Ovid was born into a well-to-do and socially
prominent family living in Sulmo (modern Sulmona),
some 90 miles east of Rome. His father, a
member of the wealthy Equestrian class, provided
him and his older brother with the Roman education
in rhetoric and law, as well as a grand tour of
Greece and Asia Minor.
The young Ovid was a gifted student of rhetoric
(the art of using language effectively and persuasively),
and he habitually added lyrical touches to
his academic exercises and assignments. However,
he had no taste for the law and no skill in politics.
His father tried repeatedly to dissuade him from his
chosen path, admonishing him that even HOMER
died broke. Ovid reportedly penned a promise to
stop writing poetry—in dactylic hexameter.
Ovid’s work was an immediate success among
fashionable society, as it reflected their disillusionment
with the breakdown of the classical republican
ideals of Rome at the time.Many scholars have
contrasted the positive light of Ovid’s work to the
“darker” works of his older counterparts, the Augustans,
for his work resembles neither that of the
patriotic satirist HORACE nor that of the melancholy
and moralistic VIRGIL. His inventive, refined,
and metrically brilliant poetry seems effortlessly
composed and depicts a cosmopolitan, secular
sensibility that derived from both his inherent skill
and the peace and prosperity of AUGUSTUS’s reign.
His spirited, graceful elegies and epistles reveal the
soul of a true romantic.
Ovid was prolific as well as popular; more than
35,000 lines of his verses survive.His first published
poems were a collection of playful and lighthearted
love poems, Amores (Loves), first published 20–16
B.C. in five books and later, in 2 B.C., reduced to three.
Around the same time as the Amores, Ovid
composed the Heroides (Heroines), a collection of
imaginary love letters between 15 mythological
women and their lovers or husbands. In these letters
he takes minor characters appearing in other
works and gives them psychological depth and
complexity by using the first person to reveal the
personalities of these famous and doomed women.
The characters typically seen as pure evil, such as
Medea, Ovid humanizes by explaining their motives
or casting them in a light of pitiful ignorance,
as he does with Helen of Troy. Those women customarily
seen as noble and guiltless, like the abandoned
Dido or the bereft Hero, Ovid complicates
by revealing their sinister thoughts and occasional
selfishness. Altogether, the Heroides so captured
the imagination of readers that subsequent authors
added six more letters to Ovid’s collection.
Ovid also wrote a tragedy called Medea (no
longer extant), most likely to take advantage of the
boom in theater construction during 13–11 B.C. Ars
amatoria (The Art of Love) appeared in 1 B.C., offering,
in three books of mock didactic verse, a satirical
instructional manual on the art of seduction. This
was followed shortly by Remedia Amoris (Remedies
for Love), an even more mocking sequel.
Between A.D. 1 and 8, Ovid worked on Metamorphoses
concurrently with Fasti (Religious Holidays),
a calendar of Roman feast days that he never
completed. The six books of Fasti cover the first six
months of the Roman year and are now a valuable
source of information about Roman religious
practice. In addition, they include lively episodes of
Greek MYTHOLOGY, Roman history, and astronomical
observations.
Augustus’s banishment of Ovid around A.D. 8
is generally attributed to an “unknown indiscretion,”
but it was probably brought about by a number
of factors: The eroticism and immorality of
Ovid’s works were not in keeping with the emperor’s
efforts at moral reform; the poet may have
witnessed scandalous behavior in the imperial
family; and he was decidedly unpatriotic and indifferent
to religion and politics. Although the emperor
supported the arts, he sent Ovid to live the
rest of his days at the furthest edge of the Roman
Empire, far from the center of literary arts and cultural
entertainments upon which the poet thrived.
During his exile, Ovid wrote the Tristia (Songs of
Sorrow) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the
Black Sea). In these works, he unsuccessfully asks
to be pardoned and allowed to return to Rome.
Critical Analysis
The work that secured Ovid’s fame to future generations
and his acknowledged place among the
master artists of world literature is the 15-book
Metamorphoses. In this project, Ovid underwent a
change of his own, turning from elegy and its
meter to EPIC and the nobler and more appropriate
hexameter.He declares his purpose in the first four
lines of the poem:
My intention is to tell of bodies changed
To different forms; the gods, who made the
changes,
Will help me—or I hope so—with a poem
That runs from the world’s beginning to
our own days.
The theme of Metamorphoses is the transforming
power of love, and the brief, fanciful tales that
make up the work relate numerous metamorphoses:
men turn into birds, boys become trees, a
magic spell makes a woman a spider, and an ivory
statue comes to life. For a work of such disparate
elements, the narrative’s continuity is striking.
The poem begins with the creation of the world
and ostensibly covers the course of history up to
the deification of Julius CAESAR. Ovid concludes the
work with a suggestion that Augustus will be similarly
venerated:
Later than our own era, when Augustus
Shall leave the world he rules, ascend to
Heaven,
And there, beyond our presence, hear our
prayers!
If this was an attempt to curry favor, it did not
succeed in recalling the poet from exile.
Many of the stories in Metamorphoses are implicit
or explicit statements about power dynamics,
examining (and subtly criticizing) power
imbalances between gods and humans, rulers and
subjects, women and men. The stories are by
turns gay and tragic; Ovid turns his pen to
charming subjects such as courtship with the
same ease he uses to describe horrifying violence,
like the battle of the Centaurs or the rape of
Philomela. Love and betrayal are constant themes
throughout the books, and doomed lovers scatter
Ovid’s landscape as thickly as trees. In the first
four books, infidelities of the gods intertwine
with the story of Cadmus and the founding of
Thebes. Books 5 through 8 describe the adventures
of the ancient heroes Perseus, Jason, and
Theseus. Book 9 introduces Hercules, and Book
10 narrates a series of famous love affairs: Orpheus, Ganymede, Pygmalion, and Venus and
Adonis.
After the story of Midas in Book 11, the focus
turns in Book 12 to the fall of Troy, and, in 13 and
14, the voyage of Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic.
Book 14 then progresses to the legendary early history
of Rome, reaching at last the event which in
Ovid’s time marked the end of the Roman Republic:
the ascent of Caesar. Altogether, Ovid’s vivid
and elaborate tapestry of narratives contains
within it, in the form of story, all the changes that
brought forth the world he knew.
In his introduction to Metamorphoses, translator
Rolfe Humphries writes, “The enormous influence
of The Metamorphoses on pre-nineteenth
century Europe cannot be disputed: it is all but
omnipresent, in prose as well as in poetry, in painting
as well as sculpture.” He adds that the work
“was, more than any other work, the medium by
which classical mythology was known and understood.”
According to translator Horace Gregory,
Metamorphoses is continually being rediscovered:
“Something of its original importance is beginning
to be understood. Its collection of myths . . . has
taken on fresh color and richness . . . and contemporary
anthropologists are finding new meaning
in Ovid’s ‘fables’ and miracles.”
Throughout the European MIDDLE AGES, Ovid
and Virgil were considered the unparalleled exemplars
of the Latin tradition. Ovid’s treatment of love
influenced the development of courtly love (see
CHIVALRY AND COURTLY LOVE) and gave a language
of passion to such famous lovers as ABÉLARD AND
HÉLOÏSE. Stories from Metamorphoses reappeared in
the poetry of DANTE, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Gower,
and influenced the Renaissance playwrights and
poets Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and
William Shakespeare.
English Versions of Works by Ovid
The Art of Love. Translated by James Michie. Introduction
by David Malouf. London: Random
House, 2002.
Fasti. Edited by A. J. Boyle and R. D.Woodard. New
York: Penguin Classics, 2000.
Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955.
The Metamorphoses. Translated by Horace Gregory.
New York: The Viking Press, 1958.
Ovid: Selected Poems. London: Phoenix House, 2004.
Ovid: Selections from Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris.
Edited by Graves Haydon Thompson.Wauconda,
Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1999.
Works about Ovid
Holzberg, Niklas. Ovid: The Poet and His Work.
Translations by G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2002.
Lindheim, Sara H., ed. Mail and Female: Epistolary
Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Spentzou, Efrossini. Readers and Writers in Ovid’s
Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Tissol, Garth. The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and
Cosmic Origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.