LIFE:
The poet was born in 43 BCE and died sometime after Augustus, the first
Roman emperor, under whose rule he spent his adult life. The best source
for the details of his life is his autobiographical poem 10, in Book 4 of
his late collection of poems entitled
Tristia.
In
Tristia
3.3.73-76 Ovid pathetically asks his wife to set up this epitaph which he
has composed in elegiac couplets for his tombstone:
hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum
ingenio perii Naso poeta meo;
at tibi qui transis ne sit graue quisquis amasti
dicere Nasonis molliter ossa cubent
Here I lie, a playful composer of tender loves,
Naso the poet,who perished by my own talent;
But let it not be troublesome for you who pass by, whoever has loved,
to say "May the bones of Naso lie gently"
Ovid was born in a small hill town in central Italy east of Rome, Sulmo, of an old equestrian family. He studied literature and rhetoric at Rome and travelled to Athens and through many areas of the eastern Roman Empire. Frustrating his father's hopes for a future in politics, he became a successful poet, known to but not one of the Augustan poets in Rome. In 8 CE, 10 years after the emperor's daughter Julia and in the same year as the emperor's grandaughter Julia, Augustus banished Ovid to the semi-Romanized eastern city of Tomis on the Black Sea. Ovid vaguely names the cause as "carmen et error," which has been interpreted to refer to his persistent production of the kind of poetry that flouted the Augustan moral order. Despite repeated overtures for remission of his sentence, Ovid was never recalled and he died in Tomis c. 17 CE.
On-line resources on Ovid's life and work are available here.
WORK:
Ovid's most popular work is the Metamorphoses, a narrative poem about transformations, in dactylic hexameter, of truly epic scope and magnitude. Other poems for which he is famous are the Heroides, the Fasti, and the Ars Amatoria. These, together with the Amores, demonstrate Ovid's learning, talent, and creativity.
Amores: Ovid's first literary success, the Amores, is commonly dated between 25-16 BCE. The poet himself calls them (in Tristia 4.10) his "youthful poems," which he read in public not long after his first shave. Along with the poetry of Propertius and Tibullus, the Amores belong to the genre of Latin love elegy. His subjects are limited to: Love--sometimes joyous, sometimes miserable, but always passionate; the loved one--a beautiful but unpredictable female (Corinna and others); and the lover--the poet's long-suffering, mostly frustrated male persona.
Although Ovid uses the traditional meter, language, and subjects of the genre of love elegy, his tone, which is witty, playful, and ironic, suggests parody. His dazzling display of poetic imagery, language, rhetoric, and meter mark the Amores as a masterwork. This text derives from manuscripts which do not predate the 9th century.
Meter and Scansion: Latin Love poetry is traditionally composed in elegiac couplet, a meter created by the early Greek lyric poets for the expression of personal emotion. It consists of 2 paired lines of primarily dactylic meter: the first line, which contains 6 feet, is called hexameter, the second line, which contains 5 feet, is called pentameter.
Book I: The first book of
the Amores is devoted to the poet's choice of elegy and the
romantic nature of love. It opens with Ovid's poetic introduction to our
only version of the Amores, in which he hints at an earlier
edition of his work. The epigram which opens Book I is reprinted below in
Latin and in translation. In it Ovid sets the meter--and thus
automatically the genre of the work, the tone--light, and the aim--the
reader's pleasure.
EPIGRAMMA IPSIUS
Qui modo Nasonis fueramus quinque libelli
tres sumus; hoc illi praetulit auctor opus.
Ut iam nulla tibi nos sit legisse voluptas,
at levior demptis poena duobus erit.
INSCRIPTION OF THE AUTHOR
We who were just now five books of Naso
are three; the author preferred this to the earlier work.
Though now you may have no pleasure in reading us,
your pain will be less with two books gone.