role in the drama.  All that was clear was that some storm-wind from the fastnesses of the imperial will had swept through the gaiety of Rome and quenched, like a candle, the bright life of her favourite poet.  It was easy to say that an astonishing amount of freedom was still Ovid’s.  His books had been removed from the public libraries, but the individual’s liberty to own or read them was in no way diminished.  Nor was the publication of new work frowned upon.  In the autumn before his banishment Ovid had given out one or two preliminary copies of his Metamorphoses, and his friends now insisted that a work so full of charm, so characteristic of his best powers, so innocent of questionable material should be published, even if it had not undergone a final revision.  The author sent back from Tomi some lines of apology and explanation which he wished prefixed.  He also arranged with the Sosii for the bringing out of his work on the Roman Calendar when he should have completed it.  And he was at liberty not only to keep up whatever private correspondence he chose, but to have published a new set of elegiac poems in the form of frank letters about his present life to his wife and friends.  A third volume of these poems, which he called Tristia, had just appeared and more were likely to follow.  He had an extraordinary instinct for self-revelation.

But in spite of this freedom to raise his voice in Rome, it was obvious that all that made life dear to Ovid had been taken away.  The lover of sovereign Rome, of her streets and porticoes and theatres, her temples and forums and gardens, must live at the farthest limit of the Empire, in a little walled town from whose highest towers a constant watch was kept against the incursions of untamed barbarians.  The poet to whom war had meant the brilliance of triumphal pageants in the Sacred Way must now see the rude farmers of a Roman colony borne off as captives or sacrificing to the enemy their oxen and carts and little rustic treasures.  The man of fifty who had spent his youth in writing love poetry and who through all his life had had an eye for Venus in the temple of Mars must wear a sword and helmet, and dream at night of poisoned arrows and of fetters upon his wrists.  The son of the Italian soil, bred in warmth, his eye accustomed to flowers and brooks and fertile meadows, must shiver most of the year under bitter north winds sweeping over the fields of snow which melted under neither sun nor rain; and in spring could only watch for the breaking up of the ice in the Danube, the restoration of the gloomy plains to their crop of wormwood, and the rare arrival of some brave ship from Italy or Greece.  The acknowledged master of the Latin tongue, the courted talker in brilliant circles in Rome must learn to write and speak a barbarous jargon if he wished to have any intercourse with his neighbours.  The husband with the heart of a child, whose little caprices and moods, whose appetite and health had been the concern of tender eyes, must learn to be sick without proper food or medicine or nursing, must before his time grow old and grey and thin and weak, dragged from the covert of a woman’s love.