Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with two exceptions: his lost Medea, whose two fragments are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively, and his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's epics. Ovid offers an epic unlike 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.
Ovid was born March 20th in Sulmo, which lies in a valley within the Apennines, east of Rome. He was born into an equestrian ranked family and was educated at Rome. His father wished for him to study rhetoric with the ultimate goal of practising law. As stated by Pliny 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 Mesalla. He was married three times, and, from these marriages, had one daughter.
In 10 BC, the Amores were published. Book 1 of this collection of love elegy contains 15 poems, which look at the different areas of love poetry. Perhaps the most notable poem of this collection is Poem 6, written in the genre of paraclausithyron, in which Ovid plays the role of exclusus amator asking the door-keeper to let him enter the house of his beloved. Much of the Amores is tongue-in-cheek, and while Ovid appears to be taking the normal route of a love poem, he often uses this as a ploy before going against the norm and to a certain extent mocking the other love poets who he felt were not as good as himself.
Augustus banished Ovid in 8 AD to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of carmen et error – "a poem and a mistake" (Tr. 2.207). The error itself is uncertain, but it is believed that Ovid may have had an affair with a female relative of Augustus, or withheld knowledge of such an affair (perhaps even the granddaughter of Augustus, Julia). The carmen is probably his Ars Amatoria, a didactic poem offering amatory advice to Roman men and women.
It was during this period of exile – more properly known as a relegation – 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 was forced to abandon his work Fasti. Even though he was friendly with the natives of Tomis and even wrote poems in their language, 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 demonstrate the poet's misery from the start:
Parve – nec invideo – sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!
Little book – and I won't hinder you – go on to the city without me:
Alas for me, because your master is not allowed to go!
Ovid died at Tomis after nearly ten years of banishment. He is commemorated today by a statue in the Romanian city of Constanţa (ancient Tomis). The Latin text on the statue says (Tr. 3.3.73-76):
Hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum
Ingenio perii, Naso poeta, meo.
At tibi qui transis, ne sit grave, quisquis amasti,
Dicere: Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.
Here I lie, who played with tender loves,
Naso the poet, killed by my own talent.
O passerby, if you've ever been in love, let it not be too much for you
to say: May the bones of Naso lie gently.
Assessment
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]
Works
Extant Works Generally Considered Authentic (with approximate dates of publication)
Amores ('The Loves'), 5 books, published 10 BC and revised into 3 books ca. AD 1.
Ars Amatoria ('The Art of Love'), 3 books, first two books published 2 BC, the third somewhat later.
Fasti ('The Festivals'), 6 books extant which cover the first 6 months of the year, providing unique information on the Roman Calendar. Finished by AD 8, possibly published in AD 15.
Heroides ('The Heroines'), also known as Epistulae Heroidum ('Letters of Heroines'), 21 letters. Letters 1-5 published 5 BC, letters 16-21 were composed ca. AD 4 - 8.
Lost Works, or Words Generally Considered Spurious
Consolatio ad Liviam ('Consolation to Livia')
Halieutica ('On Fishing') - generally considered spurious, a poem that some have identified with the otherwise lost poem of the same name written by Ovid.
(1820s) During the days of his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin liked to compare himself with Ovid, whose place of exile seems to have been nearby. This feeling is most memorably expressed in the large verse epistleTo Ovid (1821). The exiled Ovid also makes appearance in Pushkin's long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824).
(1920s) The title of the second collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is rooted in his experiences during the hungry and violent years immediately following the October Revolution.
(1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life is published. It is a powerful novella that provides a fictional of Ovid's exile in Tomis.
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