Ovid biography

Synopsis

Life

Publius Ovidius Naso was, like most Roman men of letters, a provincial. He was born at Sulmo, a small town about 90 miles (140 km) east of Rome. The main events of his life are described in an autobiographical poem in the Tristia (Sorrows). His family was old and respectable, and sufficiently well-to-do for his father to be able to send him and his elder brother to Rome to be educated. At Rome he embarked, under the best teachers of the day, on the study of rhetoric. Ovid was thought to have the makings of a good orator, but in spite of his father's admonitions he neglected his studies for the verse-writing that came so naturally to him.

As a member of the Roman knightly class (whose rank lay between the commons and the Senate) Ovid was marked by his position, and intended by his father, for an official career. First, however, he spent some time at Athens (then a favourite finishing school for young men of the upper classes) and traveled in Asia Minor and Sicily. Afterward he dutifully held some minor judicial posts, the first steps on the official ladder, but he soon decided that public life did not suit him. From then on he abandoned his official career to cultivate poetry and the society of poets.

Ovid's first work, the Amores (The Loves), had an immediate success and was followed, in rapid succession, by the Epistolae Heroidum, or Heroides (Epistles of the Heroines), the Medicamina faciei (“Cosmetics”; Eng. trans. The Art of Beauty), the Ars amatoria (The Art of Love), and the Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love), all reflecting the brilliant, sophisticated, pleasure-seeking society in which he moved. The common theme of these early poems is love and amorous intrigue, but it is unlikely that they mirror Ovid's own life very closely. Of his three marriages the first two were short-lived, but his third wife, of whom he speaks with respect and affection, remained constant to him until his death. At Rome Ovid enjoyed the friendship and encouragement of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the patron of a circle which included Tibullus, whom Ovid knew only for a short time before his untimely death. Ovid's other friends included Horace, Sextus Propertius, and the grammarian Hyginus.

Having won an assured position among the poets of the day, Ovid turned to more ambitious projects, the Metamorphoses and the Fasti (“Calendar”). The former was nearly complete, the latter half finished, when his life was shattered by a sudden and crushing blow. In 8 the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis (or Tomi; near modern Constana, Romania) on the Black Sea. The reasons for Ovid's exile will never be fully known. Ovid specifies two, his Ars amatoria