those in power that in 18 B.C. it succeeded in passing some great social laws on luxury, on matrimony, on dress.  With these laws, Rome proposed to remake, by terrible measures, the old, prolific, austere nobility of the aristocratic era.  The lex de maritandis ordinibus aimed with a thousand vexatious restrictions to constrain the nobility to marry and have children; the lex sumptuaria studied to restrain extravagance; the lex de adulteriis proclaimed martial law in the family, menacing an unfaithful wife and her accomplice with exile for life and the confiscation of half their substance; legislation of the harshest, this, which should scourge Rome to blood, to keep her from falling anew into the inveterate vices from which the civil wars were born.

The impression of the civil wars could not last forever.  In fact, in the decade that followed the promulgation of the social laws, the puritan fervour, which had up to that time heated all Italy, began to cool.  Wealth increased; the confidence that order and peace were actually re-established, spread everywhere; the generation that had seen the civil wars, disappeared; peace and growing prosperity stirred in the next generation a desire for freedom and pleasure that would not endure the narrow traditionalism and the puritanism of the preceding generation; consequently also the laws of 18 B.C. became intolerable.

To understand this change in public spirit which had such serious consequences, there is no better way than by studying the most celebrated writer of this new generation, Ovid, who represents it most admirably both in life and works.  Ovid was born at Sulmona in 43 B.C.  He was about the same age as Tiberius,—­of a knight’s family—­that is, of the wealthy middle class.  He was destined by his father to the study of oratory and jurisprudence, evidently to make a political man of him, a senator, a future consul or proconsul, and to contribute to the great national restoration that his generation proposed to itself and of which Augustus was architect, preparing a new family for the political aristocracy that was governing the Empire.  Ovid’s father had all the requirements demanded by law and custom:  a considerable fortune, the half-nobility of the equestrian order, an intelligent son, the means to give him the necessary culture—­a favourable combination of circumstances which was wholly undone by a bit of unforeseen contrariety, the son’s invincible inclination for what his father called, with little respect, a “useless study,” literature.  The young man had indifferently studied oratory and law, gone to Rome, married, made friendships in the high society of the capital, been elected to the offices preceding the quaestorship; but when the time arrived for presenting himself as candidate for the quaestorship itself—­that is, the time for beginning the true curriculum of the magistracies, he had declared that he would rather be a great poet than a consul, and there was no persuading him farther on the long road opened to political ambitions.