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For other uses, see Ovid (disambiguation).
| Ovid | |
|---|---|
 Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. | |
| Born | March 20, 43 BC Sulmo |
| Died | 17 AD Tomis |
| Occupation | Poet |
|
Influences | |
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Influenced | |
Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – 17 AD) was a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid who wrote on many topics, including 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 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.
Ovid made use of a wide range of meters: elegiac couplets in the Amores and in his two long didactic poems, the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris; 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 |
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. 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 Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He was married three times and, from one marriage, had a daughter. http://www.jstor.org/view/00173835/ap020138/02a00070/0
In 16 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. Much of the Amores is tongue-in-cheek, and while Ovid initially appears to adhere to the standard content of his elegiac predecessors — the exclusus amator (left-out lover) and 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 wittily focused on the arts of seduction and intrigue. It contains the first reference to the board game ludus duodecim scriptorum, a relative of modern backgammon. http://www.jstor.org/view/00173835/ap020010/02a00040/6?frame=frame&userID=c101aca6@ucd.ie/01c0a8346900501d717b8&dpi=3&config=jstor This work is suspected to be the carmen, or song, that was one of the causes of Ovid\'s 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."Ovid, Tristia 2.207 He claimed that this crime was worse than murderOvid, Epistulae ex Ponto 2.9.72 and caused more harm than poetry.Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3.72 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.Norwood, Frances, "The Riddle of Ovid\'s Relegatio", Classical Philogy (1963) p. 158 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.Alan H.F. Griffin, Ovid\'s \'Metamorphoses\', Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., Vol. 24, No. 1. (Apr., 1977), p. 58. 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 — 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:
Ovid died at Tomis after nearly 10 years of banishment. He is commemorated today by a statue in the Romanian city of Constanţa (modern name of Tomis) 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):
(Ovid\'s nickname was Nasus, "The Nose" — a pun on his cognomen, Naso.)
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.R. J. Tarrant, "Ovid" in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), p. 257.
Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys\' 1632 London edition of Ovids Metamorphoses Englished.
See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples.
Dante mentions him twice:
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| 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 |
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