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Ovid

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Publius Ovidus Naso, (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC – Tomis, now Constanta AD 17) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin Literature, Ovid was generally considered the greatest master of the elegiac couplet. His poetry, largely imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries.

Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys's 1632 London edition of Ovids Metamorphosis Englished.

R. J. Tarrant offers the following assessment for the importance of Ovid:

From his own time until the end of Antiquity Ovid was among the most widely read and imitated of Latin poets; his greatest work, the Metamorphoses, also seems to have enjoyed the largest popularity. What place Ovid may have had in the curriculum of ancient schools is hard to determine: no body of antique scholia survives for any of his works, but it seems likely that the elegance of his style and his command of rhetorical technique would have commended him as a school author, perhaps at the elementary level.1

Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with two exceptions: his lost Medea, whose two fragments are in iambic trimeters and anapests, respectively, and his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Vergil's Aeneid and Homer's epics. Ovid offers an epic unlike his those of his predecessors, a chronological account of the cosmos from creation to his own day, incorporating many myths and legends about supernatural transformations from the Greek and Roman traditions.

Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious (Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an error and a carmen – a mistake and a poem). He may have had an affair with a female relative of Augustus (or had knowledge of such an affair), and the carmen mentioned by Ovid is probably his Ars Amatoria, a didactic poem offering amatory advice to Roman men and women, which had been in circulation for several years.

It was during this exile that Ovid wrote two more collections of poems, called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, which illustrate his sadness and desolation away from Rome. Even though he was friendly with the natives of Tomis, he still pined for Rome and his beloved third wife. Many of the poems are addressed to her, but also to Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and sometimes God, to himself, and even sometimes to the poems themselves, which expresses his heart-felt solitude. The famous first two lines of the Tristia ...

Parve -- nec invideo -- sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!

can be translated as ...

Little one -- and I won't hinder you -- without me, book, you will go to the City:
Alas for me, because, for your master, it is illegal to go!

Ovid would eventually die in exile.

Works

Existing and generally considered authentic, with approximate dates of publication

  • (10 BC) Amores ('The Loves'), 5 books, about "Corinna", anti-marriage (revised into 3 books c. AD 1)
  • (5 BC) Heroides ('The Heroines') or Epistulae Heroidum ('Letters of Heroines'), 21 letters (letters 16–21 were composed around AD 4 - 8)
  • (5 BC) Remedium Amoris ('The Cure for Love'), 1 book
  • (5 BC) Medicamina Faciei Femineae ('Women's Facial Cosmetics' or 'The Art of Beauty'), 100 lines surviving
  • (2 BC) Ars Amatoria ('The Art of Love'), 3 books (the third written somewhat later)
  • (AD 8) Metamorphoses ('Transformations'), 15 books
  • (9) Ibis, a single poem
  • (10) Tristia ('Sorrows'), 5 books
  • (10) Epistulae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea'), 4 books
  • (12) Fasti ('Festivals'), 6 books surviving which cover the first 6 months of the year and provide unique information on the Roman calendar

Lost or generally considered spurious

  • Medea, a lost tragedy about Medea
  • a poem in Getic, the language of Dacia where Ovid was exiled, not extant (and possibly fictional)
  • Nux ('The Walnut Tree')
  • Consolatio ad Liviam ('Consolation to Livia')
  • Haleutica ('On Fishing') - generally considered spurious, a poem that some have identified with the otherwise lost poem of the same name written by Ovid.

Works and artists inspired by Ovid

See also

References

  1. R. J. Tarrant, "Ovid" in Texts and Transmission: A Survery of the Latin Clasics (Oxford, 1983), p. 257.
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