Ovidius Naso, Publius
A very popular Roman poet, born March 21, B.C. 43, at Sulmo (now Solmona), in the country of
the Paeligni, son of a wealthy Roman of an old equestrian family. He came at an early age to
Rome, to be educated as a pleader, and enjoyed the tuition of the most famous rhetoricians of
the time—Porcius Latro and Arellius Fuscus. It was not long before the instinct for
poetry awoke in him with such power that it needed all his father's resolution to keep him to his legal studies; his oratorical exercises were simply poems in
prose, as is testified by one of his fellow-students—the elder Seneca
(
Controv. ii. 10, 8). After he had visited Greece and Asia to complete his
education, he entered into political life at his father's desire, and filled several
subordinate offices. But he soon withdrew again from public business, partly from an
inclination to idleness, and lived only for poetry, in the society of the poets of his day,
among whom he was especially intimate with Propertius. He came into note as a poet by a
tragedy called the
Medea, which is now lost, but is much praised by ancient
literary critics; and about the same time he produced a series of amatory, and in some parts
extremely licentious, poems.
When little more than a mere boy, as he says himself (
Tristia, iv. 10, 69),
he had a wife given him by his father; but this marriage, like a second one, ended in a
divorce. He derived more satisfaction, as well as the advantage of contact with the court and
with men of the highest distinction, from a third marriage, with a widow of noble family and
high connections. To her influence, perhaps, should be referred the fact that he turned his
attention to more important and more serious works. He had almost completed his best known
work, the
Metamorphoses, when suddenly, in A.D. 8, he was banished for life by
Augustus to Tomi (Kustindje), on the Black Sea, near the mouths of the Danube. The cause for
this severity on the part of the emperor is unknown; Ovid himself admits that there was a
fault on his side, but only an error, not a crime (
Tristia, i. 3, 37). At all
events, the matter directly affected Augustus; and as Ovid describes his eyes as the cause of
his misfortune, it is conjectured that he had been an unintentional eye-witness of some
offence on the part of the frivolous granddaughter of the prince, the younger Iulia, and had
neglected to inform the emperor of the matter. His indecent amatory poems, to which he also
points as the source of the emperor's displeasure, can at most only have been used as a
plausible excuse in the eyes of the public, as they had been published more than ten years
before. See Deville,
Sur l'Exil d'Ovide (Paris, 1859); Appal,
Quibus de Causis Ovidius Relegatus Sit (Leipzig, 1872);
Körber,
De Ovidii Relegationis Causis (St. Petersburg,
1883); and Thomas in the
Revue de Philologie, xiii. 47.
After a perilous voyage Ovid reached the place of his exile in the winter of A.D. 10-11; and
there, far from his beloved wife and his daughter Perilla, who had inherited the poetic talent
of her father, far from his friends and all intercourse with men of genius, he had to pass the
last years of his life in desolation among the barbarous Getae. Even in his exile his poetic
talent did not fail him. It was then that he composed his poems of lamentation, entitled the
Tristia, and his letters from Pontus, which afford touching proofs of his
grief, though also of his failing powers. His ceaseless prayers and complaints had succeeded
in softening Augustus, when the latter died. All his efforts to gain forgiveness or some
alleviation of his condition met with no response from Tiberius, and he was compelled to close
his life, broken-hearted and in exile, A.D. 17 or 18.
His extant works are:
1.
Erotic poems (
Amores), published about B.C. 14, in five books, and again
about B.C. 2, in three books. The latter edition is the one we possess; some of its
forty-nine elegies depict, in a very sensual way, the poet's life, the centre of which is the
unknown Corinna, who by later writers was identified with Iulia, the daughter of Augustus
(Sid. Apoll. xxiii. 159), but with no probability.
2.
Letters (
Epistulae), also called
Heroïdes,
rhetorical declamations in the form of love-letters sent by heroines to their husbands or
lovers, twentyone in number; the last six of these, however, and the fourteenth, are
considered spurious.
3.
Methods for beautifying the face (
Medicamina Faciei), advice to women
respecting the art of the toilette; this poem has come down to us in an incomplete form.
4.
The Art of Love (
Ars Amandi or
Amatoria), in three books,
published about B.C. 2, advice to men (books i. and ii.) and women (book iii.) as to the
methods of contracting a love-affair and insuring its continuance—a work as
licentious as it is original and elaborate.
5.
Cures for Love (
Remedia Amoris), the pendant to the previous work, and no
less offensive in substance and tone.
6.
The fifteen books of the Transformations (
Metamorphoses), his most important
work. It is composed in hexameter verse; the material is borrowed from Greek and (to a less
extent) from Roman sources, being a collection of legends of transformations, very skilfully
combining jest and earnest in rapid alternations, and extending from chaos to the apotheosis
of Caesar. When it was completed and had received the last touches, the work was cast into
the flames by Ovid in his first despair at banishment, but was afterwards rewritten from
other copies.
7.
A Calendar of Roman Festivals (
Fasti), begun in the last years before his
banishment, and originally in twelve books, corresponding to the number of the months. Of
these only six are preserved, probably because Ovid had not quite completed them at Rome, and
had not the means to do so at Tomi. It was originally intended for dedication to Augustus.
After Augustus's death the poet began to revise it, with a view to its dedication to
Germanicus; he did not, however, proceed with his revision beyond the first book. It
contains, in elegiac metre, the most important celestial phenomena and the festivals of each
month, with a description of their celebration and an account of their origin according to
the Italian legends.
8.
Poems of Lament (
Tristia), to his family, to his friends, and to Augustus,
belonging to the years A.D. 9-13, in five books; the first of these was written while he was
still on his journey to Tomi.
9.
Letters from Pontus (
Epistulae ex Ponto), in four books, only distinguished
from the previous poems by their epistolary form.
10.
Ibis, an imitation of the poem of the same name by Callimachus, who had
attacked, under this name, Apollonius of Rhodes, consisting of imprecations on a faithless
friend at Rome, written in the learned and obscure style of the Alexandrian poets.
11.
A short fragment of a didactic poem on the fish in the Black Sea
(
Halieutica), written in hexameters. Besides these Ovid wrote, during his
exile, numerous poems which have been lost, among them a eulogy of the deceased Augustus in
the Getic tongue—a sufficient proof of the strength of his irrepressible love for
poetry. In fact, in this respect he is distinguished above all other Roman poets. Perhaps no
one ever composed with less exertion; yet at the same time no one ever used so important a
faculty for so trivial a purpose. His poetry is for the most part simply
entertaining; in this kind of writing he proves his mastery by his readiness in language and
metre, by his unwearied powers of invention, by his ever-ready wit, elegance, and charm,
though, on the other hand, he is completely wanting in deep feeling and moral earnestness. By
his talent, Ovid as well as Vergil has had great influence on the further development of
Roman poetry, especially with regard to metre. Many imitated his style so closely that their
poems were actually attributed to himself. Among these, besides a number of
Heroïdes (see above), we have the
Nux, the nut-tree's
complaint of the ill-treatment it met with, a poem in elegiac verse, which was at all events
written about the time of Ovid; a poem on cosmetics,
De Medicamine Faciei, the
Consolatio ad Liviam on the death of Drusus; and a number of jointed skits
such as the
De Pulice, De Vetula, various Priapeia, etc.
Bibliography.—Of the MSS. of Ovid the best are the
Codex Petavianus of the eighth century (Vatican); the Codex B (Arundelianus) of the ninth
century (British Museum); two at Munich (D and E) and one (G) at Göttingen of the
twelfth century; the Codex Puteaneus of the tenth century (Paris), which is said to be one of
the best classical MSS. in existence; the Codex Marcianus of the eleventh century (Florence).
For an elaborate account of the MSS. and a vast collection of variant readings, see the
edition of N. Heinsius cited below.
Editions of the whole of Ovid are those by D. Heinsius, 3 vols.
(Leipzig, Leyden,
1629); N. Heinsius, 3 vols.
(Amsterdam, 1652; revised 1661); Burmann, 4
vols.
(Amsterdam, 1727); Merkel and Ehwald (Leipzig, 1888 foll.); Reise, last
ed. 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1889 foll.); and by Zingerle and others (Prague, 1883 foll.). Separate
editions of the different works, with notes, are as follows: of the
Amores by
L. Müller
(Leipzig, 1867); of the
Heroïdes by
Palmer
(London, 1874) and Shuckburgh
(London, 1879); of the
Ars Amatoria by Herzberg
(with translation, Stuttgart, 1854) and
Williams
(London, 1884); of the
Metamorphoses by Zingerle
(Prague, 1885); of the
Fasti by Merkel
(Berlin,
1841), Peter
(Leipzig, 1879), Keightley
(London, 1848), and
Paley, 3d ed.
(London, 1888); of the
Tristia by Owen
(London, 1889); of the
Epistolae ex Ponto by Korn, critical
notes
(Leipzig, 1868), and bk. i. by Keene
(London, 1887); of the
Halieutica by Haupt
(Leipzig, 1838); of the
Ibis
by R. Ellis
(Oxford, 1881); of the
Nux by Lindemann
(Zittau, 1844). The spurious Ovidiana were collected and printed in Goldast's
Catalecta Ovidii
(Frankfort, 1610), some of them being of mediæval origin. On Ovid's
life see Nageotte,
Ovide (Dijon, 1872), and especially Leutsch in
Ersch and
Gruber's Encyclopädie (1836). No authentic
portraits of the poet are known to exist. On Ovid's verse see L. Müller,
De
Re Metrica, xci. 408; and Schmidt,
De Ovidii Hexametris
(Cleves, 1856).
