Publius
Ovidius Naso(43 BC - AD17) was born at Sulmo on
March 20, 43 BC of wealthy parents who survived the civil
war. Ovid and his older brother were taken by their father
to study in Rome, where Ovid
gave up legal studies for poetry. The popularity of that
verse, his family connections and public
offices he held all allowed Ovid to move in aristocratic
circles, and he married
three times. His Ars Amatoria (which referred to
the banishment of Augustus's
daughter Julia's
for an affair with the son of the emperor's old enemy Mark
Antony) angered Augustus, however, and Ovid's attempted
apology, Remedium Amoris, went in vain. Augustus
was particularly offended by Ovid's flippant attitude to
his morality drive establishing family values in Rome. Ovid
then committed some unknown political indiscretion and found
himself banished in AD 8 to the frontier
town of Tomi,
at the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea. Attempts at
reconciliation failed, even when Augustus was succeeded
by Tiberius, and Ovid died in Tomi, probably in AD 17, as
much a victim of Imperial politics as his own celebrity
among the capital's fast set.
Ovid's poetry
Ovid's
poetrywas enormously popular in first century Rome,
and has been an important influence on European poetry fromtheRenaissance
to the present.
The Metamorphoses
and Fasti
provided abundant material to quarry,
and the poetry appealed by its brilliant rhetoric, dissimulation
and discrete irony. Ovid's wrote pleasingly from the first.
His Amores
extolled the charms of his mistress, Corinna, possibly a
composite figure. The succeeding Heroides
were elegies in the form of imaginary love letters from
famous women in Greek mythology. Ars
Amatoria (The
Art of Love) and Remedium Amoris (The
Remedy of Love) were not only witty treatises on the
art of seduction and intrigue, but went some
way towards placing men and women on an equal footing. The
Metamorphoses
were some 250 interwoven stories written in the epic hexameter.
His Fasti,
an irreverent but informative poem on the Roman calendar,
was terminated by the poet's removal to the Black Sea. There,
in a garrison town among non-Latin-speaking barbarians,
he wrote Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto
(Letters from the Black Sea), both protesting at his unjust
exile with fine elegy and independence. Augustus and Tiberius
remained unmoved by the poet's situation, however, and Ovid
was not recalled.
Roman poetry
of the silver age
With the
death of Virgil, Horace
and Catullus,
Roman poetry emerged into a new age, one deeply aware of
the past Greek and Latin models,
but also limited by the authoritarian and sometimes despotic
government of Augustas and the early Caesars.
Poets needed patrons, and patrons dabbled in poetry themselves,
giving public recitations, but both moved warily under a
government that blocked any return to the bloody insurrection
that ended the last years of the Republic. The old themes
continued, but the mythologies wielded little political
or social clout. The treatment became more extreme, dealing
with horrors, perversions and unpunished crimes, but characters
were located in the safely distant past. Seneca's
blood-stained tragedies reworked Greek myths, arguing for
a return to stoic values. Persius
wrote satires in a peculiarly crabbed style. Lucan's
epic, the Civil
War, became a protest against the political system that
produced tyrants like Nero. Only in irreverent and satirical
treatment of contemporary immorality did poetry come back
into full flower, placing individual and amatory inclinations
above matters of public duty. Propertius
concerned himself with his mistress Cynthia,
and then produced an odd mixture of Greek and Roman themes
lit by candid confession. Later
poets —
Statius,
Martial
and Juvenal
— reacted more sharply to the times, producing in Juvenal
a satirist to rival Aristophanes.
