Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet active under Emperor Augustus. He is considered one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, alongside Virgil and Horace. The scholar Quintilian regarded him as the final major figure among the Latin love elegists. Ovid is best known for the *Metamorphoses*, a fifteen-book epic of mythological transformations written in dactylic hexameters, and for elegiac works like *Ars Amatoria* and *Fasti*. His poetry was widely imitated in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it has had a lasting impact on Western art and literature.

Ovid was born on 20 March 43 BC in Sulmo, a town in the Apennine valley east of Rome, into an important equestrian family. He and his brother studied rhetoric in Rome under Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro, as their father wanted Ovid to pursue law. Seneca the Elder noted that Ovid leaned toward the emotional side of rhetoric rather than the argumentative. After his brother died at age twenty, Ovid abandoned law and traveled to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. He held minor public offices—including *tresviri capitales*, member of the Centumviral court, and *decemviri litibus iudicandis*—but resigned around 29–25 BC to focus on poetry, a decision his father apparently disapproved of. His first recitation occurred around age eighteen, about 25 BC. He belonged to the circle of patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and was friendly with poets in Maecenas’s circle. In his *Tristia*, Ovid mentions friendships with Macer, Propertius, Ponticus, and Bassus, and claims to have heard Horace recite. He barely met Virgil and Tibullus. He married three times, divorced twice by age thirty, and had one daughter and grandchildren. His last wife, connected to the influential Fabia family, helped him during his exile.

For the first twenty-five years of his career, Ovid wrote elegiac poetry with erotic themes. His earliest surviving work is likely the *Heroides*, letters from mythological heroines to absent lovers, possibly published in 19 BC. The first edition of the *Amores*, a series of erotic poems to a lover named Corinna, was probably published in 16–15 BC; a revised three-book version appeared around 8–3 BC. Between these editions, he wrote the tragedy *Medea*, now lost. Next came the *Medicamina Faciei* (a fragment on beauty treatments), then the *Ars Amatoria*, a three-book parody of didactic poetry on seduction, dated to AD 2 (Books 1–2 to 1 BC). Ovid may have referred to this work as the *carmen* that partly caused his exile. The *Remedia Amoris* followed the same year. This body of erotic elegy placed him alongside Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, whom he considered his predecessors. By AD 8, he had completed the *Metamorphoses*, a hexameter epic cataloging transformations from the cosmos’s origin to Julius Caesar’s apotheosis. He also worked on the *Fasti*, a six-book elegiac poem on Roman festivals and astronomy, but exile interrupted it, and he likely abandoned it in Tomis. The double letters (16–21) of the *Heroides* may date from this period, though their authorship is debated.

In AD 8, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by Augustus’s sole decree, without Senate or Roman involvement. He spent the last nine or ten years of his life there. Ovid attributed his exile to a *carmen et error* (“poem and a mistake”), but his vagueness has led to much scholarly speculation. He died in AD 17 or 18.