Jump to content

Ovid

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 62.68.169.218 (talk) at 11:20, 13 October 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
For other uses, see Ovid (disambiguation)
File:Ovidthepoet.jpg
Portrait of the poet Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso, (March 20, 43 BCE – 17 CE) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations.

Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with the exception of his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter in imitation of Vergil's Aeneid and Homer's epics. Ovid does not offer an epic narrative like his predecessors but promises a chronological account of the cosmos from creation to his own day, incorporating many myths and legends from the Greek and Roman traditions.

Augustus banished Ovid in 8 CE to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious (Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an 'error' and a 'carmen' – a mistake and a poem). He may have had an affair with a female relative of Augustus, and the 'carmen' mentioned by Ovid may be his supposedly immoral Ars Amatoria, which had been available for some time.

  • Amores ('The Loves'), 5 books, written after 20 BCE (revised into 3 books c. 1 CE)
  • Heroides ('The Heroines') or Epistulae Heroidum ('Letters of Heroines'), 21 letters of which the first group (letters 1–15) were written around 15 BCE, letters 16–21 around 4–8 CE.
  • Ars Amatoria ('The Art of Love'), 3 books, the first two written about 1 BCE to 1 CE and the third somewhat later.
  • Remedium Amoris ('The Cure for Love'), 1 book
  • Medicamina Faciei Femineae ('Women's Facial Cosmetics'), 100 lines surviving.
  • Medea, a lost tragedy about Medea.
  • Metamorphoses ('Transformations'), 15 books
  • Fasti ('Festivals'), 6 books surviving which cover the first 6 months of the year and provide unique information on the Roman calendar.
  • Tristia ('Sorrows'), 1 book, after 8 CE
  • Epistulae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea'), 4 books, after 8 CE
  • Ibis, a single poem, after 8 CE
  • Haleutica ('On Fishing'), which has probably not survived (see below).
  • a poem in Getic, the language of Dacia where Ovid was exiled, not extant (and probably fictional).

Poems sometimes attributed to Ovid but generally considered spurious:

  • Nux ('The Walnut Tree')
  • Consolatio ad Liviam ('Consolation to Livia')
  • Haleutica ('On Fishing'), a poem that some have identifed with the otherwise lost poem of the same name written by Ovid.

See Metamorphoses for external links specific to that work.

See Latin literature

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ovid&oldid=6553333"