A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – 17 or 18 AD) was a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid who wrote on many topics, including love, seduction, and mythological transformations. Traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, Ovid was generally considered a great master of the elegiac couplet. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries. Ovid was one of the greatest poets of antiquity and the author of Metamorphoses, a masterpiece on Greek and Roman myths. What Virgil was to epic poetry, Ovid was to elegiac poetry, and his love poems and instructional works have firmly established him as one of the greatest influences on Western literature. His other works include Amores (3 volumes of love poems), Heroides (fictional letters from a woman to her lovers) and Ars Amatoria (an instructional poem on the art of love). Ovid was prolific and popular in his lifetime and highly regarded by the emperor Augustus, until he was banished from Rome under mysterious circumstances in 8 A.D. Despite public and private entreaties, Augustus (and later, Tiberius) refused to forgive Ovid, who finished out his days in Tobis. Ovid was born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), which lies in a valley within the Apennines, east of Rome. He was born into an equestrian ranked family and was educated in Rome. His father wished him to study rhetoric with the ultimate goal of practicing law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid leaned toward the emotional side of rhetoric as opposed to the argumentative. After the death of his father, Ovid renounced law and began his travels. He traveled to Athens, Asia Minor and Sicily. He also held some minor public posts, but quickly gave them up to pursue his poetry. He was part of the circle centered around the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Horace and Propertius were among his friends, but his warmest feelings were expressed in his elegy for Tibullus (Amores III. 9), also a member of Messalla's circle. Virgil he only saw. He was married three times and divorced twice by the age of 30 and had one daughter, probably by his second wife. His third wife remained devoted to him, and loyal during his exile. The Amores were originally published as a five-book collection, probably some time in the 20s BC. The version which has survived, reduced to three books, includes poems written as late as 1 AD. Book 1 of this collection of love elegy contains 15 poems, which look at the different areas of love poetry. Much of the Amores is tongue-in-cheek, and while Ovid initially appears to adhere to the standard content of his elegiac predecessors — such as the exclusus amator (locked-out lover) lamenting in a paraklausithyron (in front of a locked door) - he actually portrays himself as more than capable at love, and not particularly emotionally struck by it (unlike, for example, Propertius, who in his poems portrays himself as crushed under love's foot). He writes about adultery, which had been made illegal in Augustus's marriage reforms of 18 BC. Ovid's next poem, the Ars Amatoria, or the Art of Love, was a parody of didactic poetry and was a manual on the arts of seduction and intrigue. It contains the first reference to the board game ludus duodecim scriptorum, a relative of modern backgammon. Ovid identifies this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, that was one of the causes of his banishment. By 8 AD, Ovid had completed his most famous work: Metamorphoses, an epic poem drawing on Greek mythology. The poem's subject, as the author indicates at the outset, is "forms changed into new bodies". From the emergence of the cosmos from formless mass into the organized material world to the deification of Julius Caesar many chapters later, the poem weaves tales of transformation. The stories are woven one after the other by the telling of humans transformed into new bodies — trees, rocks, animals, flowers, constellations and so forth. Many famous myths are recounted such as Apollo and Daphne, Orpheus and Eurydice and Pygmalion. It offers an explanation to many alluded myths in other works. It is also a valuable source for those attempting to piece together Roman religion, as many of the characters in the book are Olympian gods or their offspring. Starting from Heraclitus's "all things flow, nothing abides," the idea that everything always changes was an essential part of Greek thought, and a driving force in the history of the expansive Roman Empire. In the Metamorphoses men are transformed into women and vice versa; stones become people; a statue is changed into a woman; a girl becomes a laurel tree, Neptune changes into a fierce-looking ox. In the final metamorphosis the spirit of the murdered Julius Caesar is changed into a star. Augustus banished Ovid in 8 AD to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote of his crime that it was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake." He claimed that this crime was worse than murder and caused more harm than poetry. The error Ovid made is believed to have been political in nature — possibly he had knowledge of a plot against Augustus, or stumbled into some sensitive state secret. Augustus' grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, had been banished around the same time as Ovid and Julia's husband, Lucius Aenilius Paullus, was executed after a conspiracy against Augustus. Ovid may have had knowledge about this conspiracy. Because Julia the Younger and Ovid were exiled in the same year, some suspect that he was somehow involved in her alleged affair with Decimus Silanus. Still, Ovid only moved on the perimeter of Julia's circle, suggesting that reports that he seduced Julia or facilitated her affairs is likely romantic hearsay. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC were still fresh in the minds of Romans; these laws promoted monogamous, marital sexual relations in Rome to increase the population, but Ovid's works concerned adultery, which was punishable by severe penalties, including banishment. It was during this period of exile that Ovid wrote two more collections of poems, called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto , which illustrate his sadness and desolation. Being far away from Rome, Ovid had no chance to research in libraries and thus may have been forced to abandon his work Fasti (a poem on the Roman calendar, with one book dedicated to each month; however, only the first six books -- January through June -- exist. Whether the other six have been lost, or for some reason were never written, is unknown). Ovid has described in a famous poem (Tristia 1. 3) his last sad night at Rome and the hardships of his voyage to Tomis, and many of the poems of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto attest the tedious years of boredom, deprivation, and even danger (from barbarian attack) he had to endure, as well as the rigours of the climate, in that bleak land. There he died after ten years of unbroken exile. He eventually became reconciled to its inhabitants: they were kind and considerate and won his esteem. Though the city was a Greek foundation, half the population was Getic and either spoke Greek with Getic accent or used the local language. Ovid not only learned the language but wrote in it a poem (which has not survived) in honour of Augustus and Tiberius. Ovid never returned to Rome. After Tiberius's succession the visit of his nephew Germanicus, also a poet, raised new hopes, but in vain. Everything in the Metamorphoses changed, but in real life his exile was permanent. Ovid died at Tomis after nearly 10 years of banishment. He is commemorated today by a statue in the Romanian city of Tomis (modern day Constan?a) and the 1930 renaming of the nearby town of Ovidiu, alleged location of his tomb. The order in which Ovid wrote his works is difficult to establish but is roughly as follows (see under each name): Amores, of which the first edition may have appeared as early as 20 BC, the second shortly before the Ars Amatoria; Heroides, published between the first and second editions of Amores; Medicamina Faciei Femineae, written before the third book of the Ars Amatoria, i.e. perhaps before 1 BC; the first two books of the Ars Amatoria (published not before 1 BC, the third book was added later); Remedia Amoris, AD 1; Metamorphoses and Fasti contemporaneously, from AD 2 onwards; Tristia, AD 9; Ibis, c. AD 11; Epistulae ex Ponto , AD 13 (book IV probably appeared posthumously). A tragedy, Medea, was praised by Quintilian and Tacitus, but only two lines survive. The poems Halieutica, of which only a fragment survives, Nux, and Consolatio ad Liviam, all attributed to Ovid, were probably not by him. All Ovid's works are in elegiac couplets except for Metamorphoses (and Halieutica), in hexameters. Ovid was born in the year after the murder of Julius Caesar, too late to experience the horrors of civil war and so to welcome the policies of the Augustan regime. He was single-mindedly devoted to poetry, and his virtuosity, linguistic as well as metrical, was considerable. He refined even more strictly the rules of composition for the elegiac couplet. His wit and inventiveness make him the most consistently entertaining of the Roman poets, and a brilliant, sometimes over-exuberant, epigrammatist. Frivolous and irresponsible his poetry may sometimes seem, but when, as not infrequently happens, his imaginative sympathy is aroused, he can write movingly and simply, without artificiality or straining for effect. He is a gifted story-teller, skilful at focusing upon the telling scene or significant moment in a narrative, and with a sensitivity to natural beauty rare in the ancient world. As a story-teller and guide to Greek myth and Roman legend Ovid was very influential on later Roman writers and was read, quoted, and adapted during the Middle Ages. He was the favourite Latin poet of the Renaissance. Shakespeare seems to have been well acquainted with Ovid in Latin as well as in Arthur Golding's excellent English translation of the Metamorphoses. |
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