Ovid - Overview of the Latin Poet Ovid

Ovid was a prolific Roman poet whose writing influenced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton. As those men knew, to understand the corpus of Greco-Roman mythology requires familiarity with Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Publius Ovidius Naso or Ovid was born in 43 B.C., in Sulmo, to an equestrian (moneyed class) family. His father took him and his older brother to Rome to study to become a public speaker and politician, but instead, Ovid put his rhetorical education to work in his poetic writing. Ovid's Metamorphoses, written in the epic meter of dactyllic hexameters, a work on the transformations of mostly humans and nymphs into animals, plants, etc., is a storehouse for Greek and Roman mythology; while the topics of his love-based poetry, especially the Amores 'Loves' and Ars Amatoria 'Art of Love', and his work on the days of the Roman calendar, known as Fasti, give us a look at the social and private lives of ancient Rome in the time of the Emperor Augustus. Ovid is therefore one of the most important of the Roman poets, even though there is debate as to whether he belongs to the Golden or merely the Silver Age of Latin literature.

John Porter says of Ovid : "Ovid's poetry is often dismissed as frivolous fluff, and to a large degree it is. But it is very sophisticated fluff and, if read carefully, presents interesting insights into the less serious side of the Augustan Age."

Ovid's plaintive appeals in his writing from exile at Tomi [see § He on the map], on the Black Sea, are less entertaining than his mythological and amatory writing and are also somewhat frustrating because, while we know Augustus exiled a fifty-year-old Ovid for carmen et error , we don't know exactly what his grave mistake was. Ovid says he saw something he should not have seen. It is assumed that the carmen et error had something to do with Augustus' moral reforms and/or the princeps' promiscuous daughter Julia. [Ovid had acquired the patronage of M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus (64 B.C. - A.D. 8), and become part of the lively social circle around Augustus' daughter Julia.] Augustus banished his granddaughter Julia and Ovid in the same year, A.D. 8. Ovid's Ars amatoria, a didactic poem purporting to instruct first men and then women on the arts of seduction, is thought to have been the offensive song (Latin: carmen).

Augustus died while Ovid was in exile, in A.D. 14, but the successor of Augustus, the Emperor Tiberius, did not recall Ovid. Technically, since Ovid did not lose his possessions, his relegation to Tomi should not be called exile, but relegatio. For Ovid, however, Rome was the glittering pulse of the world. Being stuck, for whatever reasons, in what is modern Romania led to despair. Ovid died 3 years after Augustus, at Tomi, and was buried in the area.

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Ovid - Writing Chronology

• Amores
  
• Heroides
  
• Ars Amatoria
  
• Medicamina faciei femineae
  
• Medea
  
• Remedia Amoris
  
• Metamorphoses
  
• Fasti
  
• Tristia
  
• Epistulae ex Ponto

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