Ovid: his Life and Work
by
Prof. R. Gentilcore
Statue of Ovid by Ettore Ferrari, 1887 in Constanta,
(ancient Tomis) Romania
The Life of Publius Ovidius Naso
• Much of our information about Ovid’s life comes from
Tristia 4.10
• A poem he wrote after he had been exiled and his poems
banned from public libraries
• Born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona) about 90 miles east and
north of Rome in 43 B.C.
• Year after Julius Caesar’s assassination, year before
Cicero’s execution
• Period of civil war in Italy, ended with Octavian’s victory
at Actium in 31 B.C.
Bust of Cicero
Octavian and Agrippa after Actium
Life of Ovid cont’d
• Born into a wealthy family of equestrian rank
• Sons expected to follow a political career
• Ovid and his elder brother (one year older) educated first
in Sulmo and then in Rome
• Schooling at that time emphasized study of rhetoric and
public speaking, important for law and politics
• Ovid’s father had reservations about Ovid’s early interest
in poetry
• “Often my father said, why try a useless task? Even Homer
himself had no money to leave?” Tristia 4.10. 21-22.
Life of Ovid cont’d
• Brothers ran for office but older brother died when he was
20
• Ovid gave up political career
• He began to read his poetry in public perhaps at 17 or 18
(26 or 25 B.C.)
Ovid and his Contemporaries
• Lucretius and Catullus had died around 55 B.C.
• Vergil (70-19 B.C.) had written the Eclogues and the
Georgics and was working on the Aeneid
• Horace (65-8 B.C.) had published his Satires and Epodes
and was at work on Odes
• Propertius (55 B.C. - A.D. 2?) and Tibullus (55? B.C. 19B.C.) were writing love elegies
Augustus and Maecenas
• Augustus (Octavian)
promoted the arts in an
attempt to restore Rome
after the devestation of the
civil wars
• Maecenas was patron of
Vergil and Horace
• Messalla was another
important patron who
supported poets
financially
Ovid’s Amores
Ovid’s works: Amores
• First published work was the Amores (Loves)
• Short poems written in the first person in elegiac couplets
• Became his favorite meter which he used in all his poems except the
Metamorphoses (which he wrote in dactylic hexameter as befits an
epic)
• Meter was used for light subjects
• Written in the tradition of the love elegy, as written by Cornelius
Gallus, Tibullus and Propertius
• Poet-lover cannot follow proper Roman career or write proper Roman
poetry
• Ovid’s poems devoted to subject of poetry and love, but plays with
readers, introduces comedy and satire into elegiac
Dido by Sacchi Andrea 1599-1661
The Heroides
• Collection of 15 verse epistles addressed by women to the men they
love
• Almost all are characters from myth
• Each expresses feelings of a woman at a moment of crisis
• Ex. Penelope to Ulysses after waiting 20 years for his return, from
Medea to Jason after he deserted her, Dido to Aeneas etc.
• Ovid not working in an established tradition
• He created a whole collection of elegiac letters on a single theme of a
woman who had lost her man
• Wrote dramatic monologues to create characters and reveal their
psychologies
• Lets the unheard voices of female victims of war, betrayal etc. speak,
thereby re-interpreting myth
Title page of Ars amatoria, Frankfurt 1644
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
• An unprecedented didactic poem on art of seduction
• Poem is in 3 books, finished in A.D. 2
• Poet-lover teaches a course in love based on his own
experiences and technical knowledge
• His “scholarly treatise” follows in the footsteps of Vergil’s
Georgics and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura
• Poem seems to have been planned in 2 books addressed to
men
• 3 subjects 1. Best pick-up places in Rome 2. Hunting
techniques 3. Art of keeping the girl once caught
Ars Amatoria cont’d
• Later Ovid decided to write a third book instructing
women in the arts of love
• Most of it has to do with appearance and behavior
• Ovid sustains one narrative voice over entire poem
• In the Ars Ovid parodies love elegy and didactic poetry
• Also makes fun of political and moral climate of Augustan
Rome and provides social commentary
• Ovid followed this with Remedia - a sort of advice column
in which the professor advises lovers how to escape their
predicaments
The Metamorphoses Illustrated
These images are engravings by Johannes Baur
from the 1703 edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis
and are accompanied by the text translated into
English verse by John Dryden, Alexander Pope,
Joseph Addison, William Congreve and others
from 1713.
Bernini (1622-1625)
Apollo and Daphne
The Metamorphoses (Transformations)
• Ovid now turned to epic and wrote his great mythological
poem, the Metamorphoses until 8 A.D. when he was
banished
• Poem was published without final revisions but the 15
books are complete
• An answer to Vergil and to many earlier poets in diverse
genres (from Homer to Callimachus)
• “an epic on an majestic scale that refuses to take epic
seriously” (Sara Mack)
• 250 stories from Greek and Roman mythology within a
vaguely chronological framework
• Many stories from myth that we are familiar with are from
this poem
Peter Brueghel, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
(1558).
Echo and Narcissus by Waterhouse, 1913
Titian (1490-1576) Venus and Adonis
Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904).
Gustave Moreau. (1826-1898). Orpheus. 1865
Metamorphoses: Style and Substance
• Ovid was a master storyteller, always varying his narrative
and his subject
• Some myths told in a few lines, other several hundred with
elaborate detail, psychological realism
• Others dealt with obscurely and allusively
• Some are comedies, others tragedies, many told by other
narrators within the myth, stories within stories
Ovid’s Exile
• In A.D. 8 when copies of Metamorphoses circulating
among his friends Ovid was banished from Rome by
Augustus and his books removed from public libraries
• Place of exile was Tomis, on site of modern Constanza in
Romania
• It was a barren, uncivilized place inhabited by a Thracian
tribe
• In spite of many petitions from the poet and his many
friends in Rome, Augustus never relented, nor did Tiberius
who succeeded Aug. in A.D. 14
• Ovid died in exile in late A.D. 17 or early 18
• Why was Ovid exiled? Carmen et error?
Ovid’s works from exile
• Wrote 2 collections of poetry from exile; the Tristia (8 to
about 12 A.D. and the Epistulae ex Ponto (12 or 13 to 16
A.D.)
• They consist of short poems in elegiac couplets like his
first poems and also use a frist person narrator
• Language and themes of erotic elegies recast for themes of
exile
• Many are poetic epistles written in despair
• Revives elegy’s ancient Greek association with death and
lamentation
Ovid’s Fame
• “Here I am, bereft of country, home and you, everything
gone that could be taken from me. My art is still my
companion and my joy - over that Caesar could not get
jurisdiction.”
• Tristia 3.7.45-8
• Selections from his work even performed on stage during
his lifetime
• Graffiti scrawled on walls in Pompeii quoting (or
misquoting) his verses attest to the fact that people knew
his work by heart in 1st century A.D.
• In addition to literature, Ovid’s work has inspired painters,
sculptors and musicians over the centuries