Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)

Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet born on 20 March 43 BC in Sulmo, a Paelignian town in an Apennine valley east of Rome. He lived during the reign of Augustus and died in AD 17 or 18. A younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, he is often grouped with them as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian later considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Ovid was widely popular in his own lifetime, though the final years of his life were spent far from Rome, in exile at Tomis on the Black Sea.

Much of what is known about Ovid comes from his own poetry, especially the autobiographical account in Tristia 4.10, along with evidence from Seneca the Elder and Quintilian. He was born into 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 Ovid’s gifts pulled in another direction. Seneca the Elder wrote that Ovid tended 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 to pursue poetry, probably around 29 to 25 BC.

Ovid’s first recitation is dated to around 25 BC, when he was eighteen. He became part of the circle around the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and seems to have known poets connected with Maecenas. In Tristia, he names friendships with Macer, Propertius, Ponticus, and Bassus, and says he heard Horace recite. He barely met Virgil and Tibullus, though he admired Tibullus’s elegies. Ovid married three times and had divorced twice by the age of thirty. He had one daughter, and grandchildren through her. His final wife, connected in some way to the gens Fabia, helped him during his exile.

For the first twenty-five years of his literary career, Ovid wrote mainly in elegiac meter on erotic themes. His early works include the Heroides, letters from mythological heroines to absent lovers, and the Amores, poems addressed to a lover named Corinna. His tragedy Medea was admired in antiquity but no longer survives. He also wrote the fragmentary Medicamina Faciei, the Ars Amatoria or The Art of Love, and the Remedia Amoris. By AD 8 he had completed the Metamorphoses, a fifteen-book mythological narrative in dactylic hexameters, moving from the emergence of the cosmos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Its stories of human beings changed into trees, rocks, animals, flowers, constellations, and other forms made it one of the main sources of classical mythology.

In AD 8, Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis, the capital of the newly organized province of Moesia, without the participation of the Senate or a Roman judge. Ovid described the cause as carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake,” but did not give full details. The exile changed all the poetry that followed. At the same time, he had been working on the Fasti, a six-book poem in elegiac couplets on Roman festivals and astronomy, but that work was interrupted and probably abandoned at Tomis. Ovid’s range, wit, speed, and feeling made his poetry much imitated in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it greatly influenced Western art and literature. His words still speak because they turn change, desire, loss, and memory into stories that remain clear and alive on the page.