Ancient Classics: Ovid

Finished after the emperor Augustus Caesar had exiled Ovid from Rome to the city of Tomi on the Black Sea, the poet's Metamorphoses compose a work universally acknowledged to be his masterpiece. Both the poem's meter, dactylic hexameter, and its length, 15 books, suggest that he cast the work in the epic mode—albeit the epic redefined, for Metamorphoses gave birth to an epic poem of a new sort. It takes a cue from Ovid's Greek predecessors of the Hellenistic Age by bringing together a collection of supernatural transformations of shape. Looking even further back to such models as Hesiod's Theogony, Ovid takes universal history and the changes that the gods have both wrought and undergone as his announced subject, and he establishes in his readers the expectation that the poem will proceed chronologically from the Creation until the poet's own time. That expectation, however, the poet soon and delightfully disappoints by, without altogether deserting chronology, changing the organizational principle into one arising from thematic correspondence and emotional effect. The poem achieves this by taking its readers through a compendium of the central myths of Greece and Rome...

The son of a family of the Roman knightly or equestrian class, Ovid was born at Sulmo in Abbruzzi. His father hoped that Ovid and his brother would become influential public figures and sent the boys first to Rome and then to Athens for an education centered on the study of rhetoric. Ovid, however, was so passionately drawn to the study of literature and so intensely driven by poetic impulse that, as the poet himself admits, anything he wrote automatically took the form of verse. Perhaps in deference to his father's wishes, Ovid briefly occupied minor public office, but his passion for literary endeavor soon led him to abandon public affairs and pursue the usually hand-to-mouth existence of a poet. With the support, however, of a powerful literary patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, Ovid soon distinguished himself and eventually emerged as the leading poet of Rome...

(Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 bc–ad 17), poet, was born at Sulmo in the Abruzzi on 20 March. Our chief source for his life is one of his own poems, Tr. 4. 10. As the son of an old equestrian family, Ovid was sent to Rome for his education. His rhetorical studies under Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro, in which he evidently acquitted himself with distinction, are described by the elder Seneca (Controv. 2. 2. 8–12; cf. 9. 5. 17). His education was rounded off by the usual Grand Tour through Greek lands (Tr. 1. 2. 77–8, Ep. ex Pont. 2. 10. 21 ff.). After holding some minor judicial posts, he apparently abandoned public life for poetry—thus enacting one of the commonplaces of Roman elegiac autobiography. With early backing from Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (Pont. 1. 7. 27–8) Ovid quickly gained prominence as a writer, and by ad 8 he was the leading poet of Rome...