Ovid The Poet Essay Research Paper Not

Ovid The Poet Essay, Research Paper

Not exactly considered a “serious” poet or author, Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid as he is more commonly called, captured the spirit of Greek and Roman mythology in his most noted work The Metamorphoses. The stories told in this work are commonly thought of as not serious enough for adults. Therefore, many of these stories have been “dumbed down” and transposed into child book form. Though most of these stories are very serious, many do not see them as sophisticated literature. True as this is, his works are still great and reflect much of the attitude and culture of his time. Behind his fables, Ovid was a fantastic storyteller and a master at capturing the spirit of the ancient times as well as portraying his own life through his work.

Like many poets of that time, Ovid’s father wished him to be a lawyer. His father sent him from his home in Sulmo, where he was born, to Athens to obtain a legal degree and study rhetoric. “Indeed rhetoric was the core of Roman education in Ovid’s time, as it had been for almost a century before his birth as it was for centuries after his death” (Luce 785). When his formal training was complete, Ovid studied philosophy. Ovid then came home to start a serious career.

“It did not work. Fathers of poets seem to have a penchant for trying to turn their male offspring into lawyers, doctors, or engineers. Usually this stratagem is effective because most sons are not poets. Most fathers confronted with the problem of a versifying son, therefore, turn out to be right; Ovid’s father turned out to be wrong” (Luce 785).

Ovid sincerely attempted to satisfy the demands of his father, but failed horribly. He abandoned his law studies and he drifted off to book merchants and poetry readings. He also married, but swiftly divorced, the woman his father had chosen for him. He was clearly strong-minded and independent. Ovid became more interested with the world of poetry. He also became acquainted with most of the leading poets of the time. Thus, at approximately at the age of twenty, Ovid launched into his career as poet. Up to this point, the poet’s life was basically ho-hum.

“Until the catastrophe in A.D. 8, when Augustus exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea, Ovid’s life appears to have been uneventful” (Luce 785). In the next years of his life, he married a total of three times.

“.This might suggest domestic turmoil of an unusual sort; but given social fragmentation of his time, even this apparent disorder may have been merely ordinary. In any case, the third and final marriage seems to have been an extraordinary one, and Ovid’s devotion to the wife he left in Rome when he went to Tomis is manifest to her in his final volumes” (Luce 785).

Soon in Ovid’s life appeared an adversary, though. Augustus Caesar, the grand nephew to Julius Caesar, took the empirical throne. Augustus was bent on reforming Rome in a time of spiritual freedom. He saw the “free love” attitude of Ovid’s time as wrong and demeaning to the family. He soon made laws against certain acts between two unmarried people. At this point Ovid was just discovering and enjoying this time of freedom.

“While Augustus was devoting himself to the reform of a social order that nearly a hundred years of cival war had left in ruins, Ovid devoted himself to the refinement of his craft and of his observations of Roman high society and politics” (Luce 786).

The difference between the two’s mind set is described by T. James Luce as

“.The confrontation between two irreconcilable visions of human life, the collisions of political necessity with poetic freedom, of pragmatic with a humanism that is grounded in religious intuitions, of the contingencies of history with moral imagination” (Luce 788).

Ovid found himself exiled to Tomis from Rome. The exact circumstances of this exile are unknown, for even Ovid himself shrouds them in mystery. He and his friends who practiced the same loose mindset did not take Augustus’s efforts seriously.

“What Ovid and his playmates did not understand, what would have appalled them had they been able to grasp it, was that Augustus was utterly, deadly serious in his efforts to purify and revitalize the social patterns of Rome” (Hendry 250).

Yet Ovid continued in his activities and his writings. He poked fun at the members of high society and publicly criticized the movements of the emperor and other politicians. “Ovid, whose eye is on the beautiful people and their foibles, glances at the emperor in these years (23 – 3 B.C.) occasionally, and his attitude is one of mild flippancy and tolerant good humor” (Luce 786). Augustus was not pleased, nor was he amused, with Ovid. He banished the poet to the island of Tomis with no explanation left in history. There are speculated versions of the story. “Ovid laments having seen something, but refuses to specify what it was for fear of reawakening the imperial wrath” (Luce 787). Ovid was banished, suspiciously, from Rome about the same time that Augustus himself also mysteriously exiled his granddaughter, Julia, from Rome. A connection between the two is plausible. It is thought that perhaps Ovid was a semi-innocent bystander in a scandal in which adultery was discovered. Ovid may have been a confidant to either Julia or to her lover, had sympathized, and had helped in the concealment of this scandal