Ovid

Source

• Born: 20 March 43 B.C.
• Birthplace: Sulmo (now Sulmona), Italy
• Died: 17 or 18 A.D.
• Best Known As: Roman author of Metamorphoses

Name at birth: Publius Ovidius Naso

Ovid was one of the greatest poets of antiquity and the author of Metamorphoses, a masterpiece on Greek and Roman myths. What Virgil was to epic poetry, Ovid was to elegiac poetry, and his love poems and instructional works have firmly established him as one of the greatest influences on Western literature. His other works include Amores (3 volumes of love poems), Heroides (fictional letters from a woman to her lovers) and Ars Amatoria (an instructional poem on the art of love). Ovid was prolific and popular in his lifetime and highly regarded by the emperor Augustus, until he was banished from Rome under mysterious circumstances in 8 A.D. Despite public and private entreaties, Augustus (and later, Tiberius) refused to forgive Ovid, who finished out his days in Tobis.

Ovid (43 B.C.-ca. A.D. 18) was a Roman elegiac and epic poet. His verse is distinguished by its easy elegance and sophistication.

Ovid whose full name was Publius Ovidius Naso, was born on March 20, 43 B.C., at Sulmo (modern Sulmona) about 90 miles from Rome. His father, a member of the equestrian order, intended for him to become a lawyer and an official and gave him an excellent education, including study under the great rhetoricians Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro. According to Seneca Rhetor, he preferred the suasoriae, exercises in giving advice in various historical or imaginary circumstances, to the prescribed debates of the controversiae, and his orations seemed nothing but poems without meter. His facility in composition, the content of some of his poems, and the rhetorical nature of much of his work in general all reflect his training with the rhetoricians.

Ovid also studied in Athens, toured the Near East with his friend Macer the poet, and lived for almost a year in Sicily. His father, who frequently pointed out to him that not even Homer had made any money, then apparently prevailed upon him to return to Rome, where he served in various minor offices of a judicial nature; but he disliked the work and lacked further ambition, so he soon surrendered to a life of ease and poetry.

Early Works

Ovid's life in the years after his liberation was that of a poet and man-about-town. He moved in the best literary circles, although never forming part of either of the major coteries of the time, those around Messalla and Maecenas. He had attracted notice as a poet while still in school and in time came to be surrounded by a group of admirers of his own. Ovid's early work was almost all on the theme of love; the residue of this early production, after he had destroyed many poems which he considered faulty, formed three short books of verses known as the Amores (Loves): the earliest poem of this collection seems to be a lament for Tibullus, who died in 19 B.C., and the latest assignable date for any of these poems is about 2 B.C. Most of these poems concern Ovid's love for a certain Corinna, who is generally considered an imaginary figure: the poems addressed to her form an almost complete cycle of the emotions and situations which a lover might expect to undergo in a love affair. This interest in the psychology of love is also exemplified in his Heroides, which dates from roughly the same period and is a series of letters from mythical heroines to their absent husbands or lovers.

This period of Ovid's life seems to have been relatively tranquil as well as productive. Of his private life we know little. In addition to "other company in youth," he was married three times; the last marriage, apparently a very happy one, was to a relative of his patron Paullus Fabius Maximus, a man of great influence. By one of these wives he had a daughter who made him a grandfather. His parents died only shortly before he was suddenly relegated (a form of banishment without the loss of property or civil rights) in A.D. 9 or 8 to Tomi on the Black Sea (the modern Constantsa in Romania).

His Exile

The reasons behind Ovid's exile have been the subject of much speculation. He himself tells us that the reason was "a poem and a mistake." The poem was clearly his Art of Love. With this work, its companion piece, The Remedies for Love, on how to get over an unsuccessful love affair, and its predecessor, On Cosmetics, Ovid had invented a new kind of poetry, didactic and amatory. The Art of Love consists of three books which parody conventional love poetry and didactic verse while offering vivid portrayals of contemporary Roman society.

The witty sophistication of this work made it an immediate and overwhelming success in fashionable society and infuriated the emperor Augustus, who was attempting to force a moral reformation on this same society. To the Emperor, this work must have seemed, in the strictest sense, subversive, and he excluded it, along with Ovid's other works, from the public libraries of Rome. What the "mistake" may have been, we do not know. It was, Ovid says, the result of his having eyes, and the most widely accepted suggestion is that he had somehow become aware of the licentious behavior of the Emperor's daughter Julia (who was banished in the same year as he) without his informing Augustus about her.

Upon receiving word of his exile, Ovid dramatically burned the manuscript of his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. The unreality of this gesture can be seen from the fact that his friends already had copies and that he took the unfinished manuscript of his Fasti along with him into exile. The journey to Tomi lasted nearly a year, and when he arrived, he found it a frontier post, where books and educated people were not to be found and Latin was practically unknown. Tomi was subject to attack by hostile barbarians and to bitterly cold winters. The production of the last 10 years of his life consists largely of tedious and interminable complaints mingled with appeals for recall, in the Sorrows and Letters from the Black Sea, but Augustus was too bitterly offended to relent, and the accession of Tiberius in A.D. 14 brought an even more unyielding emperor to the throne.

Ovid's exile was not so unbearable as his letters indicate. He learned the native languages, and his unconquerable geniality and amiability made him a beloved and revered figure to the local citizens, who exempted him from taxes and treated him as well, he said, as he could have expected even in his native Sulmo. He wrote a panegyric to Augustus in the Getic language, the loss of which is a source of regret for philologists; a bitter attack on an unnamed and perhaps imaginary enemy, the Ibis; and a work on the fish of the Black Sea, the Halieutica; he resumed work on the Fasti before his death, which is given by St. Jerome as occurring in A.D. 17, but probably occurred early in the next year.

Ovid's earliest work, in the Loves and Heroides, already exhibits his fully developed talent. His verse is facile, smoothly flowing, and rhetorical and artificial without ever being obscure or even very often giving the impression of being other than natural and inevitable. His mastery of Greek literature, from which he draws most of his themes and to which he is continually alluding by direct or indirect quotation, was very great. His faults are those of overfacility and an occasional excessive verbal cleverness.

His Masterpiece

Ovid's masterpiece is generally considered to be his Metamorphoses. It is an epic in form, 15 books in length, and devoted to the theme of changes in shape, although some stories not strictly limited to this theme are included. It is arranged in chronological order from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, the first 12 books being derived from Greek mythology, and books 13-15 devoted to Roman legends and history, beginning with the story of Aeneas. The transitions between the various stories are managed with great skill.

The metamorphoses are of form only: the character, interests, and activities of the persons transformed remain invariable under transformation. Lycus, for example, in the first metamorphosis in book I, retains his savage cruelty when he is transformed into a wolf; Arachne, changed into a spider for daring to challenge Minerva to a contest in weaving, retains her skill and shows it in her webs; and Baucis and Philemon, transformed into trees, remain inseparable as they were in life and continue to offer hospitality with their shade as they did to Jupiter while they were still in human form. Above all, however, the Metamorphoses owes its preservation to the incomparable narrative skill with which Ovid takes the old tales of a mythology which by his time was already hackneyed, and as little an object of belief then as now, and imbues them with sensuous charm and freshness.

The Fasti was intended to be a Roman religious calendar in verse, one book for each month. Ovid completed only six books. It is of interest because it contains much antiquarian lore otherwise unknown (probably derived from the works of Marcus Verrius Flaccus, the greatest of Augustan scholars), chosen with Ovid's usual eye for the picturesque and versified with his usual elegance.

Several lost works of Ovid's are recorded, the most important being his tragedy Medea, a rhetorical closet drama like the tragedies of Seneca, which is highly praised by Quintilian and Tacitus. Some epigrams are ascribed to him, perhaps correctly.

Later Influence

In antiquity itself the influence of Ovid on all subsequent writers of elegiac and hexameter verse was inescapable, even for those writers who were consciously attempting to return to earlier, Virgilian standards; and his stories, particularly from the Metamorphoses, were a major source for the illustrations of artists.

In the Middle Ages, especially the High Middle Ages, when interest in Ovid's works was primarily centered on the Metamorphoses, Art of Love, and Heroides, Ovid helped to fill the overpowering medieval hunger for storytelling, as exemplified in Chaucer and others, all in greater or lesser degree dependent on Ovid. His frequently exaggerated and romantic tales greatly appealed to the taste of the time; his sensuousness and fantasy fed an age starved for just these elements. The 12th century has been named the aetas Ovidiana (the Ovidian age) because of the number of poets writing imitations of Ovidian hexameters on frequently Ovidian themes. In the student songs of the medieval universities and later into the Renaissance, Ovid acts almost as a patron saint for the sensual antinomianism of intellectuals, even if it extended no further than a preference for secular verses over religious literature.

In the Renaissance, Ovid was easily the most influential of the Latin poets. Painters and sculptors used him for themes; writers of all ranks translated, adapted, and plundered him freely. In English literature alone Edmund Spenser and John Milton show a deep knowledge and use of Ovid. William Shakespeare's knowledge of him is also great, for example, his use of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend in the play within the play of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

After the Renaissance, Ovid's influence was most often indirect, but among many authors and artists who used him directly, one must mention John Dryden, who translated (with assistance) the Metamorphoses, and Pablo Picasso, who illustrated this work.

Further Reading

Two comprehensive recent books on Ovid in English have done much to revive Ovid's reputation as a poet: Hermann Ferdinand Fraenkel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (1945), and L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (1955; condensed and published as Ovid Surveyed, 1962). Also important is Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (1966). The bimillenary celebration for the birth of Ovid produced a volume of essays, Ovidiana, edited by Niculae I. Herescu, some of them of considerable importance and many of them in English.

The long-disputed question of the cause of Ovid's exile was reopened by John C. Thibault in The Mystery of Ovid's Exile (1964). A noteworthy earlier work is the great edition of and commentary on the Fasti by Sir James George Frazer (1929; repr. 1951). Ovid's place in literary history was extensively studied by Edward Kennard Rand, Ovid and His Influence (1925); Mary Marjorie Crump, The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid (1931); and Wilmon Brewer, Ovid's Metamorphoses in European Culture (3 vols., 1933-1957).

For more information on Ovid, visit Britannica.com.

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Nāso, 43 BC–AD 17), Roman poet. He was born at Sulmo, in a valley of the Apennines east of Rome, on 20 March. He tells the story of his life in one of his own poems, Tristia IV. 10. His family was of equestrian rank, and he was educated at Rome; by his father's wish he studied rhetoric with a view to practising law, but his taste for poetry asserted itself. According to the Elder Pliny he applied himself to the emotional rather than the argumentative side of rhetoric. He travelled, and visited Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. For a time he held some minor official posts in Rome, but soon abandoned public life for poetry. He was one of the group of poets around Messalla and stood slightly apart from the Augustan circle centred on Maecenas. Horace and Propertius were among his friends, but his warmest feelings were expressed in his elegy for Tibullus (Amores III. 9), also a member of Messalla's circle. Virgil he only saw. He was three times married and had one daughter, probably by his second wife. His third wife remained devoted to him, and loyal during his exile.

Ovid's poetry had made him a leading figure in the social and literary circles at Rome, when in AD 8 he was suddenly banished by Augustus to Tǒmis on the western shore of the Black Sea and his books removed from the public libraries. (He suffered only relegatio, which meant that he retained his property and civic rights at Rome, not the more severe exsilium.) According to Ovid himself the grounds for this sentence were two, carmen and error, that is, a poem and a blunder; the poem was the Ars amatoria, published eight years before. The error, which Ovid refers to only obliquely, but insists was not scelus, ‘a crime’, was connected with the Julian family to which Augustus belonged; Ovid seems to have been present when something culpable was done, perhaps being involved in one of the adulteries of Augustus' granddaughter Julia, also banished in AD 8. The error must have provided the occasion for the emperor to satisfy his resentment at the poem, which ran counter to his moralistic legislation and had been published and won enormous success soon after Augustus discovered his daughter Julia (see (4)) to be a notorious adulteress (2 BC). Ovid has described in a famous poem (Tristia 1. 3) his last sad night at Rome and the hardships of his voyage to Tomis, and many of the poems of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto (see below) attest the tedious years of boredom, deprivation, and even danger (from barbarian attack) he had to endure, as well as the rigours of the climate, in that bleak land. There he died after ten years of unbroken exile. He eventually became reconciled to its inhabitants: they were kind and considerate and won his esteem. Though the city was a Greek foundation, half the population was Getic and either spoke Greek with Getic accent or used the local language. Ovid not only learned the language but wrote in it a poem (which has not survived) in honour of Augustus and Tiberius.

The order in which Ovid wrote his works is difficult to establish but is roughly as follows (see under each name): Amores, of which the first edition may have appeared as early as 20 BC, the second shortly before the Ars amatoria; Heroides, published between the first and second editions of Amores; Medicamina faciei femineae, written before the third book of the Ars amatoria, i.e. perhaps before 1 BC; the first two books of the Ars amatoria (published not before 1 BC, the third book was added later); Remedia amoris, AD 1; Metamorphoses and Fasti contemporaneously, from AD 2 onwards; Tristia, AD 9; Ibis, c. AD 11; Epistulae ex Ponto I–III, AD 13 (book IV probably appeared posthumously). A tragedy, Medea, was praised by Quintilian and Tacitus, but only two lines survive. The poems Halieutica, of which only a fragment survives, Nux, and Consolatio ad Liviam, all attributed to Ovid, were probably not by him. All Ovid's works are in elegiac couplets except for Metamorphoses (and Halieutica), in hexameters (see METRE).

Ovid was born in the year after the murder of Julius Caesar, too late to experience the horrors of civil war and so to welcome the policies of the Augustan regime. He was single-mindedly devoted to poetry, and his virtuosity, linguistic as well as metrical, was considerable. He refined even more strictly the rules of composition for the elegiac couplet. His wit and inventiveness make him the most consistently entertaining of the Roman poets, and a brilliant, sometimes over-exuberant, epigrammatist. Frivolous and irresponsible his poetry may sometimes seem, but when, as not infrequently happens, his imaginative sympathy is aroused, he can write movingly and simply, without artificiality or straining for effect. He is a gifted story-teller, skilful at focusing upon the telling scene or significant moment in a narrative, and with a sensitivity to natural beauty rare in the ancient world. The Elder Seneca has preserved a story illustrating Ovid's fondness for verbal extravagance. He was once asked by his friends if they might choose three lines to be excised from his works. He agreed, on condition that he might choose three lines that were on no account to be sacrificed. The lines chosen on each side turned out to be the same. One of them was (of the Minotaur), semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem, ‘a man half bull and a bull half man’.

As a story-teller and guide to Greek myth and Roman legend Ovid was very influential on later Roman writers and was read, quoted, and adapted during the Middle Ages. He was the favourite Latin poet of the Renaissance. Shakespeare seems to have been well acquainted with Ovid in Latin as well as in Arthur Golding's excellent English translation of the Metamorphoses (1565–7).

Quotes:

"We are ever striving after what is forbidden, and coveting what is denied us."

"A short absence is the safest."

"Time is generally the best doctor."

"In an easy matter. Anybody can be eloquent."

"The spirited horse, which will try to win the race of its own accord, will run even faster if encouraged."

"Bear patiently with a rival."

See more famous quotes by Ovid

Ovid (43 b.c.e.-17 c.e.) was a postclassical poet of the Roman Empire. He is renowned for his ability to meld the reality of the waking world with dream-like elements in his prose and poetry. Depending on the source, scholars refer to Ovid being either the last of the poets of the golden age, or the first of the poets of the silver age. He was banished to the city of Tomis in 11 c.e. for unknown reasons.

In a letter written during his exile, he described the agony that refused to leave him, even while asleep, and the suppressed wishes that made themselves known in his nightmares. In his great work Metamorphoses, he devotes a section to the description of the "Dream of Erysichthon." Erysichthon is cursed, doomed to starve no matter what he eats or how much. In the end, it causes him to devour the entire world, and this is followed by the rendering of his own flesh. Ovid compares Erysichthon to Fames, who is a living corpse surviving on a minimal diet. The incorporation of these nightmarish elements in Ovid's morose poetry exemplifies the irony that characterizes these events.

For other uses, see Ovid (disambiguation).

Ovid
Latin poet ovid.
Born	March 20, 43 BC Sulmo, Roman Republic
Died	17 or 18 AD Tomis (present Constanţa), Scythia Minor, Greek colony
Occupation	Poet
Influences Virgil, Homer, Cicero
Influenced Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, William Shakespeare

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17 or 18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who wrote about love, seduction, and mythological transformation.

He is considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature.

The Elegiac couplet is the meter of most of Ovid's poems: the Amores — Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris — are didactic long poems; the Fasti, about the Roman calendar; the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, about cosmetics; fictional letters from mythologic heroines, the Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum; and all of the works written in exile (five Tristia books, four Epistulae ex Ponto books, and "Ibis", a long curse-poem).

The two extant fragments of the tragedy Medea are in iambic trimeter and anapest, respectively; the Metamorphoses is in dactylic hexameter, also known as "epic meter," which was used in the Aeneid by Virgil and the Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer.

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Works 2.1 Extant authentic works 2.2 Lost authentic works and spurious works 3 Works and artists whom Ovid inspired 3.1 Retellings, adaptations, and translations of Ovidian works 4 Attitude in Romania 5 See also 6 Notes 7 Further reading 8 External links

Life and work

Ovid was born in Sulmo (Sulmona), in an Apennine valley, east of Rome, to an equestrian family, and was educated in Rome. His father wished him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to the emotional, not the argumentative pole of rhetoric.

After the death of his brother, Ovid renounced law and began travelling — to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. He held minor public posts, but resigned to pursue poetry. He was part of the circle centered upon the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He was thrice-married and twice-divorced by the time he was thirty years old; yet only one marriage yielded offspring — a daughter. ^[1]

Originally, the Amores were a five-book collection, circa 20 BC; the surviving, extant version, reduced to three books, includes poems written as late as AD 1. Book 1 contains 15 elegiac love poems about aspects of love. Most of the Amores is tongue-in-cheek, and, while Ovid adhered to standard elegiac themes — such as the exclusus amator (locked-out lover) lamenting before a paraklausithyron (a locked door) — he portrays himself as romantically capable, not emotionally struck by it, (unlike Propertius, whose poetry portrays him under love's foot). He writes about adultery, rendered illegal in Augustus's marriage law reforms of 18 BC. Ovid's next poem, the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, parodies didactic poetry whilst being a manual about seduction and intrigue.^[2] He identifies this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, which was one cause of his banishment.

By AD 8, he had completed Metamorphoses, an epic poem derived from Greek mythology. The subject is "forms changed into new bodies". From the emergence of the cosmos from formless mass to the organized, material world, to the deification of Julius Caesar, the poem tells of transformation. The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies — trees, rocks, animals, flowers, constellations et cetera. Famous myths, such as Apollo and Daphne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pygmalion are contained. It explains many myths alluded to in other works, and is a valuable source about Roman religion, because many characters are gods or offspring of Olympian gods.

Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1859. National Gallery (London).

In AD 8, Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis, on the Black Sea, for political reasons. Ovid wrote that his crime was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake", ^[3] claiming that his crime was worse than murder, ^[4] more harmful than poetry. ^[5][6] The Emperor's grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, were banished around the time of his banishment; Julia's husband, Lucius Aenilius Paullus, was put to death for conspiracy against Augustus; Ovid might have known of that. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC were fresh in the Roman mind. These promoted monogamous marriage to increase the population's birth rate. Ovid's writing concerned the serious crime of adultery, which was punishable by banishment.

In exile, he wrote two poetry collections titled Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, illustrating his sadness and desolation. Being far from Rome, he had no access to libraries, thus might have been forced to abandon the Fasti poem about the Roman calendar, of which exist only the first six books — January through June. In the Epistulae ex Ponto he claims friendship with the natives of Tomis (in the Tristia they are frightening barbarians) and to have written a poem in their language (Ex P. 4.13.19-20). And yet he pined for Rome and for his third wife, as many of the poems are to her. Some are also to the Emperor Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and God. Yet others are to himself, to friends in Rome, and sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing loneliness and hope of recall from banishment or exile. The first two lines of the Tristia communicate his misery:

Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:

ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!

Ovid's statue in Constanţa/Tomis, the city where he died

Little book — for I won't hinder you — go on to the city without me:

Alas for me, because your master is not allowed to go with you!

Ovid died at Tomis after some ten years. He was allegedly buried a few kilometers away in a nearby town. In 1930 that town was renamed Ovidiu in his honor. Also, a statue commemorates him in the Romanian city of Tomis (contemporary Constanţa). The statue's Latin inscription reads (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.

Works

Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys’s 1632 London edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished.

Extant authentic works

• Amores ("The Loves"), five books, published in 16 BC, and revised to three books ca. AD 1.
• 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.
• Medicamina Faciei Femineae ("Women's Facial Cosmetics"), The Art of Beauty, 100 lines survive; 5 BC.
• Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love"), three books; first two books published 1 BC, the third book was published later.
• Remedia Amoris ("The Cure for Love"), 1 book, published AD 1.
• Fasti ("The Festivals"), 6 books extant, about the first semester of the year, about the Roman calendar. Finished by AD 8, possibly published posthumously.
• Metamorphoses, ("Transformations"), 15 books published ca. AD 8.
• Ibis a poem written ca. AD 9.
• Tristia ("Sorrows"), five books published AD 10.
• Epistulae ex Ponto ("Letters from the Black Sea"), four books published AD 10.

Lost authentic works and spurious works

• Consolatio ad Liviam ("Consolation to Livia")
• Halieutica ("On Fishing") — considered spurious, and identified as an eponymous poem by Ovid.
• Medea, a tragedy about Medea
• Nux ("The Walnut Tree")
• A volume of poems in Getic, the language of Dacia, where Ovid was exiled, not extant (possibly fictitious).

Works and artists whom Ovid inspired

Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.

See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples.

• (c.800–810) Moduin, a poet in the court circle of Charlemagne, adopts the pen name Naso.
• (1100s) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature
• (1200s) The Roman de la Rose
• (1300s) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, Juan Ruiz
• (1400s) Sandro Botticelli
• (1500s-1600s) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Marston, Cephalus and Procris; Narcissus
• (1600s) John Milton,Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Luis de Góngora's La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 1613, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin, 1651, Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis by Peter Paul Rubens, c.1620
• (1820s) During his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin compared himself to Ovid; memorably versified in the epistle To Ovid (1821). The exiled Ovid also features in his long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824).
• (1916) James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a quotation from Book 8 of Metamorphoses and introduces Stephen Dedalus. The Ovidian reference to "Daedalus" was in Stephen Hero, but then metamorphosed to "Dedalus" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses.
• (1920s) The title of the second poetry collection by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is about his hungry, violent years immediately after the October Revolution.
• (1951) Six Metamorphoses after Ovid by Benjamin Britten, for solo oboe, evokes images of Ovid's characters from Metamorphoses.
• (1960) Dieu est né en exil, the novel by the Romanian writer Vintila Horia about Ovid's stay in exile (the novel received the Gouncourt prize in 1960).
• (1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life is about Ovid's exile in Tomis.
• (1998) In Pandora, by Anne Rice, Pandora cites Ovid as a favorite poet and author of the time, quoting him to her lover Marius.
• (2000) The Art of Love by Andrew Rissik, a drama, part of a trilogy, which speculates on the crime which sent Ovid into exile. Broadcast April 11 on BBC Radio 4, with Stephen Dillane and Juliet Aubrey (not to be confused with the 2004 radio play by the same title on Radio 4).
• (2004) The Art of Love by Robin Brooks, a comedy, emphasizing Ovid's role as lover. Broadcast May 23 on BBC Radio 4, with Bill Nighy and Anne-Marie Duff (not to be confused with the 2000 radio play by the same title on Radio 3).
• (2006) American musician Bob Dylan's album Modern Times contains songs with borrowed lines from Ovid's Poems of Exile, from Peter Green's translation. The songs are "Workingman's Blues #2", "Ain't Talkin'", "The Levee's Gonna Break", and "Spirit on the Water".
• (2007) Russian author Alexander Zorich's novel Roman Star is about the last years of Ovid's life.

Dante twice mentions him in:

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

Retellings, adaptations, and translations of Ovidian works

• (1767) Apollo et Hyacinthus, an early opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• (1949) Orphée A film by Jean Cocteau, 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, with urchins and drug addicts as the gods.
• (1994) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun is an anthology of contemporary poetry 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, a short story collection retelling several of Ovid's fables.
• (2002) An adaptation of Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman was performed at the Circle on the Square Theater ^[7]
• (2006) Patricia Barber's song cycle, Mythologies

Attitude in Romania

As Ovid spent the last years of his life and literary work at what is now Romania, Romanian nationalists have adopted him as "The First Romanian Poet" and placed him in the pantheon of Romanian national heroes. Ovidiu (name) is a common male first name in Romania.

See also

Literature portal

• Latin literature
• Metamorphoses (poem)
• Amores (Ovid)

Notes

1. ^ JSTOR - The Scholarly Journal Archive
2. ^ Hornblower, Simon; Antony Spawforth (1999). Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press. pp. 1084-1086. 
3. ^ Ovid, Tristia 2.207
4. ^ Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 2.9.72
5. ^ Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3.72
6. ^ Norwood, Frances, "The Riddle of Ovid's Relegatio", Classical Philogy (1963) p. 158
7. ^ Talkin' Broadway Review: Metamorphoses

Further reading

• Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Charles Martindale. Cambridge, 1988.
• Richard A. Dwyer "Ovid in the Middle Ages" in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 1989, Pp. 312-14
• Federica Bessone. P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula XII: Medea Iasoni. Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1997. Pp. 324.
• Theodor Heinze. P. Ovidius Naso. Der XII. Heroidenbrief: Medea an Jason. Mit einer Beilage: Die Fragmente der Tragodie Medea. Einleitung, Text & Kommentar. Mnemosyne Supplement 170 Leiden: Brill, 1997. Pp. xi + 288.
• R. A. Smith. Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil. Ann Arbor; The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp.ix+ 226.
• Michael Simpson, The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Pp. 498.
• Philip Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 408.
• Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium. Edited by Geraldine Herbert-Brown. Oxford, OUP, 2002, 327 pp.
• Susanne Gippert, Joseph Addison's Ovid: An Adaptation of the Metamorphoses in the Augustan Age of English Literature. Die Antike und ihr Weiterleben, Band 5. Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 2003. Pp. 304.
• Heather van Tress, Poetic Memory. Allusion in the Poetry of Callimachus and the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Mnemosyne, Supplementa 258. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Pp. ix, 215.
• Ziolkowski, Theodore, Ovid and the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 262.
• Desmond, Marilynn, Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 232.
• Rimell, Victoria, Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 235.
• Pugh, Syrithe, Spenser and Ovid. Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. 302.
• Pasco-Pranger, Molly, Founding the Year: Ovid's Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar. Mnemosyne Suppl., 276. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pp. 326.
• Martin Amann, Komik in den Tristien Ovids. (Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft, 31). Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2006. Pp. 296.
• P. J. Davis, Ovid & Augustus: A political reading of Ovid's erotic poems. London: Duckworth, 2006. Pp. 183.
• Peter E. Knox (ed.), Oxford Readings in Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 541.
• Andreas N. Michalopoulos, Ovid Heroides 16 and 17. Introduction, text and commentary. (ARCA: Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs, 47). Cambridge: Francis Cairns, 2006. Pp. x, 409.
• R. Gibson, S. Green, S. Sharrock, The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 375.
• Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 206.
• Montuschi, Claudia, Il tempo in Ovidio. Funzioni, meccanismi, strutture. Accademia la colombaria studi, 226. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2005. Pp. 463.
• Johnson, Patricia J. Ovid before Exile: Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses. (Wisconsin Studies in Classics). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Pp. x, 184.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ovid

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ovid

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ovid

• University of Virginia, "Ovid Illustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and Text"
• Works by Ovid at Project Gutenberg
• Multilingual Translation
  • schueler-latein.de
• 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
  • Perseus/Tufts: Commentary on the Heroides of Ovid
• SORGLL: Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, 183-235, (Daedalus & Icarus); read by Stephen Daitz

Persondata
NAME	Ovid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Roman poet
DATE OF BIRTH	March 20, 43 BC
PLACE OF BIRTH	Sulmo
DATE OF DEATH	17 AD
PLACE OF DEATH	Tomis

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