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Ovidius (43 BC-17 AD) - OVID - in full Publius Ovidius Naso |
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Roman poet, noted especially for his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Metamorphoses. Ovid was the first major writer to grow up under the empire. He died far from home, in a desolate town by the Black Sea. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Ovidian stories were highly popular among artists, poets and in courts. In England the Metamorphoses was one of Chaucer's favorite books. If anyone among this people knows not the art of loving, let him read my poem, and having read be skilled in love. By skill swift ships are sailed and rowed, by skill nimble chariots are driven: by skill must Love be guided. Well fitted for chariots and pliant reins was Automedon, and Tiphys was the helmsman of the Haemonian ship: me hath Venus set over tender Love as master in the art; I shall be called the Tiphys and Automedon of Love. (from The Art of Love and Other Poems by Ovid, with an English translation by J. H. Mozley, London: William Heinemann, MCMLVII, p. 13) Publius Ovidius Naso was a member of the Roman knightly class. Ovid came from Sulmo in the territory of the Paeligni. His last name meant a "nose", perhaps after some ancestor who had a big nose. Ovid's parents had destined him for a career in law. He studied rhetoric under Aurelius Fuscus and Porcius Latro and his education was completed in Athens, where he decided to become a poet, and rich and famous. With the poet Macer, Ovid travelled in Asia Minor and Sicily. In Rome he started to practise law as one of the judges who tried testamentary and sometimes criminal cases. Legal phraseology is seen later in his writing. Soon he decided that public life did not suit him. Ovid retired to devote himself entirely to writing. He was married three times; his only daughter was probably his second wife. In a short while, Ovid gained the reputation of being the most brilliant poet of his generation. Among his first series of poems were love elegies, Amores, a fictitious romance between the poet and a woman named Corinna. Ovid never divulged the real identity of Corinna, whom he immortalized in his collection. She is slightly older than he, married to a much older man, and loves luxury. "So you and I, love, will enjoy the same wold-wide publicity, / And our names will be linked, for ever, with the gods." (from The Amores, in The Erotic Poems, translated with an introduction and notes by Peter Green, Penguin Books, 1982, p. 89) After several years as Ovid's mistress, she leaves him. Heroides was written in the form of love letters between mythological lovers, such as Paris and Helen, and Penelope and her husband Ulysses. The only exception is the fifteenth letter, in which the Greek poet Sappho writes to Phaon. This work shows Ovid's familiarity with Greek and Roman literature, as well as a knowledge of geography and astronomy. About at the age of forty Ovid published Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), an instruction book about seducing in three volumes, two for men and one for women. Expressing his disillusionment with old ideals the poet stated: "Let others worship the past; I much prefer the present, / Am delighted to be alive today." (from The Art of Love, in The Erotic Poems, p. 217) In Remedia Amoris Ovid answered to his critics and playfully turned upside down many of the instructions given in Ars Amatoria. In 1497, The Art of Love was burned with mirrors, cosmetics, musical instruments, gaming tables, and the works of Dante and Botticelli for their "immoral" content in Fra. Girolamo Savonarola's "bonfire of the vanities" in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The Metamorphoses, written in dactylic hexameters, was completed when Ovid was in his fifties. "My mind is intent on singing of shapes changed into new bodies", he said. The title of the work was a Greek word meaning "changes of shape". Its fifteen books dealt with mythological, legendary, and historical figures and recorded the history of the world from chaos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Hexameter was familiar to Ovid from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid. Characteristic of the epic is the view of the unpredictable nature of things and the instability of the forms of nature. Starting from Heraclitus's "all things flow, nothing abides", the idea that everything always changes had been an essential part of Greek thought, and was a driving force behind the history of the expansive Roman Empire. There are similarities between the Biblical creation story and Ovid's poem. "Before the sea was, and the lands, and the sky that hangs over all, the face of Nature showed alike in her whole round, which state have men called chaos: a rough, unordered mass of things . . . God – or kindlier Nature – composed this strife; for he rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land". Also Ovid's account culminates in the creation of man, who is "moulded into the form of the all-controlling gods." (The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey, 2017, pp. 29-40) Men are transformed into women and vice versa; stones become people; a statue is changed into a woman; a girl becomes a laurel tree, Neptune changes into a fierce-looking ox. Early Christian leaders regarded this kind of bodily transformations as heretical, though in the book of Genesis Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt. In the final metamorphosis the spirit of the murdered Julius Caesar is changed into a star. "However impossible these intensities might seem to be on one level, on another, apparently more significant level Ovid renders them with psychological truth and force. In his earlier books, preoccupied with erotic love, he had been a sophisticated entertainer. Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to the unique moment in history-the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire." (Ted Hughes, in The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997) Ovid's expectations of a quiet life was ruined when emperor
Augustus
banished him in 8 AD to Tomis, a fishing village on the northwest coast
of the Black Sea. Augustus had his works removed from public libraries,
too. "So I have arrived, and here I am in that horrible place", he
wrote in a poem. Ovid had been hailed as the successor to Virgil,
but he lived his last ten years among barbarians, who "fend off the
evil cold with skins and stitched breeches, / and of their bodies the
faces only show," as he said in Elegies of Gloom. (quoted in Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds by Hermann Frankel, Universoty of California Press, 1969, p. 125) The real reason for his exile remains a mystery. According to his poem Tristia, his crime had been twofold: "Duo crimina, carmen et error" (two crimes: a poem and a mistake). For an urban poet who had declared Rome to be his only home, exile was the hardest punishment. Tomis had been founded by Greek traders and colonists, but at that time the Greeks had adopted the native garb and no one knew Latin. There was no Roman garrison. The Sarmatians of Scythian origins formed the majority of the people. In his own time Ovid was an immensely popular writer, but knew how capricious people are: "So long as you are secure you will count many friends; if your life becomes clouded you will be alone." (Tristia, in Tristia, Ex Ponto, with an English translation by Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Harvard University Press, MCMXXXIX, p. 45) The reasons behind the emperor's decisions are unsolved, but he may have objected to a rumored affair between Ovid and the emperor's nymphomaniac daughter Julia, whose portrait is drawn among others in Robert Graves's Claudius novels. Perhaps Ovid witnessed the affair between Julia and Silanus. Augustus himself wanted to restore old Roman family values and criminalize adultery, but he wasn't a good example: he had divorced his wife to marry his mistress, Livia. In the beginning was the Golden Age, when men of their own accord, without threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right. There were no penalties to be afraid of, no bronze tablets were erected, carrying threats of legal action, no crowd of wrong-doers, anxious for mercy, trembled before the face of their judge: indeed, there were no judges, men lived securely without them. (from The Methamorphoses of Ovid, translated and with an introduction by Mary M. Innes, Penguin Books, 1955, p. 31) Ovid's poems in exile manifested complicated motives. He sent poetic supplications to the Emperor, which were published under the titles Tristia (Songs of Sadness) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). At the same time he covertly criticized Augustus's 'New Rome.' Among Ovid's later works is Fasti, poem of some five thousand lines on the Roman calendar, written and revised in the years between AD 2 and 17. Unlike his Metamorphoses, the "calendar poem" on the holidays and feast days of the Roman calendar, is anchored in Rome: sacred rites, history and legend, monuments, and characters. Ovid dedicated the work to the Emperor, but ambivalently interprets the ideals of the Augustan period. However, he does not mock them openly although he nearly reveals himself when Romulus, the other pater patriae of Rome, becomes an autocrat and rapist. It is believed that before being exiled, Ovid had parts of the work in a reasonably finished state. Noteworthy, the poem to Book 1 had established Germanicus, the adopted grandson of Augustus, as the literary inspiration for Fasti. The change in dedicee took place possibly after the death of Augustus. Ovid never returned to Rome. After Tiberius's succession the visit of his nephew Germanicus, also a poet, raised new hopes, but in vain. The relationship between Ovid and Tiberius never warmed over the years. Everything in the Metamorphoses changed, but in real life Ovid's exile was permanent. To the end, he keep up the hope of return to Rome. Ovid died in Tomis on the rim of the empire in AD 17 and was buried in the Sarmatian soil. Before his death Ovid had learned Sarmatian language, and even composed poems in it. The local people called him a bard. Tomi or Tomis of today is Constanta, a seaport in Romania, characterized by gloomy architecture and rusty cranes in the harbor. A statue of Ovid, designed by the Italian artist Ettore Ferrari in 1887, was erected in Piata Ovidiu. With Ovid's death, the Golden Age of Roman literature came to an end. Full of veiled political and historical references, the Metamorphoses lived on to become one of the major sources of ancient mythology in the middle ages. The alchemist Petrus Bonus claimed that it dealt esoterically with the philosophers' stone. Through the Renaissance up to modern times, from Dante to Ezra Pound, Ovid has inspired generations of poets, but he has also enjoyed fame as an immoralist. This did not stop Martin Luther from reading his works. Among several translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses is England's poet laureate Ted Hughes's selection (1997), which won the Whitbread Award in 1998. Hughes chose for his 24 translations some of the most violent and disturbing narratives Ovid wrote, including the stories of 'Echo and Narcissus,' 'Bacchus and Pentheus,' and 'Semele's rape by Jove'. The book followed the anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995, ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun), in which other prominent English-language poets, such as Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, and Charles Simic, contributed their own interpretations of the great classic of ancient Roman myths. In the 18th century scenes from Ovid appeared on Chinese porcelain made for European markets. Ars Amatoria was first translated into Chinese in 1929; a complete (prose) translation of Metamorphoses came out in 1984. For further reading: History in Ovid by Ronald Syme (1979); Ovid in Sicily by Allen Mandelbaum (1986); Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influence on Literature and Art from Middle Ages to the Twentieth ed. by Charles Martindale (1988); Ovid's Poetry of Exile by David R. Slavitt (1989); Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard by Kathleen A. Perry (1990); The Severed Word: Ovid's Heroides and the Novela Sentimental by Marina Scordilis Brownlee (1990); Ovid and the Fasti: An Historical Study by Geraldine Herbert-Brown (1994); Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid's Exile Poetry by Gareth D. Williams (1994); After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun (1995); Playing With Time: Ovid and the Fasti by Carole E. Newlands (1995); Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare by M. L. Stapleton (1997); The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses by Garth Tissol (1997); Contrast As Narrative Technique in Ovid's Metamorphoses by Richard Albert Spencer (1997); Tales from Ovid by Ovid, ed. Ted Hughes (1997); The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse by Alessandro Barchiesi (1997); Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid Through Chaucer, ed. by James J. Paxson and Cynthia A. Gravlee (1998); A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses by Stephen Michael Wheeler (1999); Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender by Efrossini Spentzou (2003); Fasti 1: A Commentary by Steven J. Green (2004); A Companion to Ovid, edited by Peter E. Knox (2009); Ovid by Katharina Volk (2010); Young Ovid: an Unfinished Biography by Diane Middlebrook (2014); A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, edited by John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (2014); Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso by Paul Barolsky (2014); Ovid: a Poet on the Margins by Laurel Fulkerson (2016); Ovid in China: Reception, Translation, and Comparison, edited by Thomas J. Sienkewicz, Jinyu Liu (2022); Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher, edited by Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams (2022); Ambiguity and Religion in Ovid's Fasti: Religious Innovation and the Imperial Family by Darja Sterbenc Erker (2023) Selected works:
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