Jump to content

Ovid

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 67.38.138.130 (talk) at 15:04, 11 December 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 aRoman 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.)

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. 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 one marriage, had a 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. 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), 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. This work is suspected to be the carmen, or song, that was one of the causes of Ovid's banishment.

By AD 8, Ovid had completed his most famous work called the 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. 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 have been 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 that he seduced Julia or facilitated her affairs is likely romantic hearsay.[1] 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:

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

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=177217982"