Publius Ovidius Naso

Ovid was one of the greatest Roman poets and a leading figure in Roman society until the emperor Augustus banished him in A.D. 8. Traditional Roman values included military duty hard work, and civic service. Before Ovid, love had been considered a kind of destructive illness that threatened one’s personality. Ovid turned those ideas upside down as he celebrated love in his poetry as the more important and positive force in human nature.

Ovid's Life and Times. Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) was born in 43 B.C. in the town of Sulmo, about 100 miles east of Rome. He received the standard education for a person of his class, studying rhetoric* in Rome as he prepared for a career in public service. After his formal training, Ovid, like most educated young men, studied philosophy* in Athens and toured the lands of the eastern Mediterranean before returning to Rome. He held several minor government offices, a career he soon abandoned to spend his time visiting booksellers’ shops and becoming acquainted with the leading poets of his day. His career as a poet began when he was about 20 years old. Augustus had just begun his reign as emperor.

At that time, Rome was emerging from almost 100 years of civil war that transformed the serious, public-minded society of the Roman Republic* into the pleasure-seeking society of the Roman Empire. Ovid drew inspiration from the bustling urban life of Rome and became well known as a poetic spokesman for the younger, and more sexually liberated, element of society. His identification with this group was at odds with Augustus’s view that increasing sexual liberation threatened the family and the fabric of society. Ovid published his Amores (Loves) in about 16 B.C. and Ars amatoria (Art of Love) about 17 years later. By ad. 8 he was a prominent poet. Then suddenly in that same year, Augustus banished him from Rome to the remote town of Tomis on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death 10 years later. The cause of Ovid’s banishment remains mysterious, but some scholars wonder whether it was connected with Augustus’s banishment, in the same year, of his granddaughter Julia, who he discovered was committing adultery*. Augustus’s disapproval of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, combined with some minor court intrigue or knowledge of Julia’s behavior on the part of Ovid, may have led Augustus to his actions. Ovid himself wrote that he had been banished because of “a poem and an error.”

* rhetoric art of using words effectively in speaking or writing

* philosophy study of ideas, including science

* Roman Republic Rome during the period from 509 B.C. to 31 B.C., when popular assemblies annually elected their governmental officials

* adultery sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than his or her spouse

Amores. Ovid’s first great work was Amores, a collection of love poems in which he claims for the poet and lover the same traditional Roman values associated with military and civic life: duty, bravery, perseverance, and toughness. He portrayed love and romance as tasks that required as much effort, skill, and daring as making a military conquest or ruling an empire. The main character of Amores is the poet-lover-conqueror who combines the virtues of the old Rome with the attitudes of the new in a witty, original, and somewhat subversive way.

In a second edition of Amoves, published about 3 B.C., a more mature Ovid shows the negative side of the main character. Because the character’s goal is the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself, he becomes a victim of the emptiness of a life dedicated to shallow “good times.” For Ovid, love’s true purpose is to uplift a person and allow him to achieve true humanity, not merely the satisfaction of his desires. This theme is developed more fully in his later works, Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris (The Cure of Love), in which he writes about how to fall out of love.

Ars amatoria. A didactic* poem in three books, Ars amatoria advises young men on the art

          Statue (1887) by Ettore Ferrari
        commemorating Ovid's exile in Tomis
         (present-day Constanța, Romania)