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Naso, Publius Ovidius

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**Ovid**
Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
Born:	March 20, 43 BC Sulmo
Died:	17 AD Tomis
Occupation:	Poet
Influenced:	Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, William Shakespeare

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.

Ovid wrote in 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 senstive 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

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.

(1100s) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature
(1200s) The Roman de la Rose
(1300s) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer
(1400s) Sandro Botticelli
(1500s-1600s) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare
(1600s) Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin, 1651
(1820s) During the days of his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin liked to compare himself with Ovid, whose place of exile seems to have been nearby. This feeling is most memorably expressed in the large verse epistle To Ovid (1821). The exiled Ovid also makes appearance in Pushkin's long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824).
(1916) James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man uses a quote from Book 8 of Metamorphoses and introduces the character of Stephen Dedalus. The Ovidian reference to 'Daedalus' had already been included in Stephen Hero but was then metamorphosed into 'Dedalus' in both A Portrait and in Ulysses.
(1920s) The title of the second collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is rooted in his experiences during the hungry and violent years immediately following the October Revolution.
(1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life is published. It is a powerful novella that provides a fictional account of Ovid's exile in Tomis.

Dante mentions him twice:

in De vulgari eloquentia mentions him, along with Lucan, Virgil and Statius as one of the four regulati poetae (ii, vi, 7)
in Inferno ranks him side by side with Homer, Horace, Lucan and Virgil (Inferno, IV,88).

Retellings, adaptations and translations of his actual works

(1767) Apollo et Hyacinthus, one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's earliest operas
(1900s) 6 Metaphorphoses After Ovid for oboe by Benjamin Britten.
(1949) Orphée A film by Jean Cocteau, a retelling of the Orpheus myth from the Metamorphoses
(1991) The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr
(1997) "Polaroid Stories" by Naomi Iizuka, a retelling of Metamorphoses casting street kids and junkies in the roles of gods.
(1994) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun is an anthology of contemporary poetry re-envisioning Ovid's Metamorphoses
(1997) Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes is a modern poetic translation of twenty four passages from Metamorphoses
(2000) Ovid Metamorphosed edited by Phil Terry is a collection of short stories by various writers that re-tell several of Ovid's fables.
(2002) An adaptation of Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman appeared on Broadway's Circle on the Square Theater, which featured an onstage pool [1]
(2006) Patricia Barber's song cycle, Mythologies

Trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items into the main text and removing inappropriate items. (June 2007)

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.

References

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

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Ovid

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Ovid

University of Virginia, "Ovid Illustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and Text"
Works by Ovid at Project Gutenberg
Latin and English translation
- Perseus/Tufts: P. Ovidius Naso Amores, Ars Amatoria, Heroides (on this site called Epistulae), Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris. Enhanced brower. Not downloadable.
- Sacred Texts Archive: Ovid Amores, Ars Amatoria, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris.
- The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso; elucidated by an analysis and explanation of the fables, together with English notes, historical, mythological and critical, and illustrated by pictorial embellishments: with a dictionary, giving the meaning of all the words with critical exactness. By Nathan Covington Brooks. Publisher: New York, A. S. Barnes & co.; Cincinnati, H. W. Derby & co., 1857 (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
Original Latin only
- Latin Library: Ovid Amores, Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, Fasti, Heroides, Ibis, Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris, Tristia.
- Gutenberg Project: Fasti With introduction and extensive notes in English by Thomas Keightley. Plain text version.
- Works by Ovid
English translation only
- New translations by A. S. Kline Amores, Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, Fasti, Heroides, Ibis, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris, Tristia with enhanced browsing facility, downloadable in HTML, PDF, or MS Word DOC formats. Site also includes wide selection of works by other authors.
- Two translations from Ovid's Amores by Jon Corelis.
- English translations of Ovid's Amores with introductory essay and notes by Jon Corelis
- Some English translations of Ovid by famous literary figures
Commentary
- Perseus/Tufts: Commentary on the Heroides of Ovid