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UNCERTAINTIES
written, not at all what many people would have been expecting after reading
the proem to the third book of the Georgics; and in spite of Propertius' famous
eulogy (2.34.65—6) its success can at the time have seemed by no means secure
to the poet. 1 Horace's literary epistles afford vivid, if not always unambiguous, 2
insights into the literary dissensions of the age. Even Ovid, whose earliest
poetry (he tells us) took the town by storm, had encountered critical hostility
(Rem. Am. 387—98) some years before incurring the much more damaging
displeasure of the Princeps.
In these respects, then, the Augustan Age did not differ materially from the
ages that preceded and followed it. It is in the domain of technique that it may
lay claim to a unique status. In the period of almost exactly two centuries which
separates the literary ddbut of Virgil from that of Livius Andronicus the Latin
language and its native modes of expression had been, by fits and starts as
genius came on to the scene, and not widiout friction, 3 assimilating itself to
the metres and forms of Greece. In the work of Virgil and Horace it seems that
the process of assimilation has achieved a happy equilibrium: the most characteristic
monuments of Augustan poetry display a formally and aesdietically
satisfying fusion of new and old, native and alien elements. For the first time
since the classical age of Greece the competing claims of technique Cars') and
inspiration (ingeniurri) were again harmonized. The balance which Callimachus
(Ov. Am. 1.15.14) and Ennius (Ov. Trist. 2.424) had missed, Ovid — and by
implication those contemporary writers approved by educated taste — had
triumphantly compassed.
As in human affairs in general, so in art, equilibrium is a transitory diing. In
the longer perspectives of later literary history Ovid himself, like his contemporary
Livy, is a transitional figure, documenting — to use a familiar though
fundamentally misleading stereotype — the waning of the 'Golden' and the
waxing of the 'Silver' Ages of Latin letters. In Ovid's verse we find consummated
the technical legacy of the Augustans to their successors: a common
idiom, a poetical koine, with affinities to current prose, in which anything could
be expressed with ease and elegance by anybody with an ear and the necessary
training. Respect for the generic boundary-lines and restraint in the exploitation
of the abundant technical resources, subordination of means to ends, selfcontrol
: the area in which technique shades into taste, and taste into morals —
that was a bequest with less appeal to poets eager to astonish and surprise.
Already in the Controversiae and Suasoriae of the Elder Seneca, whose memories
went back to the age of Cicero (Contr. 1 praef. n), the incipient domination
of the rhetoric which in the view of Wilamowitz was principally to blame for
1 Cf. Kidd (1977), on Hor. Odes 1.3 as referring to the boldness of Virgil's attempt.
2 See, for instance, the interpretations of Epist. 1.19 by Fraenkel (1957) 339—5° and G. W.
Williams (1968) 25-8.
3 Cf. on Lucilius above, pp. 167, 169—71.
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