Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet born on 20 March 43 BC in Sulmo, modern Sulmona, in an Apennine valley east of Rome. He lived during the reign of Augustus and was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace. With them, he is often ranked among the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian later considered him the last of the Latin love elegists.

Ovid came from an important equestrian family, the gens Ovidia, and was educated in rhetoric at Rome under Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro. His father wanted him to study rhetoric so he could practice law, but Seneca the Elder says Ovid leaned toward the emotional rather than the argumentative side of rhetoric. After his brother died at the age of twenty, Ovid gave up law, traveled to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily, and held minor public posts before resigning, probably around 29 to 25 BC, to pursue poetry.

His literary life began early. His first recitation is dated to around 25 BC, when he was eighteen. He belonged to the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and seems to have known poets connected with Maecenas. In his own autobiographical writing, Ovid mentions friendships with Macer, Propertius, Ponticus, and Bassus, says he heard Horace recite, and notes that he only barely met Virgil and Tibullus. He married three times, had divorced twice by the age of thirty, and had one daughter and grandchildren through her.

For the first twenty-five years of his career, Ovid wrote mainly in elegiac meter on erotic themes. His earliest surviving work is thought to be the Heroides, letters from mythological heroines to absent lovers, possibly published in 19 BC. The Amores, poems addressed to Corinna, appeared first in a five-book collection thought to date to 16 or 15 BC, with the surviving three-book version dated around 8 to 3 BC. His tragedy Medea was admired in antiquity but is no longer extant. He also wrote Medicamina Faciei, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris.

Ovid is most famous for the Metamorphoses, completed by AD 8, a fifteen-book mythological narrative in dactylic hexameters. It follows transformations in Greek and Roman mythology, from the emergence of the cosmos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. At the same time, he worked on the Fasti, a six-book poem in elegiac couplets on Roman festivals and astronomy, though his exile interrupted its composition.

In AD 8, Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he spent the last nine or ten years of his life and died in AD 17 or 18. Ovid attributed the punishment to carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake,” but did not explain the details. His poetry was widely imitated in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it strongly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the main sources for classical mythology today, which is why Ovid’s words still feel close to readers so many centuries later.