Ovid
43 bce–17 ce

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmona (now in the Abruzzo region of Italy) on March 20, 43 bce, and died in Tomis (now Constanta, Romania) on the Black Sea in 17 ce. His wealthy equestrian-rank family sent him to Rome, where he studied Rhetoric, and then, as was customary, to Greece, where he spent a formative year in Athens. Upon his return to the capital, he started the cursus honorum in order to fulfill his family's ambitions, but dropped out at an early stage, after holding only junior-level offices. Then, Ovid devoted himself entirely to his literary career under the protection of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, a patron of literature whose poetic tastes were less aligned with Augustan cultural politics than with those of the more powerful and influential Gaius Maecenas (the protector of Horace and Propertius, with whom Ovid entertained friendly relationships; and of Virgil, whom he did not know personally, but whose works he read intensively). Ovid married three times and had a daughter and a stepdaughter. In 8 ce, he was exiled to the town of Tomis, then at the outer edge of the Roman colonial territory. Ovid was not stripped of his citizenship, neither was he deprived of his possessions. On the cause of the banishment, he laconically mentioned "carmen et error." While carmen ("poem") is widely believed to refer to the Ars amatoria (which was recalled from all Roman libraries), the real nature of the "error" is still unknown. It is likely, however, that Ovid was somehow implicated in the adultery scandals of Augustus' daughter and granddaughter (the latter was banished the same year as Ovid).

The chronology of Ovid's corpus is still debated, but his first published work was, around 15 bce, the five books of Amores (The Loves: poems in elegiac couplets), which years later were trimmed down to three books. Between 10 and 3 bce he composed the first fifteen elegies of the Heroides (Heroins; the last six poems, whose authorship is still questioned, were added later). These early works were as successful as Ovid's only tragedy, Medea, now lost. The first two books of Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) were published in 1 bce, and the Medicamina faciei femineae (Women's Facial Cosmetics) appeared before 1 ce. They were followed, in 1 ce, by the third book of the Ars, and by the Remedia amoris (The Cure for Love). Around 3 ce Ovid began his most ambitious project, the only one composed in hexameters and not in elegiac meter (hexameter and pentameter): the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses, a veritable encyclopedia of transformation-related mythical stories, from the primeval chaos to the metamorphosis of Caesar and the glory of Augustus. In the same years Ovid composed the six books of Fasti (Festivals), a series of aetiological poems on festivities and celebrations in the Roman calendar. Twelve books were planned, but the project was interrupted by the poet's exile. In Tomis, Ovid composed numerous elegies and poetic epistles in which he lamented his unhappy life at the periphery of the empire, and tried to win back Augustus' favor directly or by enlisting the intercession of the powerful addressees of some of the poems. These were collected in the five books of Tristia (Sorrows, 8–12 ce) and in the four books of Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea, begun in 12 ce and published posthumously). At the beginning of his exile, Ovid also composed Ibis, an invective against an anonymous defamer. Other works written during his late years have not survived: they included a poem written for the death of Augustus in 14 ce, and a poem, supposedly written in the local language of Dacia, or Getic, on the divinization of the dead emperor and in praise of his successor Tiberius (who, however, did not revoke the relegatio [the exile]). The attribution of a fragment of a poem on fishing and fauna at the Black Sea has been widely challenged by scholars.

As a poet who principally wrote in the elegiac tradition, and as "the poet-par excellence of the fluidity of identity" (Sharrock 2002, p. 95), Ovid has been the subject of many studies focused on his representation of gender and sexuality. The very choice of the genre (the "gendering of genre, Sharrock 2002, p. 104) has important implications in this respect. It has been noted (Harrison 2002, p. 79) that "'supergenre' might be a better term" to discuss Ovid's re-use and diversification of the elegiac form, as it had been codified mainly by Propertius and Tibullus: going far beyond his predecessors, Ovid expands the roster of themes that can be put to verse in that particular meter. Whereas the Augustan rule, and its related masculine order, found its proper expressions in political (Horace) or epic (Virgil) poetry, Ovid's choice of the elegy signals an intention to distance the poetic practice from the dominant ideology, but in so doing he also subverts some precepts of the genre. The fictionally submissive male (or the "elegiac fiction of sexual role inversion, Greene 1998, p. xv) of the Propertian tradition is abandoned in favor of a demystified, unromanticized, or even militarized (the male lover as "militant") depiction of gender dominance.

In the Ars, (its first two books are addressed to men, and the third to the hetaerae), all pretensions of sentimentality and fidelity are shed in favor of an idea of love as an erotic, physical lusus, or game, in which everything is admissible. Eroticism is the subject of both a positive (Ars) and negative (Remedia) instructional technique, which also extends to accessories like cosmetics (in blatant derision of the sumptuary and aesthetic modesty of Augustan morality, and of the elegiac tradition itself). If feminist critics like Sharrock, Greene, and Desmond have pointed out how Ovid, exposing the violence inherent in imperial Rome, repeatedly portrays women as subject to abduction and rape (as in Metamorphoses and Fasti), or as commodity (as in Amores and in the Ars), it is also very crucial to reflect on the poet's adoption, in the Heroides, of female voices and "feminine" features (see Rosati 1992, who points to Roland Barthes' notion of "absence" as "feminine"). The letters of the abandoned heroines to their absent lovers, while depicting a void in women's lives filled only by surrogate objects of desire (see Rosati 1992) and vain hopes (thus lending Ovid the opportunity to exercise in multiple variations of suasoriae, or persuasive discourse), also provide the Roman public with a none less literary, but far less fictional, account of the servitium amoris: not the pseudo-servitude of the male lover of the elegiac code, but a real subservience mandated by traditional gender normativity.

Ovid's fortune in Western culture has been immense. Recently, many scholars have focused on the dynamics of Ovid's (mis-)interpretations in the Middle Ages, in texts like the Romance of the Rose and the Ovide moralisé, and in the works of Chretien de Troyes, Andrea Capellanus, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and many others. According to Desmond the reception of Ovid, and especially of his amatory poetry, is an element crucial in understanding how "the colonial structures of the ancient Roman world shaped the erotic discourses of the medieval West," and, namely, the instruction "in a masculinity that is calculated and predatory, and in a femininity grounded in submission" (Desmond 2006, p. 7). Other scholars have focused on the medieval allegorical readings that expanded the poet's auctoritas, and the resulting dichotomy between a perception of Ovid as an authority in ethics, natural philosophy and mythology, and the lingering image of the "archpriest of transgression, whether sexual, political theological" (Dimmick 2002, p. 264).

see also Ancient Rome.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.

Desmond, Marilynn. 2006. Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press.

Dimmick, Jeremy. 2002. "Ovid in the Middle Age." In The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Greene, Ellen. 1998. Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Love Poetry. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kaufmann, Linda S. 1986. Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

Kennedy, Duncan F.2002. "Epistolarity: The Heroides." In The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rosati, Giampiero. "L'elegia al femminile: le Heroides di Ovidio (e altre Heroides)." Materiali e Discussioni 29: 71-94.

Sharrock, Alison. 2002. "Gender and Sexuality." In The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

                                                  Paolo Fasoli