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most eminent living poet. That he was himself acutely conscious of this fact is
an essential key to the understanding of much of his later poetry. The Metamorphoses
had concluded with a group of transformations that might be seen
as the climax of all those that had preceded: the apotheoses of Julius Caesar
(accomplished) and of Augustus (awaited) and, linked with them, the last
great metamorphosis of history, begun by Caesar and to be completed by his
successor (Jupiter on earth: 15.858—60), of an age of war and confusion into
one of peace and stability (15.832-9). It was therefore supremely ironical that
Augustus should have chosen the moment when the Metamorphoses was about
to appear before the world to visit its author with disgrace and ruin. It was also
ironical that one of the reasons for his downfall was a poem, the Ars amatoria.
The other reason remains unknown; Ovid calls it an indiscretion (error). On
the evidence available it cannot be categorically said that Augustus' resentment
was unjustified; Ovid indeed, for what that is worth, acknowledges that it was
not. The form that it took, on the other hand, was severe to the point of calculated
cruelty. Ovid was exiled, or rather relegated (for he was not deprived of
citizenship or property), not to one of the usual Mediterranean islands customarily
used for this purpose, but to a place on the very edge of the civilized world,
where he was cut off from everything that for a man of his temperament made
life worth living: friends, the society of the capital, books, the Latin language
itself—and above all peace of mind. Spiritually it was a death sentence.
Ovid refused to die. More than once in the poems of exile he alludes to his
peculiar gifts, his ingenium, as the cause of his destruction; 1 but by the same
token they were his only resource in his hour of need:
indignata malis mens est succumbere seque
praestitit inuictam uiribus usa suis. . .
ergo quod uiuo durisque laboribus obsto
nee me sollicitae taedia lucis habent,
gratia, Musa, tibi: nam tu solacia praebes,
tu curae requies, tu medicina uenis,
tu dux et comes es, tu nos abducis ab Histro
in medioque mihi das Helicone locum,
tu mihi, quod rarum est, uiuo sublime dedisti
nomen, ab exequiis quod dare fama solet.
( Trist. 4.1 o. 103-4, 115 -22)
My mind disdained to sink beneath misfortune and by its own strength showed itself
unconquerable. . . And so the fact that I still live and hold out against affliction, the
fact that for all its vexations I am not yet weary of life, this, o Muse, I owe to you. It
is you who offer me consolation, you come as rest and medicine to my unhappiness; you
are my guide and companion, you carry me away from the Danube and bring me to
an honourable seat on Helicon. You have given me what is rarely given, a lofty name
while I still live, something that jame is apt to confer only after death.
1
Trist. 2.1—2, 3.3.73—7, Pont. 3.5.4.
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