The Juvenile Works of Ovid and the Spondaic Period of His Metrical Art (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Juvenile Works of Ovid and the Spondaic Period of His Metrical ArtHe was one of the most precocious of Roman poets, and like Cowley or like Pope he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.2 According to his own account, when he first re. Cited his juvenile poems to a public audience, his beard had been shaved only once or twice. 3 This plain statement is usually misinterpreted, but clearly the natural meaning is that when he first entered the circle of his patron, Messalla, he was only fifteen or sixteen years of age.4 Beginning to write at so early a period, when the simpler and more natural school of Catullus, Gallus, and Propertius was still in the ascendant, Ovid passed through a long period of apprentice ship and, after much wavering and much experimentation, eventually abandoned the more natural manner with which he had begun, and went over wholly to the more artistic and more epigrammatic style of Tibullus, which he found better suited to his own rhetorical training and to which he finally gave an undisputed supremacy in the domain of Roman elegy. It is true that a different opinion is usually held today, and it is everywhere assumed that he'devoted himself from the first to the imitation of Tibullus and possessed from the beginning the remarkable facility and skill which make him easily the first of Roman metrical artists. This View seems to me wholly erroneous, and I shall begin in the present study to trace the various stages by which Ovid, the historical person, the friend of Messalla, the disciple first of Catullus and later of Tibullus, reached the acme of artistic perfection.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.