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.
