Propertius and Tibullus occurred before Ovid published his first volume;
and Horace, the last survivor of the older Augustans, had died some years
before that volume was followed by any important work. The period of
Ovid's greatest fertility was the decade immediately following the
opening of the Christian era; he outlived Augustus by three years, and so
laps over into the sombre period of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which
culminated in the reign of Nero.

As the eldest surviving son of an opulent equestrian family of Upper
Italy, Ovid was trained for the usual career of civil and judicial
office. He studied for the bar at Rome, and, though he never worked hard
at law, filled several judicial offices of importance. But his interest
was almost wholly in the rhetorical side of his profession; he "hated
argument;" and from the rhetoric of the schools to the highly rhetorical
poetry which was coming into fashion there was no violent transition. An
easy fortune, a brilliant wit, an inexhaustible memory, and an unfailing
social tact, soon made him a prominent figure in society; and his genuine
love of literature and admiration for genius--unmingled in his case with
the slightest trace of literary jealousy or self-consciousness--made him
the friend of the whole contemporary world of letters. He did not begin
to publish poetry very early; not because he had any delicacy about doing
so, nor because his genius took long to ripen, but from the good-humoured
laziness which never allowed him to take his own poetry too seriously.
When he was about thirty he published, to be in the fashion, a volume of
amatory elegiacs, which was afterwards re-edited and enlarged into the
existing three books of _Amores_. Probably about the same time he
formally graduated in serious poetry with his tragedy of _Medea_. For ten
or twelve years afterwards he continued to throw off elegiac poems, some
light, others serious, but all alike in their easy polish, and written
from the very first with complete and effortless mastery of the metre. To