Ovid, another great Roman poet, was a fantastic storyteller. Like Virgil, Ovid was popular in his own day and remains so today. And it's no wonder, his works are full of magic, seduction, love, and transformation. His poetry has been a major influence on European literature for centuries.

Life

On March 20, 43 B.C., Publius Ovidius Naso was born in the small town of Sulmo, about ninety miles east of Rome. Ovid came from an affluent, respectable family, and his father sent him and his older brother to Rome for their education. Like Virgil's father, Ovid's father also wanted him to study law, but Ovid was more interested in writing poetry. When his brother died, Ovid left Rome to travel to Athens and Sicily.

Ovid held a minor public office, but he quit to write poetry. This decision turned out to be an excellent career move, because he enjoyed immense popularity as a poet. Ovid's life, however, was not entirely full of glory. By the age of thirty, he'd been married three times and divorced twice. In A.D. 8, he was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea. His banishment may have been for political reasons or for the subject matter of his poems (some dealt with adultery, which was a crime during that era). One rumor suggested that Ovid was involved an adulterous affair with the emperor's granddaughter. Ovid wrote that his banishment was due to carmen et error, “a song and a mistake,” suggesting he ran into trouble for something he wrote and for something he did. Ovid died in exile in A.D. 17, still begging to be allowed to return to Rome.

Works

Ovid wrote several works, but the most popular by far is his narrative poem Metamorphoses, which has been called “the major treasury of classical mythology.” Approximately 12,000 lines, this poem is a collection of Roman mythological stories, covering everything from creation to the death of Julius Caesar. Metamorphoses is all about transformations, or as Ovid put it, “forms changed into new bodies.” For example, the nymph Daphne, fleeing from the god Apollo, is changed into a laurel tree; a woman named Arachne challenges the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and is turned into a spider for her audacity.

Love is a dominant theme throughout Ovid's work. Amores, Ovid's first published poems, describe a love affair, and Heroides is a series of imaginary love letters written by mythological characters to their lovers. Fasti describes, from one month to the next, the Romans' various religious festivals and their mythological basis. Unfortunately, only the first six books — the first six months — of Fasti have survived (or perhaps Ovid never finished this work).