Last reviewed: June 2018
Roman poet
March 20, 43 b.c.e.
Sulmo, Roman Empire (now Sulmona, Italy)
17 c.e.
Tomis on the Black Sea, Moesia (now Constanţa, Romania)
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, was born in the Italian Apennines, northeast of Rome, in the last year of the Republic. He was brought up under the absolute rule of Augustus. His works depict the life of rich and fashionable Romans during the second half of Augustus’s reign, and with Ovid’s death the Golden Age of Roman literature came to an end. Ovid
Ovid’s father, of an equestrian family whose estates were never confiscated, sent the boy and his brother from Abruzzi to Rome, where they were educated by two famous rhetoricians, Arellius Fuscus and the Spanish-born friend of Seneca, Marcus Porcius Latro, who guided the formation of Ovid’s literary style. Horace read his own poems to Ovid, and Aemilius Macer, who traveled with him to Athens, Troy, and Sicily, introduced him to the writings of Vergil. On their return to Rome, Ovid was offered a political career in the Senate, but he chose to devote himself to literature.
He married four times. Personal experience undoubtedly inspired the creation of his imaginary Corinna, whom he celebrated in forty-four short poems and the five-volume Amores (which he later prudently reduced to three). His fourth marriage, to a girl of the Fabian family, brought him favor with the Empress Livia. Women were influential in Roman life, and women figure significantly in Ovid’s poetry, with a balance between romance, realism, and tongue-in-cheek humor. His Heroides (also known as Letters from Heroines) were imaginary epistles from the heroines of antiquity to their absent husbands and lovers.
His Art of Love caused the greatest furor. This guidebook for lovemaking, with two volumes for men and one for women, was once called the most immoral book ever written by a man of genius. Because it ran counter to Augustus’s attempts at moral reforms, Ovid tried to repair the damage by writing Cure for Love (sometimes called Love’s Remedies), telling how to end love affairs. He was banished in 8
Though he wrote scores of letters to influential Romans and five volumes of Sorrows to describe the wretchedness of his exile and to present pleas for forgiveness, even Tiberius upon his succession to the throne refused to pardon him, suggesting that the reason for Ovid’s banishment was something more than licentious writing or even meddling in the love intrigues of Augustus’s granddaughter Julia. Ovid remained in Tomis until his death in 17
Ovid’s greatest work was the fifteen books of Metamorphoses. Written in hexameters, the work recounts miraculous transformations that range through classical mythology from the change of chaos to cosmos in the world to the tale of Julius Caesar’s metamorphosis into a star. The Alexandrian poets, as well as old legends, provided material for this cyclic work. At the time of his banishment, he burned his own manuscript, but the work survived because other copies had been made.