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.

With the episode of Julia and Tiberius in mind, I have stated that
Ovid's life epitomises the new generation, because it shows us
in action the first of the forces that dissolved the aristocratic
government and the nobility artificially reconstituted by Augustus
at the close of the civil wars--intellectualism. The case of Ovid
demonstrates that intellectual culture, literature, poetry, instead
of being, for the Roman aristocracy, as in older times, a simple
ornament, secondary to politics, had already a prime attraction for
the man of genius; that even among the higher classes, devoted by
tradition only to military and political life, there appeared, by the
side of the leaders in war and politics, the professional literary
man. The study of Ovid's work shows something even more noteworthy:
that, profiting by the discords in the ruling class, these literary
men feared no longer to express and to re-enforce the discontent,
the bad feeling, the aversion, that the efforts of the State to
re-establish a more vigorous social order was rousing in one part of
the public.

Ovid's first important work was the _Amores_, which was certainly out
by the year 8 B.C. although in a different form from that in which
we now have it. To understand what this book really was when it was
published, one must remember that it was written, read, and what
is more, _admired_, ten years after the promulgation of the _lex de
maritandis ordinibus_ and of the _lex de adulteriis_; it should be
read with what remains of the text of those laws in hand.

We are astonished at the book, full of excitements to frivolity, to
dissipation, to pleasure, to those very activities that appeared to
the ancients to form the most dangerous part of the "corruption."
Extravagances of a libertine poet? The single-handed revolt of a
corrupt youth, which cannot be considered a sign of the times? No. If
there had not been in the public at large, in the higher classes, in
the new generation, a general sympathy with this poetry, subversive