At the age of fifty he was banished from Rome, and ordered
to betake himself to Tomi, on the borders of the Black Sea. Here,
among the barbarous people and in a severe climate, the poet, who
had been accustomed to all the pleasures of a luxurious capital
and the society of his most distinguished contemporaries, spent
the last ten years of his life, worn out with grief and anxiety.
His only consolation in exile was to address his wife and absent
friends, and his letters were all poetical. Though these poems
(the "Trista" and "Letters from Pontus") have no other topic than
the poet's sorrows, his exquisite taste and fruitful invention
have redeemed them from the charge of being tedious, and they are
read with pleasure and even with sympathy.
The two great works of Ovid are his "Metamorphoses" and his
"Fasti." They are both mythological poems, and from the former we
have taken most of our stories of Grecian and Roman mythology. A
late writer thus characterizes these poems:
"The rich mythology of Greece furnished Ovid, as it may still
furnish the poet, the painter, and the sculptor, with materials
for his art. With exquisite taste, simplicity, and pathos he has
narrated the fabulous traditions of early ages, and given to them
that appearance of reality which only a master hand could impart.
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