareness of worldwide interests helped the substance and force of Livy’s style, the power of his character descriptions, the brilliance and strength of his narratives, and the majestic flow of his prose. Those fictitious speeches, which are abundant in his history, are a masterpiece of oratory and later became models in schools. The charm of literature has permeated the book: Livy never shouts; he never severely condemns anyone, and his tenderness is wider than his scholarship and deeper than his thought. When he comes to narrate the events of the time of Hannibal’s invasion, this tenderness leaves him in a forgivable way; but he has compensated for this defect with a charm and brilliance of expression that reaches its peak in the description of the second Punic War.
His readers did not care about his inaccuracies and prejudices, they loved his style and story, and they prided themselves on seeing the living picture he had drawn of their past. The book From the Founding of the City was regarded as a prose epic and one of the noblest works of the age and a characteristic of the Augustan period. From that time onward it was Livy’s book that for eighteen centuries shaped people’s ideas about the history and moral character of Rome. Even readers from conquered lands were impressed by this massive history of unprecedented victories and gigantic deeds. Pliny the Elder tells the story of a Spaniard who was so impressed by Livy’s work that he traveled from Gades to Rome just to see him. As soon as he reached his goal and praised the idol, he ignored the other sights and returned contentedly to his homeland on the shores of the Atlantic.
The Rebellion of Love in Poetry
During this time poetry continued to advance, but not entirely according to Augustus’ wishes. Only great artists like Virgil or Horace can create pleasing order according to the specifications of government. Men greater than they refuse such a task, and men who do not reach their level are unable to perform it. Of the three main sources of poetry—religion, nature, and love—two sources had come under the control of the state; the third, even in Horace’s odes, had refused to submit to the law. At this time poetry escaped in a gentle way in the works of Tibullus and Propertius and with great force in the works of Ovid from the control of propaganda administration, and raised the banner of rebellion that with increasing mastery reached a sorrowful end.
Albius Tibullus (54–19 BC), like Virgil, lost his ancestral lands when the civil wars reached the village of Pedum—near Tibur—where he was born. Messalla saved him from poverty and took him with his retinue to the East, but Tibullus fell ill on the way and returned to Rome. He was glad to be free from the burden of war and politics. Now he could devote himself to love free of a specific gender and to writing elegies in the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks. He addressed entreaties and supplications to Delia (who is not known except in this way and perhaps is a name for many women) that he might sit “like a doorkeeper beside your closed door,” and reminded her—as many other maidens have been reminded—that youth comes only once and flees quickly. He was not troubled that Delia had a husband; he put the husband to sleep with undiluted wine—but when Delia’s new lover used the same trick on him, smoke rose from his head. These old matters could not arouse Augustus. What really put Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid out of favor with a government that found it difficult to recruit soldiers for the army was the anti-military and seductive aspect of this unrestrained group in love. Tibullus laughs at warriors who are paid to die while they could seduce women. He mourns for the age of Saturn, which in his opinion had no army, no hatred, and no war. … In the time when man drank from a wooden cup, there was no war. … Give me only love and let others go to war. … The hero is he who, when his children have become fathers, old age embraces him in his humble cottage. He himself follows the sheep, and his son follows the lambs, and at that time his loving wife warms water for his weary limbs. So let me live until my hair turns white, so that, like old men, I may tell the story of past times.
Sextus Propertius (49–15 BC) sang less simply and tenderly than Tibullus and used more ornament, but he sang of debauchery and vice mixed with ease and tranquillity to the same degree. Propertius was born in Umbria, was raised in Rome, and began writing poetry very early; although no one except a few readers could understand his meaning from the well of his pedantry, Maecenas still brought him into his circle on the Esquiline hill. Propertius, with pride and pleasure, has described the dinners he ate on the Esquiline, by the Tiber, and the Lesbian wine he drank from cups carved by artists, “as if sitting on a throne among merry women,” and watching the ships passing under their feet on the river. Propertius, intending to please his patron and his emperor, occasionally tuned the lyre of poetry to the praise of war, but for his mistress Cynthia he sang a different song: “Why should I raise sons for victory over the Parthians? No child of ours will be a soldier.” He assured his mistress that all the military glories of the world could not equal spending one night with Cynthia.
Among all these light-hearted and frivolous Epicureans who spent their lives ascending and descending from women’s navels, Publius Ovidius Naso was the cheerful model and leader of the poets. The city of Sulmo saw his birth in 43 BC in a pleasant valley in the Apennines, one hundred and forty kilometers east of Rome. In those last years of his life spent in painful exile, how beautiful the vineyards, olive groves, grain fields, and streams of Sulmo must have seemed to him! His wealthy father, who came from a middle-class family, sent him to Rome to study law and was startled to hear that his son wanted to be a poet. He told the frightening fate of Homer, who according to reliable reports had died in poverty and blindness, to frighten his son. Ovid, thus warned, arranged to reach the position of judge in the police courts. Then, despite his father, he refused to stand as a candidate for the quaestorship (which led to the Senate) and devoted himself to cultivating literature and love. He excused himself by saying he could not help being a poet. “I was among the stammerers and poems came.”
Ovid traveled at leisure to Athens, the Near East, and Sicily, and upon his return joined the most frivolous circles of the capital. Since he had charm, wit, education, and money, he could open all doors to himself. He married twice in early youth, and both times his wives divorced him; then for a time he indulged in public pleasure houses. He said: “Let the past please others; I congratulate myself that I was born in this age whose moral principles so closely resemble my own.” He laughed at the Aeneid and drew from it only the conclusion that since the son of Venus founded Rome, even if out of piety, that city must become the city of love. He gave his heart to a courtesan who, because she was nameless or had many counterparts, Ovid hid her under the name Corinna. His witty poems about Corinna found no difficulty in finding a publisher. These poems, under the title Amores, were soon (14 BC) on the lips and lyres of the young men of Rome. “From all sides people want to know who this Corinna is whom I describe.” With the publication of the second collection of Amores, which began with a mixed and ambiguous preface, he confused them:
What arouses my desire is not a fixed beauty; there are hundreds of reasons that always keep me in love. If a beautiful girl has modest, downcast eyes, I am on fire, and it is her very chastity that is my snare. If a maiden is sharp-tongued, I am excited, because she is not a simple country girl and gives me hope of enjoying her soft arms on the bed; if she has a sour appearance and presents herself as a cold lady, I judge that she will yield, but she is too self-satisfied. If she is a book reader, she captivates me with her rare erudition. … One walks softly and I fall in love with her step; another is hard-hearted but softens with the touch of love. Since this one has a sweet voice … I want to steal kisses while she reads; this one runs her nimble fingers over the complaining strings—who would not fall in love with such artistic hands? Another woman captivates my heart with her movement, with the rhythmic swaying of her arms and the bending of her soft side, and with precise art—provided I do not mention myself, who for any reason catches fire. Put Hippolytus in my place, he forgets his name. … Tall and short run after the desire of my heart, but both have done my work. … My love is a volunteer for the favors of all of them.
Ovid excuses himself for not having written a poem in praise of war. He says Cupid came and stole one foot of his verse and made his foot defective. He wrote a play called Medea that has been lost and was well received in its time, but above all he wanted to be known as “the idle shadow of Venus” and was content to be called “the famous reader of his own worthless works.” In Ovid’s works we find something that is the forerunner of the troubadours or wandering singers of the Middle Ages and, like their works, is addressed to married women and has made the conduct of love affairs the main business of life. Ovid teaches Corinna how, when she is lying on her husband’s bed, to communicate with him, Ovid, by signs and gestures. He assures Corinna of his eternal fidelity and that he commits adultery only with her: “I am not a lover of fickle profession; I am not one of those who love a hundred women at the same time.” Finally he takes his pleasure from her and raises a cry of joy and triumph. He encourages her for having kept him waiting so long and advises her to keep him waiting again from time to time so that he may always love her. He quarrels with her, beats her, repents, falls into lamentation, and loves her more madly than before. Like Romeo he begs the dawn to delay a moment and wishes that a favorable wind would break the axle of the chariot of dawn. Corinna deceives him in turn and Ovid becomes angry that he sees Corinna does not consider his poems, which he composed in honor of Corinna, sufficient for her favors. Corinna kisses him enough to forgive him. But Ovid cannot forgive Corinna’s new trick in love, because surely another master has taught her this trick. A few pages later, “at the same time he is in love with two maidens. Each is beautiful, each is tasteful in dress and skill.” He fears that performing two duties at the same time will exhaust him, but he is glad to die in the battlefield of love.
These poems were accepted by Roman society with patience four years after the approval of the Julian reform laws. The great senatorial families such as the Fabii, Corvini, and Pomponii still received Ovid in their homes. The poet, who was wallowing in success, circulated a little book teaching the deception of women under the name The Art of Love (2 BC). In it he says: “Venus has appointed me as the teacher of tender love.” Innocently he informs the readers that his theories should only be applied to courtesans and slave girls, but the images he has drawn of whispered secrets, hidden promises, love letters, gibes and taunts, deceived husbands, and clever servants bring to mind the middle and upper classes of Rome. Fearing that his lessons might be too effective, he composed another treatise called The Remedy of Love: “The best remedies are hard work, then hunting, third absence. Also, going to her unexpectedly in the morning before the lady has finished her toilet is useful.” Finally, to maintain balance on both sides, he wrote a poem called The Cosmetics of Women whose material he had stolen from Greek authors. These little volumes sold so well that Ovid reached the height of notoriety. “As long as I am famous throughout the world, what does it matter if one or two lawyers speak ill of me behind my back.” He did not know that one of these lawyers was Augustus himself, he did not know that the emperor hated his poems as an insult to the Julian laws; when scandal and disgrace arise, the emperor will not spare the unsuspecting poet.
Around the year 3 AD Ovid married for the third time. His new wife came from one of the most distinguished families of Rome. The poet, who was now forty-six years old, settled into a calm family life and apparently lived faithfully and mutually with his wife Fabia. What the law could not bring upon him, length of life brought; it cooled his fire and honored his poems. In the book Heroines he again retold the love stories of famous women—Penelope, Phaedra, Dido, Ariadne, Sappho, Helen, and Hero; and perhaps he retold those stories with excessive detail, for even the repetition of love causes annoyance. Nevertheless, the sentence in which Phaedra expresses Ovid’s philosophy is dazzling: “Jupiter has decreed that virtue is what gives us pleasure.” Around the year 7 AD the poet published his greatest work, the Metamorphoses. In these fifteen “books,” in delightful hexameter, he retold the famous transformations of inanimate objects, animals, humans, and gods. Since in Greek and Roman legends almost everything changed form, the plan of the work gave Ovid the opportunity to bring the entire world of ancient myths into verse form from the beginning of the creation of the world to the deification of Caesar. These are the same old stories that one generation before us found tedious to read in every university (Europe and America) and whose memory has not yet been erased by the revolution of our time: the chariot of Phaethon, Pyramus and Thisbe, Perseus and Andromeda, the rape of Proserpina, Arethusa, Medea, Daedalus and Icarus, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Atalanta, Venus and Adonis, and many other names and stories. These books were a treasure from which tens of thousands of poems, pictures, and statues took their subjects. If anyone still has to read the ancient myths, there is no easier way than reading this panorama of humans and gods—these are stories told with a nature mixed with doubt and a loving inclination and woven with such patient art that no prose writer could ever have accomplished it. It is no wonder if, at the end of this book, the poet, confident in his work, declared his immortality and eternity: “I shall live in all generations.”
He had not yet finished writing these words when news came that Augustus had exiled him to the small, cold, and savage town of Tomi (which is still called Constanta and has no charm), on the shores of the Black Sea. This was a blow for which the poet, who had now reached the age of fifty-one, was in no way prepared. In the last part of the Metamorphoses he had made an eloquent eulogy of the emperor, for he had just realized that the source of the peace, security, and luxury from which the poet’s generation benefited was the statesmanship of Augustus. Under the title Fasti he had brought to half completion a relatively chaste poem in honor of the religious festivals of the Roman year. In this poem Ovid tried to make an epic of the calendar, for he applied the same ease of expression, charm of words and phrases, and even speed and playful narration that he had used for Greek myths and Roman love to the stories related to the old Roman rites and the glorification of its temples and gods. He hoped to present that work as a contribution to the restoration of religion, as an apology for the faith he had once insulted, and to dedicate it to Augustus.
The emperor gave no reason for his order, and even today no one can confidently investigate its causes. Besides, at the same time that he exiled his granddaughter Julia, he ordered Ovid’s works to be removed from the public libraries—perhaps this itself was a hint at the main cause of the exile. The poet apparently had a share in Julia’s misconduct—whether as witness or accomplice, or as the main agent. Ovid himself declared that he was punished for “a mistake” and his poems, and implicitly conveyed that without his personal consent he had witnessed some indecent scenes. He was given a few months at the end (8 AD) to put his affairs in order. The emperor’s order meant exile to a specific place and, compared to the general sense of exile, was milder in that he could keep his property, and harsher in that he was required to live in only one city. He burned the copies of the Metamorphoses he had, but some of his previous readers had copied them and kept them. Most of his friends abandoned him. A few brave souls risked the thunderbolt of the emperor and stayed with Ovid until the time of his departure; and his wife, who was ordered to remain in Rome, supported him with kindness and sincerity. When the entertainer of Rome’s pleasures left Ostia and left behind everything he loved, Rome paid little attention to this matter. Almost throughout the days of that journey the sea was rough, and the poet once thought the waves would engulf the ship. As soon as his eyes fell on the town of Tomi, he regretted that he had survived, and surrendered himself to grief.
While he was on the journey he began the poems we know as the Tristia. When he reached Tomi he continued composing them and sent whatever he wrote to his wife, daughter, stepdaughter, and friends. It is probable that the sensitive Roman poet exaggerated in expressing the horror of his new residence: a rock bare of trees on which nothing grows, and yet because of the mist of the Black Sea the face of the sun is not seen; a cold so biting that in some years the snow of winter remains until the end of summer; the Black Sea is sadly frozen throughout the winter and hard, and the Danube is so frozen that it prevents the invasion of foreign barbarians upon the mixed race living in the city, half of whom were knife-wielding Getae and half Greek half-breeds. As soon as the poet remembered the sky of Rome and the fields of Sulmo, his heart broke and his poetry, which was still beautiful in form and words, mixed with such deep emotion that it had never before reached that level.
The Tristia and the poetic letters he sent to his friends—from Pontus or the Black Sea—contain almost all the qualities of his greater works. They are all written in easy language that has made reading Ovid pleasant even in schools. They have scenes that come alive before the reader’s eyes with insight and imagination, people described with psychological points that have come to life, sentences that are heavy with the weight of experience and thought, and a uniform charm of expression and special sweetness of language. These qualities were with him throughout his exile and were accompanied by a seriousness and grace whose absence in his previous poems makes them unworthy of such a man. He never allowed pride or arrogance. Just as he had once destroyed the charm of his poems with superficial lust, now he filled his poems with tears and entreaties to the emperor.
He envied that these poems could go to Rome, but he himself could not. “Go, my book, and greet from me the places I love and the dear soil of my native land.” Perhaps a strong friend will place you in the emperor’s hands repentant. In every letter he still hopes for pardon or begs to be sent to a milder place. Every day he remembers Fabia and every night he utters her name. He wishes to kiss her graying hair before death. But no news of pardon came. After nine years of exile the broken sixty-year-old old man welcomed death. His bones were taken to Italy according to his request and buried near the capital.
He had predicted that his name would be immortal and time fulfilled this prediction. His influence in the Middle Ages rivaled that of Virgil. His Metamorphoses and Heroines became rich sources of heroic and love stories of that era. Boccaccio and Tasso, Chaucer and Spenser borrowed from him without scruple; and the painters of the Renaissance had in his sensual poems a stolen treasure of various subjects. Ovid was the great writer of heroic and love works of antiquity.
With Ovid’s death one of the great periods of literary flowering in history came to an end. The Augustan age, like the age of Pericles in Greece or Elizabeth in England, was not a supreme literary age; even at its peak there is an ornate artificiality in its prose and a formal perfection in its poetry that comes less from the heart than to touch the heart. In this age there is no news of Aeschylus or Euripides or Socrates or even Lucretius or Cicero. The emperor’s patronage both inspired and strengthened literature in Rome and also suffocated and restricted it. An aristocratic age—like the Augustan age in Rome, or the age of Louis XIV in France, or the eighteenth century in England—elevates moderation and good taste and creates in literature a tendency toward the classical style in which logic and form dominate feeling and the reality of life. Such literature has a more perfect appearance and less force than the literature born of thoughts or the literature of periods that are very creative, and is more mature and less influential than that. But, within the limits of classical works, this age is worthy of the epithet given to it: the Golden Age. Never before had judicious criticism appeared in an art so perfect; even the mad debauchery of Ovid was cast in the cold classical mold. The Latin language as a means of poetic expression reached its peak in Ovid, Virgil, and Horace. After that, that language never again became so rich and melodious, so delicate and precise, and so flexible and harmonious.
Written & researched by Dr. Shahin Siami