Jump to content

Ovid

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tvmode (talk | contribs) at 17:44, 19 September 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Ovid
Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
BornMarch 20, 43 BC
Sulmo
Died17 AD
Tomis
OccupationPoet
For other uses, see Ovid (disambiguation)

Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – 17 AD) was a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid who 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, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries.


As noted above, Ovid primarily made use of elegiac couplets, with two exceptions: his lost Medea, whose two fragments are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively, and Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and of 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.

Life and work

Ovid was born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), which lies in a valley within the Apennines, east of Rome. He was born a boy 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 Messalla. He was married three times and, from these marriages, had one daughter.

Ovid as imagined by Anton von Werner.

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. Ovid's next poem, the Ars Amatoria, or the Art of Love, was an extremely sexual poem that mocked the values promoted by Augustus Caesar. This work is the "carmen", or song, that was one of the causes of Ovid's banishment. Supposedly, Augustus believed that this work led to the moral corruption of Julia the Younger. By AD 8, Ovid had completed his most famous work, a compilation of Roman and Greek mythology called the Metamorphoses. The book discusses the myths of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Medea, the love affairs of Zeus, and many other celebrated Roman myths. For literary scholars today the book is very valuable, as 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 AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious, though it is largely speculated that something in the Art of Love offended him. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of carmen et error – "a poem and a mistake" (Tr. 2.207). The error Ovid made is believed to be political in nature--possibly he had knowledge of a plot against Augustus, or stumbled into some sensitive state secret. As Julia the Younger (the granddaughter of Augustus) and Ovid were exiled in the same year, some suspect that he was somehow involved in her affair with Decimus Silanus. Still, Ovid only moved on the perimeter of Julia's circle, suggesting that reports he seduced Julia or facilitated her affiars is likely romantic hearsay. [1]. The carmen is his Art of Love. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC were still fresh in the minds of Romans; these laws had promoted monogamous, marital sexual relations in Rome in order to promote population growth, 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:

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 (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):

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

File:Ovidius-Constanta.PNG
Ovid's statue in Constanţa (Tomis)

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.[2]

Works

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

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.
  • Metamorphoses, ('Transformations'), 15 books, published ca. AD 8.
  • Medicamina Faciei Feminae ('Women's Facial Cosmetics'), also known as 'The Art of Beauty, 100 lines surviving. Published ca. 5 BC.
  • Remedia Amoris ('The Cure for Love'), 1 book, published 5 BC.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Ibis, a single poem, written ca. AD 9.
  • Tristia ('Sorrows'), 5 books, published AD 10.
  • Epistulae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea'), 4 books, published AD 10.

Lost works, or works 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.
  • Medea, a lost tragedy about Medea
  • Nux ('The Walnut Tree')
  • A volume of poems in Getic, the language of Dacia where Ovid lived in exile, not extant (and possibly fictional).

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

Trivia

  • Ovid's Ars Amatoria contains the first reference to the board game ludus duodecim scriptorum, a relative of modern backgammon.
  • Ovid's nickname was Nasus, "The Nose" — a pun on his cognomen, Naso.
  • In Pandora, by Anne Rice, Pandora cites Ovid as one of her favorite poets and authors of the time, and quotes him vividly in front of her lover Marius.

See also

References

  1. ^ Alan H.F. Griffin, Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., Vol. 24, No. 1. (Apr., 1977), p. 58.
  2. ^ R. J. Tarrant, "Ovid" in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), p. 257.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Ovid.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ovid.

Template:Link FA Template:Link FA Template:Link FA

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ovid&oldid=158990628"