About Ovid (2024)

FAQs

What are some important facts about Ovid? ›

Ovid was a Roman poet renowned for his verse's technical accomplishment. His best-known work is the Metamorphoses, a collection of mythological and legendary stories, told in chronological order from the creation of the universe to the death and deification of Caesar.

The poem traces the history of the world from the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar. Ovid combined real historical events with mythology to create a poem that centers on the themes of love and transformation.

The conclusion is simple: Ovid's wife seems to have been a Fabia who stayed behind in Rome in order to influence the emperor via her powerful relative Fabius Maximus. She was to get her husband recalled, but once Augustus and Fabius Maximus had died in A.D.

The Roman poet Ovid was born in 43 BC at Sulmo, near Rome. At the age of 50 he was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea where he died in the year 17 AD. Delacroix imagines what Ovid's exile was like in his painting Ovid among the Scythians.

Ovid applies to the gods the class distinctions found in Roman society. As Romans are divided into patricians and plebeians, there are greater and lesser gods. Moreover, Ovid uses mockery, especially of the gods, to ridicule the hypocrisies of Augustan society and even Augustus himself.

In refashioning Ovid into an author that that had intended the Metamorphoses as religious and moral instruction, Golding followed contemporary mythological scholarship by asserting that the Roman poet was influenced, directly, or indirectly, by a Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible.

The Metamorphoses is a collection of transformation stories, but the principle of change characterizes every layer of the poem. The Metamorphoses is Ovid's only epic poem, thus in form a departure from the elegiac tradition he otherwise champions.

“Vivam!” “I will live.” The final word of Ovid's Metamorphoses, proclaiming the poet's hope that he will continue to be known through his great work. It's a prediction that of course turns out to be true, as we're still reading and influenced by the Metamorphoses 2000 years after it was written.

He married three times and had divorced twice by the time he was thirty. He had one daughter and grandchildren through her. His last wife was connected in some way to the influential gens Fabia and helped him during his exile in Tomis (now Constanța in Romania).

Did Ovid have kids? ›

By the time he turned thirty, Ovid had been married three times, divorced twice, and had only one child, a daughter. In 8 CE, Ovid's writing career was briefly halted when he was banished from Rome and exiled to the island of Tomi in the Black Sea. The Roman Emperor Augustus had Ovid tried for unclear reasons.

Ovid was a conspicuous success as a student of rhetoric at Rome, went on a tour of Greece, and held at least one minor magistracy in Rome, before turning to poetry as a full-time occupation. He married at least three times, and had a daughter and two grandchildren.

In 8 CE Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea. The reason why is uncertain, but Ovid specified a poem (probably Ars amatoria) and an indiscretion which he insisted was not a crime. He might have become an involuntary accomplice in the adultery of Augustus's granddaughter who was banished at the same time.

Among Ovid's early poetic influences were Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus and the Roman poets Catullus and Propertius, the latter two of which influenced Ovid's use of elegiaccouplets.

THE EXILE OF OVID

In 8 CE, Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus.

He shows how the Metamorphoses is not just a colorful collection of stories about change, but also an exploration of change itself. Ovid challenges us to recognize flux as fundamental to human experience—circ*mstances shift, fortunes ebb and flow, and our identities ceaselessly evolve from one life stage to another.

Legacy of Ovid

He succeeded in the difficult task of adapting the intractable Latin language to dactylic Greek metres, and thereby perfected both the elegiac couplet and the hexameter as all-purpose metres and as instruments of fluent communication. Ovid's verse is remarkable for its smoothness, fluency, and balance.

Consider Ovid's Metamorphoses. The text is over 78,000 words long, but Ovid uses only 8,789 different words. Of those, 3,644 — almost half — appear only once. The most frequent words in the Metamorphoses are et, sum, in, and qui, appearing more than 1,000 times each.

Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis (now Constanța, Romania) by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid's exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius.