Ovid - Life and work, Works, Works and artists inspired by Ovid

Latin poet, born in Sulmo, Italy. He trained as a lawyer, but devoted himself to poetry, and visited Athens. His first success was the tragedy Medea, followed by Heroides, love letters from legendary heroines to their lords. His major poems are the three-book Ars amatoria (Art of Love) and the 15-book Metamorphoses (Transformations), written in hexameters and imitated by Goethe and Pushkin. With its startling insights into psychological states and symbolism, this is one of the most influential works from antiquity. In AD 8 he was banished, for some reason unknown, to Tomi on the Black Sea.

Publius Ovidius Naso (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC – Tomis, now Constanţa AD 17), a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, Ovid was generally considered the greatest master of the elegiac couplet.

Life and work

Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with two exceptions: his lost Medea, whose two fragments are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively, and his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's epics. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of carmen et error – "a poem and a mistake" (Tr. 2.207).

It was during this period of exile – more properly known as a relegation – that Ovid wrote two more collections of poems, called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, which illustrate his sadness and desolation. The famous first two lines of the Tristia demonstrate the poet's misery from the start:

Ovid died at Tomis after nearly ten years of banishment. Tarrant offers the following assessment for the importance of Ovid:

Works

Existing and generally considered authentic, with approximate dates of publication

(10 BC) Amores ('The Loves'), 5 books, about "Corinna", anti-marriage (revised into 3 books ca. AD 1) (5 BC) Heroides ('The Heroines') or Epistulae Heroidum ('Letters of Heroines'), 21 letters (letters 16–21 were composed around AD 4 - 8) (5 BC) Remedia Amoris ('The Cure for Love'), 1 book (5 BC) Medicamina Faciei Feminae ('Women's Facial Cosmetics' or 'The Art of Beauty'), 100 lines surviving (2 BC) Ars Amatoria ('The Art of Love'), 3 books (the third written somewhat later) (finished by 8AD) Fasti ('Festivals'), 6 books surviving which cover the first 6 months of the year and provide unique information on the Roman calendar (AD 8) Metamorphoses ('Transformations'), 15 books (9) Ibis, a single poem (10) Tristia ('Sorrows'), 5 books (10) Epistulae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea'), 4 books (12) Fasti ('Festivals'), 6 books surviving which cover the first 6 months of the year and provide unique information on the Roman calendar

Lost or generally considered spurious

Medea, a lost tragedy about Medea a poem in Getic, the language of Dacia where Ovid was exiled, not extant (and possibly fictional) Nux ('The Walnut Tree') Consolatio ad Liviam ('Consolation to Livia') Halieutica ('On Fishing') - generally considered spurious, a poem that some have identified with the otherwise lost poem of the same name written by Ovid.

Works and artists inspired by Ovid

See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples.

(1100s) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature (1200s) The Roman de la Rose (1300s) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer (1400s) Sandro Botticelli (1500s-1600s) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare (1600s) Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1820s) During the days of his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin liked to compare himself with Ovid, whose place of exile seems to have been nearby. The exiled Ovid also makes appearance in Pushkin's long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824). (1920s) The title of the second collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. (1949) Orphée A film by Jean Cocteau, a retelling of the Orpheus myth from the Metamorphoses (1991) The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr (1997) An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, the story of Ovid's exile, and his relationship with a wild boy he encounters. (1994) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun is an anthology of contemporary poetry re-envisioning Ovid's Metamorphoses (1997) Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes is a modern poetic translation of twenty four passages from Metamorphoses (2000) Ovid Metamorphosed edited by Phil Terry is a collection of short stories by various writers that re-tell several of Ovid's fables.