Ovid
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Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – AD 17), a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women and mythological transformations. He is best known for the erotic Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses.
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Overview
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17 or 18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who wrote about love, seduction, and mythological transformation. He is considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature.
The Elegiac couplet is the meter of most of Ovid's poems: the Amores — Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris — are didactic long poems; the Fasti, about the Roman calendar; the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, about cosmetics; fictional letters from mythologic heroines, the Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum; and all of the works written in exile (five Tristia books, four Epistulae ex Ponto books, and "Ibis", a long curse-poem). The two extant fragments of the tragedy Medea are in iambic trimeter and anapest, respectively; the Metamorphoses is in dactylic hexameter; the meter of the Aeneid, by Virgil and of the Odyssey and the Iliad, by Homer.
Praise
Ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries.
Works and artists whom Ovid inspired
- (c.800–810) Moduin, a poet in the court circle of Charlemagne, adopts the pen name Naso.
- (1100s) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature
- (1200s) The Roman de la Rose
- (1300s) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, Juan Ruiz
- (1400s) Sandro Botticelli
- (1500s-1600s) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Marston, Cephalus and Procris; Narcissus
- (1600s) John Milton,Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Luis de Góngora's La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 1613, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin, 1651, Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis by Peter Paul Rubens, c.1620
- (1820s) During his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin compared himself to Ovid; memorably versified in the epistle To Ovid (1821). The exiled Ovid also features in his long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824).
- (1916) James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a quotation from Book 8 of Metamorphoses and introduces Stephen Dedalus. The Ovidian reference to "Daedalus" was in Stephen Hero, but then metamorphosed to "Dedalus" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses.
- (1920s) The title of the second poetry collection by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is about his hungry, violent years immediately after the October Revolution.
- (1951) Six Metamorphoses after Ovid by Benjamin Britten, for solo oboe, evokes images of Ovid's characters from Metamorphoses.
- (1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life is about Ovid's exile in Tomis.
- (1998) In Pandora, by Anne Rice, Pandora cites Ovid as a favorite poet and author of the time, quoting him to her lover Marius.
- (2000) The Art of Love by Andrew Rissik, a drama, part of a trilogy, which speculates on the crime which sent Ovid into exile. Broadcast April 11 on BBC Radio 4, with Stephen Dillane and Juliet Aubrey (not to be confused with the 2004 radio play by the same title on Radio 4).
- (2004) The Art of Love by Robin Brooks, a comedy, emphasizing Ovid's role as lover. Broadcast May 23 on BBC Radio 4, with Bill Nighy and Anne-Marie Duff (not to be confused with the 2000 radio play by the same title on Radio 3).
- (2006) American musician Bob Dylan's album Modern Times contains songs with borrowed lines from Ovid's Poems of Exile, from Peter Green's translation. The songs are "Workingman's Blues #2", "Ain't Talkin'", "The Levee's Gonna Break", and "Spirit on the Water".
- (2007) Russian author Alexander Zorich's novel Roman Star is about the last years of Ovid's life.
Dante twice mentions him in:
- De vulgari eloquentia, along with Lucan, Virgil, and Statius as one of the four regulati poetae (ii, vi, 7)
- Inferno ranks him with Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Virgil (Inferno, IV,88).
Retellings, adaptations, and translations of Ovidian works
- (1767) Apollo et Hyacinthus, an early opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- (1949) Orphée A film by Jean Cocteau, retelling of the Orpheus myth from the Metamorphoses
- (1991) The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr
- (1997) Polaroid Stories by Naomi Iizuka, a retelling of Metamorphoses, with urchins and drug addicts as the gods.
- (1994) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun is an anthology of contemporary poetry envisioning Ovid's Metamorphoses
- (1997) Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes is a modern poetic translation of twenty four passages from Metamorphoses
- (2000) Ovid Metamorphosed edited by Phil Terry, a short story collection retelling several of Ovid's fables.
- (2002) An adaptation of Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman was performed at the Circle on the Square Theater
- (2006) Patricia Barber's song cycle, Mythologies
