Ovid

Roman poet

• Born: March 20, 1943
• Birthplace: Sulmo, Roman Empire (now Sulmona, Italy)
• Died: 17 c.e.
• Place of death: Tomis on the Black Sea, Moesia (now Constanţa, Romania)

While his contemporaries Vergil and Horace were glorifying the Roman Empire or harking back to sober republican virtues, Ovid wittily celebrated the senses. He also preserved for later generations many of the classical myths, although he treated the gods with the same irreverence as he did his fellow mortals.

Early Life

Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid (AWV-ihd), was born in 43 b.c.e. in what is now central Italy. As his family was a locally prominent one, he enjoyed the advantages of an education and preparation for an official career. Ovid’s youth was during a period of political chaos. Rome was still nominally a republic, but Julius Caesar had made himself dictator. When Caesar was murdered in the year before Ovid’s birth, the Roman world was plunged into civil war. Peace was not truly restored until fourteen years later.

First, Octavian, great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, collaborated with Marc Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus to defeat the chiefs of the Republican party, Marcus Junius Brutus and Cassius. Then Lepidus was shunted aside, and Octavian and Antony entered into a protracted struggle for power. In 30 b.c.e., the year after his disastrous naval defeat at Actium, Antony and his Egyptian ally, Cleopatra VII, committed suicide. Octavian was the complete military ruler of Rome. By 27, the senate had conferred on him the official title Imperator, or emperor, and the honorary title Caesar Augustus, or the august one. Henceforward he was known as Augustus.

The extent to which these wars affected Ovid’s family is not known, but the eventual outcome proved beneficial for him. He had become a poet, and the Augustan Age was a favorable time for poets. Gaius Maecenas, a chief counselor to Augustus, was the protector and financier of poets. However, the fun-loving Ovid was destined to squander his advantages and fall afoul of his emperor.

Life’s Work

Although Ovid was born one hundred miles east of Rome, he was early exposed to the atmosphere of the capital. As the scion of an established family, he was sent to Rome at the age of twelve to be trained in the law. His arrival at the capital roughly coincided with Augustus’s final victory over Antony. The era of the Pax Romana had begun.

Ovid was twenty-two years younger than Horace and almost thirty years younger than Vergil. Because he had been a child during the civil war, his experience of those terrible times had been less immediate than that of the older poets. Vergil and Horace were conservative in temperament and viewed the emperor, despite his new title, as the embodiment of the traditional Roman virtues. Their approval of Augustus was apparently sincere as well as politically and financially expedient. Horace, who had fallen into poverty as a young man through his support of the ill-fated Brutus, received the gift of a farm from Maecenas in 33 b.c.e. Ovid, however, was not a member of Vergil and Horace’s circle. His companions were young and less closely associated with the regime.

Ovid entered the Roman civil service but quickly abandoned the law for poetry. He was a born poet, who once wrote that whatever he tried to say came out in verse. For one element of patrician Roman society, the new era of peace and prosperity was a perfect time for pleasure seeking. Ovid was soon the darling of this brilliant society. He became a professional poet, and his social success equaled his literary success. His themes were often frivolous, but he treated them with great elegance and wit. Technically, his verse was dazzling. The tone of his work was skeptical and irreverent. He practically thumbed his nose at the official solemnity and high-mindedness of the Augustan establishment. Gravitas might be the prime Roman virtue, but it was not the poetic mode for Ovid.

Little is known of Ovid’s appearance or personal behavior. A tradition grew up, totally unsubstantiated by evidence, that Ovid was a rake and a womanizer—a sort of ancient precursor to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. The legendary Ovid, the good-looking playboy, is largely the product of two of his poems. The first, the Amores (c. 20 b.c.e.; English translation, 1597), was also his first published work. The Amores unblushingly recounts the conquests of a Roman Don Juan. The second, the Ars amatoria (c. 2 b.c.e.; Art of Love, 1612), is a tongue-in-cheek seduction manual.

The Art of Love could hardly have endeared Ovid to Augustus. While the emperor’s propagandists were portraying a Rome turning back to the virtuousness, dignity, and piety of its forefathers, the impudent Ovid portrayed an amoral and libertine Rome, where panting ladies were ripe for the plucking. (Both Romes probably existed simultaneously.) In addition to being wickedly amusing, the poem reveals many psychologically valid insights into the gamesmanship of love. Ovid recommends the theater, the arena, dinner parties, and large festivals as the most likely gathering places of pliant females. He artfully plays on the stereotypes, already centuries old in his day, of man as an unskilled dissembler and woman as a born actress. His advice to the would-be gallant is practical in nature: Never, even playfully, discuss any of your mistress’s defects. Do not be so foolhardy as to demand her age; this information is not to be had. Last, if she is over thirty-five, do not be distressed; older women are more practiced, and therefore more desirable, lovers.

Ovid’s passing reference to pederasty is made without apology and suggests that it was an all too common practice in his society. Perhaps the tone and theme of the poem are crystallized in one line: Ovid’s assertion that, after dark, there are no ugly women. The poem contains self-mockery, too. Of the role poetry plays in wooing a woman, the poet says: Send her gold rather than verses, for, even if they are perfectly written and perfectly recited, she will consider them a trifling gift at best.

Over the next seven years, Ovid worked on his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567). The poem consists of fifteen books that retell the stories of classical mythology, beginning with the creation of the world. The title means “transformations,” especially by supernatural means, but it is only loosely descriptive. Although many of the tales recount the transformation of human beings into animals or inanimate things, others do not. Fortunately for posterity, Ovid retold so many stories that his poem became a principal sourcebook of classical myths. One cannot read the great triumvirate of English literature—Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and John Milton—without noticing how often they allude to the Metamorphoses or choose Ovid’s version of a familiar myth.

Some ancient writers later accused Ovid of lacking a proper respect for the gods. It is clear that the author of the Metamorphoses did not believe the stories he was telling or in the deities who populated them. It is equally clear that he had matured artistically since the composition of the Art of Love. The Metamorphoses is, like the Art of Love, witty, charming, and beautifully constructed; still, it is also more comic than frivolous, often seriocomic, occasionally even tragicomic. Ovid modernized the poem in a way that should have pleased the emperor. He portrays the ascension of the murdered Julius Caesar into the heavens, where he becomes a star, and hints that Augustus himself will one day be changed into a god.

By 8 c.e., however, Ovid was in deep trouble with his emperor. Although he was by that time Rome’s leading poet, he was tried before Augustus on a charge that history has not recorded and was banished from Rome. Possibly the emperor’s disapproval of the Art of Love had finally brought about the poet’s downfall. That poem was completed about 1 b.c.e. and had been in published form since 1 c.e., though, so scholars suggest that the poet’s offense may have been his involvement in a scandal, possibly one associated with the emperor’s daughter Julia. For whatever reason, he was banished to Tomis (located in modern-day Romania), an outpost on the Black Sea. Tomis was a cultural and intellectual backwater—and menaced by hostile border tribesmen.

For the next nine years, Ovid pleaded, through a series of epistles in verse known as the Tristia (after 8 c.e.; Sorrows, 1859), for the lifting of his punishment. Augustus did not relent, nor did his stepson and successor, Tiberius. Given the excesses that were eventually to mark Tiberius’s reign, one wonders how corrupting the poet’s presence could have been in Rome. Nevertheless, Ovid died still in exile in 17 c.e.

Significance

Aeneas, Vergil’s self-sacrificing Trojan prince, and the manliness and common sense of Horace’s odes express one aspect of the Augustan Age. It was probably the dominant aspect, stressing as it does the patriotism of the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553) and the traditional religious, moral, and social values of Horace’s Odes (23 b.c.e., 13 b.c.e.; English translation, 1621). Ovid, however, writing in the sensual tradition of Catullus, reflects another aspect of the age.

The Rome of Vergil and Horace gave to the Western world a legal system and a framework of political unity that only a serious and an industrious people could have devised. However, there was also in the Roman nature a playfulness, a highly developed aesthetic sensibility, and a joie de vivre; these are the qualities found in Ovid’s poetry. All people in every age are capable of excesses and base behavior, but the three great Augustan poets reflect the two faces of the Roman Empire at its best.

It is ironic that it was the skeptical Ovid who, in his Metamorphoses, breathed life back into the debilitated gods of Rome. Ovid lived at the dawn of the Christian era, and within a few centuries the Christians’ monotheism would sweep aside the polytheism of Greece and Rome. Ovid preserved the gods as intriguing characters in dozens of charming stories told in elegant verse. His compendium of mythological tales has been so influential that few indeed are the great works of Western literature that contain no allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Bibliography

Brewer, Wilmon. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” in European Culture. Boston: Cornhill, 1933. A three-volume companion work to an English translation in blank verse. Begins with a long introductory survey that includes much biographical detail. Very valuable, because every story in the poem is discussed in the light of its cultural and literary antecedents, then of later works for which it served as antecedent.

Hardie, Philip, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Chapters by well-known scholars discuss Ovid, his backgrounds and contexts, the individual works, and its influence on later literature and art. Includes bibliography and index.

Hoffman, Richard L. Ovid and “The Canterbury Tales.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966. Since John Dryden first compared Ovid and Chaucer in 1700, many Chaucerians have remarked that the great English poet studied, imitated, and relied on Ovid above all other authors. This study treats the Metamorphoses as a predecessor of The Canterbury Tales.

Rand, Edward Kennard. Ovid and His Influence. 1925. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. A professor of Latin poses the question: What does our age owe to a professed roué, a writer so subtle and rhetorical as to strike some as thoroughly insincere? His 184 pages answer that question.

Syme, Ronald. History in Ovid. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Concentrating on Ovid’s latest poems, the author develops a kind of manual designed to cover life and letters in the last decade of Caesar Augustus. Valuable because of the relative obscurity of that period.

Thibault, John C. The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. The author examines various hypotheses about Ovid’s exile, describes their content, and evaluates the evidence and the cogency of the arguments.