Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso — Ovid (43 BCE – 17 or 18 CE) — was born in Sulmo, a small town in the Paelignian country some 140 km east of Rome (modern Sulmona, in the Abruzzi). His was a respectable old equestrian family; his older brother — born exactly a year before him, as Ovid records in the autobiographical Tristia 4.10 — died at twenty. His father sent both boys to Rome to be educated for public life, and Ovid studied rhetoric under the leading declaimers of the day, Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro (Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 2.2.8 reports the latter said of Ovid that he was a born poet who used to versify his prose declamations whenever possible).

After his schooling Ovid undertook the grand tour customary for young men of his class: he spent time at Athens studying with the Greek philosophers, toured the Greek cities of Asia Minor (including Troy), and spent close to a year in Sicily with his friend the poet Macer (Tristia 4.10.49 — 'with Macer, as a youth, I saw the Asiatic cities… and Trinacria a long year'). Returning to Rome he entered the cursus honorum — held the minor judicial post of the tresviri capitales and then the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis — but renounced the senatorial path for poetry, joining the circle of Augustan elegists. He counted Propertius and Tibullus as friends and read the older Gallus's verse; Perilla — usually identified as his stepdaughter and the literary addressee of Tristia 3.7 — appears in his exile poetry.

His poetic output is the most varied of any Latin poet. The early Amores (originally five books, later cut to three) presented his fictional love affair with the elusive Corinna. The Heroides assumed the voices of mythological heroines writing to their absent lovers — a new genre. The didactic-erotic Ars Amatoria and its companion Remedia Amoris were extravagant court-of-love handbooks. His magnum opus Metamorphoses, completed by 8 CE, spins 15 hexameter books from the creation of the world down to the deification of Caesar through one continuous chain of myths of transformation — it became, more than any other ancient text, the storehouse of classical mythology for the European tradition. The Fasti, an aetiological poem on the Roman religious calendar, was projected at 12 books but only the first six (January through June) were complete when exile interrupted him.

In 8 CE Augustus's personal decree relegated Ovid — not stripping his citizenship or property (relegatio, not exilium) but banishing him to the Greek frontier town of Tomis on the Black Sea coast (modern Constanța, Romania). The reason, as Ovid himself put it (Tristia 2.207), was 'carmen et error' — a poem and a mistake: the Ars Amatoria with its sexual frankness was almost certainly the carmen; the error remains unknown and has occupied scholars for two millennia (probable theories include accidental knowledge of the adultery of Augustus's granddaughter Julia, or involvement in a political faction). From Tomis Ovid wrote the five-book Tristia and the four-book Epistulae ex Ponto, begging successive emperors for recall and describing the bleak northern climate. Neither Augustus nor his successor Tiberius relented. Ovid died at Tomis at the end of 17 CE or in 18.

His afterlife eclipses almost every other Latin poet's. The medieval rediscovery of the Metamorphoses (the aetas Ovidiana of the twelfth century) made him the master of pagan storytelling for Christian Europe; Dante (whom Ovid greets in Inferno 4 with Homer, Horace, and Lucan) and Boccaccio drew on him constantly; Chaucer's Legend of Good Women retells the Heroides; Shakespeare's Pyramus and Thisbe (A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Venus and Adonis are Metamorphoses set-pieces; Milton, Marvell, Pope, Dryden, and most modern poets owe him narrative form, mythological figure, and the conviction that transformation is the deepest pattern of human experience.