Sextus Propertius (circ. B.C. 45-circ. B.C. 15) was another of the Mæcenas circle of poets who did something to glorify Augustus. He is not (but that is a personal opinion) on anything like the same level as either Vergil or Horace as an artist. He is said to have died young, perhaps at thirty years of age, and there is no evidence of personal intimacy with Augustus, but there is some indication of his having been on bad terms with Horace. His elegies also are nearly all poems of passion. Politics and emperors are mere episodes, and were introduced in deference to Mæcenas. Still many points in the career of Augustus are referred to in the same spirit as that of Horace. The siege of Perusia—described in tones of horror, which would scarcely have been acceptable—precedes his conversion (1, 21), and the failure of the marriage law of B.C. 27 is only referred to with relief (2, 7, 1). In more complimentary terms he speaks of the victory of Actium (3, 7, 44), and of the downfall of Antony and Cleopatra (4, 8, 56; 4, 10, 32, sqq.; 4, 7, 56); and the end of the civil wars is attributed to Augustus (illa qua vicit condidit arma manu, 3, 8, 41). Then came the intended invasion of Britain (3, 23, 5); the Arabian expedition and the Indian envoys (3, 1, 15; 4, 3 1); the opening and description of the Palatine Library—the best extant (3, 29); the raids of the Sugambri and their suppression (5, 6, 77); while he has the Parthians frequently on his lips, though rather as predicting what is to be done with them than as recording the return of the standards.[321] In the fifth book there are signs of a beginning of a Fasti like that of Ovid as a record of events in Roman history; and it is possible that this was in obedience to a wish of Augustus, who, on his death, transferred the task to Ovid. Thus his voice also was secured, in part at least, in support of the imperial régime.

Publius Ovidius Naso (B.C. 43-A.D. 18) belongs to the last part of the reign. He had only seen Vergil, and though he had heard Horace recite, he does not profess to have known him. He was quite young when Augustus was winning his position and reforming the constitution, and there are no signs of his coming forward as a court poet till Mæcenas and his circle had disappeared, and if he had attracted the attention of Augustus at all, it was probably not altogether in a favourable manner. His earliest poems—the Amores and Heroidum Epistulæ—do not touch on public affairs; they are poems of passion—the former personal, the latter dramatic. In the Ars Amatoria (about B.C. 2-A.D. 2) for the first time we detect the court poet from a complimentary allusion to the approaching mission of Gaius Cæsar to Syria and Armenia, with his title of princeps iuventutis and that of Augustus as pater patriæ, as also to the naumachia or representation of the battle of Salamis given by Augustus in the flooded nemus Cæsarum in B.C. 2 (A. A., 1, 171-2). The Metamorphoses had been composed before his exile in A.D. 9, but after the death of Augustus he apparently introduced the Epilogue (xv. 745 sq.) containing an eulogy on Tiberius, and on the now finished career of Augustus. It is the Fasti—the Calendar of events in Roman history—that probably was undertaken in obedience to a wish of the Emperor, and in which accordingly we find points in his career touched upon. It was dedicated to Germanicus, and contains an allusion to his own exile, and was therefore, partly at least, composed between B.C. 2 and A.D. 10. His allusions to Augustus are not those of an intimate acquaintance, but of an admiring subject—real or feigned. He mentions the battle of Mutina (iv. 627); the bestowal of the title Augustus (i. 589); the recovery of the standards from the Parthians as a triumph of the Emperor (vi. 467). He alludes to Augustus becoming Pontifex Maximus (iii. 415); to the laurels on his palace front (iv. 957); to the demolition of the house of Vedius Pollio as connected with the reforms and the laws of B.C. 18 (vi. 637); to the division of the city into vici, and the worship of the Lares Augusti (v. 145); to the Forum Augusti and the temple of Mars dedicated in B.C. 2. (v. 551, sqq.). Ovid afterwards protested that his books had been read with pleasure by Augustus, and assumed to have some knowledge of the private chambers of the palace (Trist., 1, 5, 2; 2, 520), but there is nothing in the allusions to matters which he knew that Augustus wished to have recorded that has the air of close or intimate relations. They are the conventional expressions of the outside, and perhaps humble, panegyrist, not those of a friend and supporter, like Horace. The abject expressions in the Tristia and the letters from Pontus need not be taken into account. They are merely bids for a recall, and they often express in the crudest form the growing fashion of worshipping the Emperor or his genius. Perhaps the most subtle of these appeals is that in which he explains why he had spent his youth in writing frivolous poetry instead of celebrating the glories of the Emperor—he was not a good enough poet, and would have dishonoured a subject above his reach (Tr., ii. 335-340). This was using a weapon forged by the Emperor himself, who had always let it be known that he disliked being the subject of inferior artists. The melancholy and feebleness of these later poems of Ovid seem to bear a sort of analogy with the cloud that descended on the later years of Augustus. Vergil and Horace have the freshness of the morning or the vigour of noon, Ovid the gathering sadness of the evening.