Biography

Ovid (AH-vuhd) was born Publius Ovidius Naso into a relatively wealthy family in Sulmo, Italy, on March 20, 43 b.c.e., one year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Ovid's father's name is thought to be Leonides. From an early age, Ovid showed a great interest in writing poetry, but his father discouraged him because he considered poetry an unprofitable pursuit for his son. At the age of twelve, Ovid was sent from his small town in the mountains of central Italy to Rome, less than a hundred miles away, where he was to be educated for a career in politics. This same year, 31 b.c.e., saw the Battle of Actium bring defeat to Cleopatra and Marc Antony at the hands of Octavian, the future Emperor Caesar Augustus; for the rest of his life, Ovid would be under the influence of Augustus.

Ovid learned from the best rhetoric teachers in Rome. In addition to writing and public speaking, he probably studied the language and literature of Greece. Roman writer Seneca the Younger was several years older than Ovid, but many years later Seneca wrote of observing the boy Ovid in class and said that even as a youth he displayed a talent for writing and that his prose was always poetic. In 26 or 25 b.c.e., when Ovid was in late adolescence, he read and recited some of his poetry in public.

After completing his schooling in Rome, Ovid probably spent his early twenties studying in Athens and traveling in Asia Minor, as was customary for educated young men. His knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry, drama, and myth was becoming impressive. Returning to Italy, Ovid settled in the capital of Rome. He was married early in life, but the marriage was not successful, nor was a second one, although it produced his only child, a daughter. Eventually, Ovid married a third time, and this marriage was long and apparently very happy.

For a brief time, he held minor political offices but decided quickly that politics had no appeal for him; at the age of twenty-three he chose, instead, to devote his life to the passion that had held him captive since childhood: writing poetry. It was a good time to be a poet in Rome because the emperor, Augustus, supported the arts as a means of reestablishing the old Roman virtues of hearth and home, patriotism, and morality. Unfortunately, Ovid's first publishing venture did not address those values.

Borrowing a traditional Roman subject, Ovid wrote a collection of erotic love poems. The precise date that Amores (c. 20 b.c.e.; English translation, 1597) was first published is unknown; no copy of it has survived, but a second edition of the work, also of unknown date, indicates that the original was published in five books, while the second edition was reduced to three. The Amores is a collection of fifty poems written in elegiac couplets, the meter that Ovid used for all of his poems except the Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567). Although the poems are written in the first person, the object was to present a wide range of experiences that any young Roman man might have had under the spell of love. Some of the experiences that the poet claims are conventional ones in love elegies; thus, critics warn against trying to find biographical information about Ovid himself in these early poems. Still, the poetry does contain a vivid portrait of Roman daily life at the races, at the theater, and at the banquet table, some of it fairly decadent.

While still writing the Amores, Ovid probably began another work, the Heroides (before 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567), a collection of fifteen letters written in the voices of mythological and legendary women. The letters are directed to the men in their lives at a moment of great emotional upheaval, heroic men whose stories were and are well known: Penelope to Ulysses, Medea to Jason, Dido to Aeneas. Ovid found an untold feminine perspective in the famous myths in the stories of the women who were swept aside in the wake of the hero and conveyed the poignance of their suffering.

Perhaps inspired by his work on the Heroides, sometime before 8 c.e., Ovid wrote his only play, the tragedy Medea, which was very well received. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus called it one of the greatest of Roman tragedies, but all that remains of it today are two lines quoted by his contemporaries. Given the play's apparent success, it is hard to imagine why he never wrote another. In any case, by this time his works had earned him quite a popular reputation. Sometime after his success with the drama, Ovid added to his earlier Heroides. The original work had contained only letters from women to their men; he added six more letters, this time from the heroes to their women and the women's replies. For example, Paris's love letter to Helen, while still a guest in her home in Greece, and her reply reveal the tentative beginnings of a passion that was to result in a long, heroic war.

By the time that Ovid was in his early forties, around 2 b.c.e., he wrote one of his most famous and influential books, the Ars amatoria (Art of Love, 1612). It was a type of work that was quite popular in Rome at the time, instructional poetry. The great author of the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), Vergil, for example, had written his Georgics (c. 37-29 b.c.e.; English translation, 1589) on methods of agriculture and animal husbandry. Ovid's latest work, however, contained lessons on the art of seduction.

The Art of Love may have proved to be the undoing of Ovid in the eyes of Augustus Caesar. The emperor was a generation older than Ovid and, unlike him, had lived through war and civil strife. At a time when moral standards were lax and divorce and adultery were rampant, the emperor was trying to effect sweeping moral reform in dissolute Rome; he promoted humble living, encouraged religious piety, upheld chastity and sanctity of marriage, and imposed laws against sexual misconduct. In short, he wanted Romans to return to the values and virtues of a simpler past that Ovid had not known. Ovid's work would seem to mock much that the emperor held dear. Ovid had written, for example, that others could pine for old times if they wished, but he preferred the present, and his Art of Love instructed men on such things as the best places in Rome to meet women and informed women on how to communicate secretly with their lovers at a banquet when their husbands were present. It was a sophisticated, titillating, and wildly popular work that seemed to fly in the face of the emperor's campaign, and just as the book reached its peak of popularity, the emperor discovered that his own daughter was an adulterer. Although Ovid must have been an irritant to the emperor, Augustus took no action against him at the time of the book's appearance; nonetheless, he apparently harbored a grudge against the poet and later made him pay dearly for his irreverence and lack of discretion.

As Ovid was approaching middle age, he began what would prove to be his masterpiece, a collection of about 250 stories from Greek and Roman mythology, linked by the theme of bodies transformed into new shapes, hence the title, Metamorphoses. His professed intent is to tell the history of metamorphosis chronologically from the beginning of time until his own times. His pseudohistory has the sweep and scope of an epic, for it not only begins with the creation of the world but also ranges through most of the known world: Europe, Africa, and Asia. Every hero and heroine of Greek and Roman legend and myth appears in the Metamorphoses; because the stories evolved from oral traditions and from written works that have vanished, Ovid's masterpiece preserved for history this rich Greco-Roman legacy.

By 8 c.e., Ovid was working on his final version of the Metamorphoses and had half completed a long poem about the holidays and rituals of the Roman calendar, the Fasti, for which the work is named, when disaster befell him. Emperor Augustus banished Ovid from Rome to Tomis, a bleak, semibarbarous outpost on the Black Sea (in modern Romania). A further indignity was that the emperor had all Ovid's books removed from public libraries. Since censorship was unusual in Rome, this action speaks loudly of the emperor's conviction that Ovid's works were morally degrading. The full reason will never be known, for Ovid would always insist that he had done nothing illegal or immoral, but he did say that his poetry was part of the reason for his downfall. Augustus had recently discovered that his own granddaughter, Julia, was an adulterer, as her mother had been. It is possible, therefore, that Ovid became a scapegoat for the emperor's inability to control his own family, much less reform Roman society.

Ovid was spared the harsher punishment of exile, which would have stripped him of citizenship and of property. He retained both, but because his beloved wife had to stay in Rome to oversee their estate and finances, they were separated forever. She wanted to accompany him to Tomis, but he refused, optimistically believing that the emperor would relent and let him return. As soon as he arrived in Tomis, Ovid immediately began attempts to ingratiate himself with Augustus, but as time passed and it was clear that Augustus would not be moved to show mercy to him, he was devastated. Ovid's remaining works would be written far from the people and the city that he loved, and almost every word that he wrote was to enlist sympathy for his cause and to persuade Augustus to recall him to Rome.

The first of Ovid's works in exile was a collection of poetic letters entitled Tristia (Sorrows, 1859), written between 8 and 12 c.e.; the poet's voice is filled with the sorrow of a man suffering loss and separation. He disguises the identities of the friends to whom the letters are written out of concern that association with him may be detrimental to the recipients. In truth, in some ways his banishment enhanced his fame, but at the same time some of his friends abandoned him. His next work, Ibis (after 8 c.e.; English translation, 1859), is an attack on just such a former friend whom historians have never been able to identify. His final work was Epistulae ex Ponto (after 8 c.e.; Letters from Pontus, 1639), another collection of letters that were not private missives but were clearly meant to be circulated and to be brought to the attention of Augustus. So that he would not be forgotten by the Romans, Ovid wrote a considerable amount of autobiography into his last works. For several years, Ovid humbled himself and argued his case, but Augustus remained deaf to his pleas and justifications. The emperor's death in 14 c.e. renewed Ovid's hopes of being returned to Rome, but Augustus's successor, Tiberius, also refused to relent.

For the first years of his banishment, Ovid was despondent; a man of great culture and learning, he was cast among barbarians whose language he did not speak. Despairing and ill because of the frigid climate, he felt isolated physically, emotionally, and intellectually. He was too social a creature, however, to remain set apart for long, and eventually he learned the language of the natives and, consummate poet that he was, composed a poem in it. Therefore, when Ovid died in Tomis at the age of fifty-nine or sixty in 17 c.e., far from the Rome that he loved, he was buried with honor by the local people with whom he had forged a mutual love and respect. Today, in Romania, a marker commemorates the great poet of Rome.

Analysis

Along with Vergil, Ovid is the preeminent artist of Augustan Rome, and he has remained popular in part because of his subject matter. He glorifies human experience and, in the process, reveals a keen understanding of psychology and the human psyche. His books on finding love, his ability to represent the feminine perspective in male-dominated literature, and his portraits of heroes and gods (who are immortal and yet as flawed as any mortal) brim over with insights into the workings of minds, hearts, and souls. His human and humane concerns no doubt explain his great popularity through the ages and his huge influence on Western European arts and artists—medieval writers Dante and Geoffrey Chaucer, Renaissance writers Petrarch and, later, John Milton, as well as modern poet T. S. Eliot. Painters, sculptors, and composers, too, have been influenced by this prolific writer of Augustan Rome.

Ovid was famed for his great knowledge and use of myths in his art, and in his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, he assumes the Herculean task of weaving 250 varied and complex stories into a coherent narrative. The work is a richly textured tapestry of stories that conform, for the most part, to his theme of eternal change.

The quality that most readers associate with Ovid is a sly, sophisticated wit. At a time when the emperor wanted nationalism and virtue celebrated in art, Ovid gave readers a taste of Roman humor. His own humor is never biting or sarcastic but good-natured. Additionally, he was fond of using irony as a comic device. His playfulness manifests itself in his work not only in his subject matter but also in his diction; he draws the reader's attention to the message and to the medium by using such techniques as plays on words, overstatement, paradox, echoes, and other devices. He was also one of the earliest writers to experiment with narrative perspective, the point of view from which a story is told. His Heroides presents famous stories from the perspective of characters traditionally regarded as secondary.

Realism is one of Ovid's great strengths as a writer; he had a keen eye for the telling details that breathe life into his stories. Capturing the exact pose, word, or physical detail, he burns the moment or scene into the reader's memory. One trait, however, for which both modern critics and his own contemporaries fault Ovid is his prolixity. Although his style itself is spare, he seems unable to offer only a few examples to support a point; instead, he piles example upon example upon example, soon wearying his reader.

The characteristic of Ovid's writing that makes him seem most modern is his inclination to express the point of view of women. In his love poetry, he includes advice to women about finding satisfactory love relationships, and he insists that the act of love should be a pleasure to both parties. In Heroides, he looks at the scene behind the hero, finds the forgotten or cruelly used woman, and gives her a voice, an opportunity to tell her story, which has usually been left out of the total picture.

Ovid was not given in general to philosophical musing or religious devotion; although his works are filled with gods and goddesses, to most Romans, religious observances were more form than substance, so that deities in Ovid's work would have commanded little credulity. What seems to have been most sacred to him are human experience and art. These are the subjects that he celebrates again and again in his writing.

Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses represents Ovid's greatest artistic challenge, 250 stories from Greek and Roman mythology, legend, and history woven into a loosely chronological continuous narrative, starting with the creation of the world and ending with the assassination of Julius Caesar. Written in the meter of epic poetry, dactylic hexameter, the stories concern the transformation of bodies into different forms, such as animals, plants, or stars, each story evolving from the preceding one. Almost every deity, hero, or heroine from classical times is represented in these tales. In fact, most of the myths with which modern readers are familiar were preserved by the Metamorphoses.

One important element that helps to hold this massive work together is the voice of the poet himself; instead of remaining completely outside the events that he narrates, Ovid asserts his presence in the poem by addressing the reader, as well as the characters, on occasion. The voice is witty, sophisticated, occasionally sympathetic, frequently mocking.

Ovid begins his tales with the ultimate metamorphosis, the transformation of primal cosmic matter into the beautiful, fruitful earth. He then describes the four ages of the earth, Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron, which saw the transformation of humanity from peaceful, innocent beings into bloodthirsty, deceitful exploiters of other humans and of the earth itself. An angry Jove intervenes in human affairs by sending a great flood and starting afresh with a new race of mortals, and the Metamorphoses begins, telling the story of one transformation after another through all of history and through most of the known world and Olympus. Some of the metamorphoses are grotesque, some humorous, some quaint, and some touching.

After the introductory material on the creation and on the first transformation effected by Jove, the poem divides into three parts that deal with the deities, heroes and heroines, and actual historical figures (although these divisions are blurred by Ovid's frequent digressions). The deities of the Metamorphoses frequently have the same flaws and foibles as the mortals in these stories. They can be petty, jealous, unfaithful, vengeful. In fact, the story of Apollo and Daphne stems from the revenge that Cupid takes on Apollo, who, in his arrogance, has offended Cupid. In retaliation, Cupid shoots him with a gold-tipped arrow that causes Apollo to fall helplessly in love with Daphne, who shuns him because Cupid has shot her with a lead-tipped arrow that makes her reject love completely. Thus, Apollo can only feel thwarted and frustrated as he seeks to woo the beautiful demigoddess who inspires his passion but cannot share it. Ironically, then, in this story, love becomes ruinous to the beloved.

As arrogant as he was with Cupid, Apollo calls Daphne foolish for fleeing him and reminds her that he is no common shepherd or farm boy but a great and powerful god. Ovid, typically sensitive to the woman's perspective, conveys vividly Daphne's distress at her unwanted suitor and then her terror as Apollo chases her relentlessly through woods where briars tear at her legs. Pale, panting, feeling his breath on her hair, she engages the reader's profound sympathy in this heart-pounding scene of near rape, for she is a suffering pawn used by one god in a game of vengeance against another.

She pleads for release from her torment, and, as she is metamorphosing into a laurel tree, still shrinking from Apollo's touch and kiss, he triumphantly claims, in her form as a tree, the woman whom he could not possess as a flesh-and-blood being. He declares that, always green and shining, she will be his personal plant for all time, and he will always wear a wreath of laurel on his head. Ovid makes a respectful acknowledgment of his emperor by having Apollo foretell that the laurel will be worn in triumph by great Roman military leaders of the future and will decorate the portals of Emperor Augustus. Her metamorphosis, then, is poignant, yet satisfying.

During the time that Ovid was working on the Metamorphoses, a revival of an old Greek philosophy was underway in Rome. In the sixth century b.c.e., the Greek philosopher/mathematician Pythagoras had devised a humane philosophy opposing animal sacrifice and advocating vegetarianism. In Ovid's day, this doctrine was being rekindled and preached around Rome. Critics have argued about whether Ovid himself was a neo-Pythagorean; nonetheless, he includes a lengthy section on the teachings of Pythagoras near the end of his Metamorphoses.

The historical figure Pythagoras lends himself quite well to this collection of tales of transformations, for he believed in the transmigration of souls from humans to animals or animals to humans and therefore shunned the eating of meat. Underlying his philosophy was a deeply compassionate concern for the living creatures that share creation with human beings. Ovid presents Pythagoras's philosophy compellingly and persuasively.

In the opening lines, he establishes Pythagoras's authority as a learned, wise man who understands the workings and the nature of the world and then allows Pythagoras to speak in his own voice. Pythagoras admonishes people that the earth provides a rich abundance of healthy foods—fruits and vegetables, milk and honey—which do not require bloodshed. He further strives to awaken compassion and respect in the hearts of his hearers toward animals because these creatures are fellow workers and beautiful and innocent in their own right. His last and strongest case against slaughtering and eating animals is his theory that souls transmigrate. Souls are deathless, he argues, and when the body housing a soul dies, the soul finds a new dwelling place. The souls of humans move into the bodies of animals and vice versa. Hence, eating animal flesh is akin to cannibalism.

Pythagoras speaks at length of the perpetual flux of the universe, asserting that nothing is unchanging. Referring to natural phenomena—the tides, the seasons—he draws attention to the mutability of all forms, while arguing that the underlying matter remains constant. Thus, he says, humans should never fear death because the soul is deathless. To include such a philosophy near the end of this work is to suggest a rationale for all the other metamorphoses presented: change as a universal principle. It is not possible to assert with finality whether Ovid personally was a neo-Pythagorean or whether he included the philosophy because it provided a fitting climax to his work, whose theme was transformations. The rather serious consideration of philosophy in this section of the Metamorphoses might not seem well assimilated with the other stories, but in fact it corresponds to the creation scene of the first book of the work in its cosmic implications.

Heroides

Most epic, drama, myth, and history of the classical period focuses on the stories of men and their exploits, but in the Heroides, Ovid finds the feminine point of view that is often missing from these stories. The epistolary format is really another way to present a soliloquy or monologue, in this case of a secondary character whom Ovid depicts, thus adding to, not supplanting, the reader's understanding of the original story. In this collection of letters, the women whose names are familiar but whose perspectives have been given little consideration by the reader—or, for that matter, by the hero—present their thoughts and feelings at a moment of emotional turmoil or crisis.

Readers of Homer's Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) are familiar with the famous quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, when Agamemnon seizes Achilles' war prize, the girl Briseis. She is treated as chattel, passed between the men like an inanimate object with no regard whatever for her feelings as a human being. In Homer's story, Achilles is furious at losing her to Agamemnon, not so much because he cares for her personally but because he has been insulted and humiliated by Agamemnon's action. In Briseis' letter to Achilles in the Heroides, she even comments that he gave her up with no apparent reluctance and wishes that he had at least shown some resistance, whereby she would know that he had feelings for her. In Homer, when Agamemnon's envoys offer Achilles great riches and the return of Briseis if he will rejoin the battle, Achilles refuses; in Ovid, Briseis sees his refusal as a rejection of her and asks what she has done to earn his disfavor. She has heard that he has threatened to sail for Greece and is distraught; she asks to whom she is now to be left. When she refers to her husband and brothers who were killed in the battle when she was taken captive, the reader understands her clinging to Achilles, her captor. She has been left with nothing: no homeland, no family, no security. Achilles represents at least a future for her. Thus, Ovid shows a complex human being who was, in the Iliad, a flat figure.

The character of Medea must have been a greater challenge for Ovid because her story was so widely known and had been told magnificently by the fifth century b.c.e. Greek dramatist Euripides. The difficulty, then, was to present her in a way that did not diverge from the well-known myth and yet to capture something of her that had not been explored before. Ovid immediately captures her disordered state of mind by beginning the passage in the middle of a sentence. This suggests that her feverish thoughts have focused relentlessly on her abandonment by Jason, and anything she says or writes on the subject is indeed the continuation of an inner monologue. Like Euripides' Medea, Ovid's recounts the numerous deeds, both foul and fair, that she had done in the past for Jason's sake. Unlike Euripides' character, Ovid's Medea says, whether sincerely or not, that her current pitiful state is her punishment for the harm that she did to others on Jason's behalf. Whereas Euripides has portrayed her as a woman much like Achilles, a woman who will have vengeance and be remembered for it, Ovid conveys the idea that in her heart of hearts, Medea feels helpless, powerless. She recalls several examples of her magical prowess and laments that she is unable now to use magic on herself to cure her grief, bitterness, and pain. Because the reader knows that Medea will ultimately commit infanticide, she does not, finally, come across as more likable than the woman of Greek drama, but for a moment the reader can see a vulnerability in her that is not usually portrayed.

Although the letter of Hermione to Orestes concerns a marriage contract that she was forced to obey, a fascinating subplot emerges in her letter. Hermione is the daughter of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, who abandoned her husband and child to run away to Troy with her lover Paris. The main part of the letter to Orestes concerns their betrothal in childhood, which she regards as a marriage. Now, however, she has been given against her will to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles. What is revealed is the portrait of a woman whose whole life has been filled with loss: Her mother abandons her, her father leaves to fight for ten years to retrieve his wife, she is betrothed to her childhood companion but then is given to another man, who treats her unfeelingly. She begs Orestes to rescue her, but it is the poignant look at the childhood loss of her mother that is the truly memorable part of this letter. She recalls the tumult left in the wake of Helen's betrayal of her family: She remembers tearfully asking her mother why she was leaving her, she laments never having had a mother to hold her, and finally she recalls seeing her mother at last when Helen was returned to Greece, not knowing her face but recognizing her only because of her great beauty. In her portrait, Ovid has presented a lost and lonely soul, buffeted by the egocentric, heroically proportioned figures in her life, this time both male and female.

Summary

Ovid was noted for his exploitation of myth, and in the Metamorphoses he combines 250 diverse tales into a richly textured narrative that exemplifies the theme of universal change. Change is also apparent in the letters of the heroines of the Heroides, whose destinies are altered eternally as a result of their relationships with the heroes.

Ovid's literature embodies a profound understanding of the human psyche, a gentle wit, incisive realism, and an innovative feminine perspective, all of which have made his works universal and lasting.

Bibliography