The ethics of diet / by Howard Williams.

  • Williams, Howard, 1837-1931.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The ethics of diet / by Howard Williams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and Seneca—the former particularly—occupy a distinguished place amongst the first preachers of that sacred truth.* Publius Ovidius Naso, the Latin versifier of the Pythagorean philosophy, was born b.c. 43. He belonged to the equestrian order, a position in the social scale which corresponds with the “ higher middle class ” of modern days. Like so many other names eminent in literature, he was in the first instance educated for the law, for which, also like many other literary celebrities, he soon showed his genius to be unfitted and uncongenial. He studied at the great University of that age—Athens—where he acquired a knowledge of the Greek language, and probably of its rich literature. The most memorable event in his life—which, in accordance with the fashion of his contemporaries of the same rank, was for the most part devoted to “ gallantry ” and the accustomed amatory licence—is his mysterious banishment from Rome to the inhospitable and savage shores of the Euxine, where he passed the last seven years of his existence, dying there in the sixtieth year of his age. The cause of his sudden exile from the Court of Augustus, where he had been in high favour, is one of those secrets of history which have exercised the ingenuity of his successive biographers. According to the terms of the imperial edict, the freedom of the poet’s Ars Amatoria was the offence. That this was a mere pretext is plain, as well from the long interval of time which had passed since the publication of the poem as from the character of the fashionable society of the capital. Ovid himself attributes his misfortune to the fact of his having become the involuntary witness of some secret of the palace, the nature of which is not divulged. His most important poems are (1) The Metamorphoses, in fifteen books, so called from its being a collection of the numerous transformations of the popular theology. It is, perhaps, the most charming of Latin poems that have come down to us. Particular passages have a special beauty. (2) The Fasti, in twelve books, of which only six are extant, is the Roman Calendar in verse. Its interest, apart from the poetic genius of the author, is great, as being the grand repertory of the Latin feasts and their popular origin, Besides these two principal poems he was the author of the famous Loves, in three books • the Letters of the Heroines, The Remedies of Love, and The Tristia, or Sad Thoughts. He also wrote a tragedy—Medea—which, unfortunately has not come down to us. All his poems are characterised by elegance and a remark- * Some traces of it may be found, c.g., in Lucretius (De Rerun Nat. II., where see his touching picture of the bereaved mother-cow, whose young is ravished from her for the horrid sacrificial altar); Virgil f/Eneis VII.), in his story of Silvia’s deer—the most touching passage in the poem; Pliny, Hist. Nat. In earlier Greek literature, Euripides seems most in sympathy with suffering—at least as regards his own species.