Ovid: Life, Works, and Influence
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 17 AD)
He studied in Rome and joined the literary circle of Maecenas, but fell into disfavor with Emperor Augustus, who banished him to Pontus (Black Sea), where he died without receiving a pardon. Ovid cultivated lyric, epic, and epistolography.
He is arguably the last great elegiac poet, though his depiction of love is conventional and full of erudition. Ovid was a poet with a knack for writing and great technical perfection, which led him to write many verses, in which there is no difference in style.
Works
Lyric and Elegiac Poetry
Regarding the lyrical love theme, he wrote elegies, which he called Amores, dedicated to his beloved Corinna, who is more like a literary creation than a real woman. His love does not appear sincere and spontaneous, but these verses are filled with descriptions and pictures of the social life of his time. Ars Amatoria are didactic elegies, offering seduction tips for both sexes. His painful elegies, Tristia, comprise five books that review the mistakes in his life and recount the bitterness of exile, filled with adulation seeking forgiveness.
Other works in elegiac couplets, intended for the epic-didactic but with a rather romantic elegiac topic, are the Remedia Amoris, which shows different ways to overcome heartbreak, and the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, concerning cosmetics and forms arranged for the lover.
He also wrote, in elegiac couplets, the Fasti, which covers the main festivals of the Roman calendar, explaining their mythical origins and rituals, and relating them to the legendary past of Rome. He only composed the first six months because he was banished.
Epic Poetry
As for the epic, he wrote an epic-didactic poem in hexameters, Metamorphoses, a collection of legends of gods and heroes who undergo various changes (metamorphoses). It is divided into fifteen books ranging from the creation of the cosmos to the metamorphosis into a constellation of Julius Caesar, whom he praises as the ancestor of Emperor Augustus. This work is completely alienated from the traditional epic, approaching it with humor. It is a superficial and frivolous poem by a poet with great ease and very expressive rhetoric. He uses narrative and stylistic elements involved in the new, surprising, bizarre, and even paradoxical. His humorous look criticizes the ancient heroic epic, whose disappearance he notes. Episodes are juxtaposed without genuine unity. The best aspect is the characterization of the figures, very deep both for the gods and mortals. The gods are humanized, even treated with irony, because sometimes the metamorphosis that the gods order is unfair, even if they arise from right or wrong. Love is the great protagonist of the play, which moves all characters, divine or human, and not the will of the gods that moves the world, as in the traditional epic.
Style
His style is baroque, rhetorical, and technically perfect in hexameters, perhaps the best of Latin poetry, with verses without much light and metrical licensing. He innovates in lexical and syntactic constructions. He is, in short, the antithesis of Virgil, whom he claims to imitate. He has a great fantasy and plasticity, which leads him to change some myths. He has no purpose other than poetry for poetry’s sake, with a very careful style and outstanding ability to narrate and describe, with plenty of antithesis and other resources of rhetoric.
Epistolography
Regarding epistolography, two of his books collecting letters in verse are preserved: the Pontic Epistles, four books of letters written from exile, are really painful elegies in epistolary form. They are addressed to his wife and friends, and their focus is his suffering in exile and his desire for forgiveness from Emperor Augustus. They are full of sincerity and strong feelings. And the Heroides, are women’s love letters from his time under the guise of a legendary figure to his beloved hero, apparently. They are actually monologues collected by the author, full of erudition and a style that makes them monotonously rhetorical.