Ovid (43 BCE - 17 CE) was a Roman poet of the Augustan age, best known for the Metamorphoses, his love elegies, and the Ars Amatoria. His fluent, witty hexameters and elegiacs made him one of the most widely read poets of antiquity. [1] In 8 CE he was banished by the emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he continued to write and where he died. [2]
Early life
Publius Ovidius Naso was born on 20 March 43 BCE at Sulmo, in the Abruzzi region east of Rome, into a well-off equestrian family. He was sent to Rome and then to Athens to be trained in rhetoric, the standard preparation for a public career in law and administration. [1]
Ovid held minor judicial posts but abandoned official life for poetry, a decision his father is said to have opposed. He moved in the literary circles of Augustan Rome and was acquainted with the poets Propertius and Horace. [2]
Poetry
His earliest published work, the Amores, is a collection of love elegies addressed to a woman called Corinna. It was followed by the Heroides, verse letters imagined as written by heroines of myth to the men who had abandoned them, a form that gave the mythological tradition an unfamiliar interior voice. [1]
The Ars Amatoria, a mock-didactic poem instructing readers in the pursuit and management of love affairs, and its companion Remedia Amoris established his reputation for sophistication and irreverence. The tone of these works sat awkwardly with the moral legislation promoted by Augustus. [3]
Ovid's largest achievement is the Metamorphoses, a poem in fifteen books of hexameter verse that links some two hundred and fifty myths through the common theme of transformation, running from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. He was also at work on the Fasti, a poetic calendar of the Roman religious year, when his exile interrupted it. [1]
Exile
In 8 CE Augustus relegated Ovid to Tomis, a remote frontier town on the western shore of the Black Sea in what is now Romania. Ovid described the cause as carmen et error, a poem and a mistake; the poem is generally taken to be the Ars Amatoria, while the nature of the error remains unknown. [2]
From exile he wrote the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, collections of elegiac poems lamenting his isolation and appealing, without success, for recall. He died at Tomis, probably in 17 or 18 CE. [1]
Legacy
The Metamorphoses survived the Middle Ages as the standard handbook of classical mythology and supplied plots and images to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and countless painters and composers. [3]
Ovid's influence on the European love lyric, on narrative poetry, and on the visual arts is extensive and continuous, and modern translations and adaptations of his work have kept the poems in wide circulation. [4]
