Ovid

Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso in the Nuremberg chronicle XCIIIv.jpg
Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
Born March 20, 43 BC
Sulmo, Roman Republic
Died 17 or 18 AD
Tomis (present Constanţa), Scythia Minor, Greek colony
Occupation Poet
Influences
Influenced

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.

Elegiac couplets are the meter of most of Ovid's works: the Amores, his two long didactic poems (the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris), his poem on the Roman calendar (the Fasti), the minor work Medicamina Faciei Femineae (on makeup), his fictional letters from mythological heroines (the Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum), and all the works written in his exile (five books of the Tristia, four of the Epistulae ex Ponto, and the long curse-poem Ibis). The two fragments of the lost tragedy Medea are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively; the Metamorphoses was written in dactylic hexameter. (Dactylic hexameter is the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and of Homer's epics.)

Contents

Life and work

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. He was married three times and divorced twice by the age of 30. From one marriage, he had a daughter. [1]

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.[2] It contains the first reference to the board game ludus duodecim scriptorum, a relative of modern backgammon. [3] 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.

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."[4] He claimed that this crime was worse than murder[5] and caused more harm than poetry.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8] 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). Though in the Epistulae ex Ponto he claims to have become friendly with the natives of Tomis (in the Tristia they are merely frightening barbarians) and to have written a poem in their language (Ex P. 4.13.19-20), he still pined for Rome and his beloved third wife. Many of the poems are addressed to her, as well as to Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and sometimes God, to himself, to various friends left behind in Rome, and even sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing his heart-felt loneliness and hoping for a recall or a relocation in exile. 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!
Ovid's statue in Constanţa/Tomis, the city where he died
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 10 years of banishment. He is commemorated today by a statue in the Romanian city of Tomis (modern day Constanţa) and the 1930 renaming of the nearby town of Ovidiu, alleged location of his tomb. 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.

(Ovid's nickname was Nasus, "The Nose" — a pun on his cognomen, Naso.)

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.[9]

Works

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

Extant works generally considered authentic (with approximate dates of publication)

Lost works, or works generally considered spurious

Works and artists inspired by Ovid

See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples.

Dante mentions him twice:

Retellings, adaptations and translations of his actual works

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ http://www.jstor.org/view/00173835/ap020138/02a00070/0
  2. ↑ Hornblower, Simon; Antony Spawforth (1999). Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press. pp. 1084-1086. 
  3. ↑ http://www.jstor.org/view/00173835/ap020010/02a00040/6?frame=frame&userID=c101aca6@ucd.ie/01c0a8346900501d717b8&dpi=3&config=jstor
  4. ↑ Ovid, Tristia 2.207
  5. ↑ Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 2.9.72
  6. ↑ Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3.72
  7. ↑ Norwood, Frances, "The Riddle of Ovid's Relegatio", Classical Philogy (1963) p. 158
  8. ↑ Alan H.F. Griffin, Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., Vol. 24, No. 1. (Apr., 1977), p. 58.
  9. ↑ R. J. Tarrant, "Ovid" in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), p. 257.
  10. ↑ Talkin' Broadway Review: Metamorphoses

External links

Persondata
NAME Ovid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Roman poet
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 43 BC
PLACE OF BIRTH Sulmo
DATE OF DEATH 17 AD
PLACE OF DEATH Tomis