Augustus and Tiberius alternated with a natural history of fish--the _Halieutica_--and with abusive poems on his real or fancied enemies at Rome. While Augustus lived he did not give up hopes of a remission, or at least an alleviation, of his sentence; but the accession of Tiberius, who never forgot or forgave anything, must have extinguished them finally; and he died some three years later, still a heart-broken exile. Apart from his single tragedy, from a few didactic or mock-didactic pieces, imitated from Alexandrian originals, and from his great poem of the _Metamorphoses,_ the whole of Ovid's work was executed in the elegiac couplet. His earliest poems closely approximate in their management of this metre to the later work of Propertius. The narrower range of cadence allowed by the rule which makes every couplet regularly end in a disyllable, involves a monotony which only Ovid's immense dexterity enabled him to overcome. In the _Fasti_ this dexterity becomes almost portentous: when his genius began to fail him, the essential vice of the metre is soon evident. But the usage was stereotyped by his example; all through the Empire and through the Middle Ages, and even down to the present day, the Ovidian metre has been the single dominant type: and though no one ever managed it with such ingenuity again, he taught enough of the secret to make its use possible for almost every kind of subject. His own elegiac poetry covers an ample range. In the impassioned rhetoric of the _Heroides,_ the brilliant pictures of life and manners in the _De Arte Amatoria,_ or the sparkling narratives of the _Fasti,_ the same sure and swift touch is applied to widely diverse forms and moods. Ovid was a trained rhetorician and an accomplished man of the world before he began to write poetry; that, in spite of his worldliness and his glittering rhetoric, he has so much of feeling and charm, is the highest proof of his real greatness as a poet.