Martial, the epigrammatist; and other essays - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1920 Excerpt: ... THE POET OVID The forty-one years during which the destiny of the civilized world was swayed by Caesar Augustus have always been a proverb of splendor, cultivation, and brilliant achievement. An age of peace and stable government, an age of material prosperity such as the world had never seen before, it was also an age of men whose names are almost as familiar now as they were nineteen centuries ago. But among all those great Augustans who have won and deserved a permanent place in the Temple of Fame there is probably none who, whether we consider his work, his personality, or his romantic career, has as many claims upon our interest and attention as Publius Ovidius Naso. The last, the youngest and the most modern of those famous poets who saw the first edition of Vergil's Aeneid and of Horace's Odes was born on the 20th of March in the year 43 B. C. His birthplace was Sulmo, a small mountain town ninety miles due east from Rome, in the Abruzzi. It then belonged to the territory of the Paeligni. In the Social Wars of fifty years before, this hardy stock of Sabellian mountaineers had fought for their rights against the Senatorial party, but had been defeated. For that reason they were all the more disposed now to side with Octavianus in that great final struggle which, when Ovid was in the cradle, had already begun. Printed in Studies in Philology, 1918. Sulmo still survives in the modern Solmona. It is perched on an isolated plateau some 1600 feet above the level of the sea. In the background are the snow-capped peaks of the Apennines. The picturesque beauty of the place is accompanied by a cool, bracing climate, and enhanced by a number of cold and sparkling mountain streams to which the poet recurred again and again in after years with a delight in this ...